Antisocial, p.33
Antisocial, page 33
Many mainstream libertarians were so opposed to any kind of coercion that they thought of libertarianism as synonymous with social liberalism, requiring a live-and-let-live approach to all kinds of behavior. Not so, Hoppe insisted. Even in the absence of a state, citizens could still use their freedom of association to form private covenants, and those covenants could implement whatever rules they saw fit. Hoppe even maintained that, if some subgroup of the population posed an inherent threat to the social order, then the troublemakers ought to be physically removed. This was about as far from live-and-let-live as you could get.*
Mises and Rothbard were trained as economists, and most economists assumed that people were basically fungible. According to their mathematical models, whether Product X will be purchased at Price Y should have nothing to do with who’s doing the purchasing. But what if people weren’t all the same? What if you couldn’t account for people’s behavior without considering their psychological traits, their cultural background, even their genetic makeup? “Slapped in the face by the reality of human bio-diversity,” Mike Enoch later wrote, “I had to come to grips with the fact that libertarianism isn’t going to work for everyone, and the people that it isn’t going to work for are going to ruin it for everyone else.” If HBD was true—if some groups of people were inherently more capable than others—then maybe multicultural democracy was an experiment that was bound to fail.
He thought he had already examined each of his beliefs, reducing them to their most fundamental axioms. But here was an axiom so fundamental that he hadn’t even articulated it to himself, much less subjected it to logical scrutiny. Now that he thought about it, he wasn’t sure why he should assume that all people were equal. Maybe they weren’t. If this was a textbook definition of racism, then so be it—maybe racism was true. “They’re fucking religious fanatics,” he wrote later, of liberals like his former self. “They believe in the equality of human beings like a Muslim believes that he has to pray five times facing Mecca, or like a Southern Baptist hates the devil.”
His previous radical philosophies had fallen short, he now believed, not because they had failed to account for the world’s complexity, but because they hadn’t been radical enough. His family, his teachers, his pastors, his peers—they had all recoiled from the reality of European superiority not because the notion was demonstrably incorrect or morally repugnant, but because they were too afraid to think for themselves. After arguing himself out of every previous position, he had finally found the perfect ideology for an inveterate contrarian—one that presented such an elemental challenge to the underlying tenets of his society that he would never run out of enemies.
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The idea of racial hierarchy seemed to hold great explanatory power. As a liberal, he had dealt with troubling facts—the achievement gap between black students and white students, say—by invoking the history of racial oppression, or by explaining why the data was more complex than it appeared at first glance. As a Marxist, he had attributed unpleasant facts to capitalist exploitation; as a libertarian, he had blamed the state. But those explanations were abstract at best, muddled at worst, and they required levels of context that were impossible to convey in a Facebook post. Now he was free to revert to a far simpler explanation: maybe white people had more wealth and power because white people were superior. “Libertarian ideals are great, but they can only work in a white country,” he said. “All the Edmund Burke shit, all the Russell Kirk shit, all the William F. Buckley shit—if your country’s 45 percent white, you can kiss that right the fuck goodbye.”
In the debate forums, people loved to rebut arguments by calling them racist. In the past, he’d always had to look for ways to deny this; now he could simply respond by saying, in essence, So what? “All they really have is this underlying moral premise that they expect you to share,” he said later. “If you just question that premise, they have no idea what to do next.” He couldn’t understand why Republican politicians never tried this. Instead of living in fear that someone might accuse them of racism, why not advocate unapologetically for white interests? White people were the only ones who reliably voted Republican anyway.
He felt the urge to explain what he was learning online to people in the real world, but he knew that they wouldn’t understand. He stopped haranguing his family about tax policy and the Federal Reserve. They assumed he had lost interest in politics, and he didn’t bother correcting them. He imagined telling them everything; he could predict what their responses would be, if they ever got over their initial shock. This isn’t how we raised you! Yeah, well, maybe you should have raised me differently. Your brother isn’t of pure European stock—does that make him bad? It’s not about good and bad, necessarily—the idea is voluntary separation, not death camps. Mike Enoch’s brother was a sweet kid, probably his favorite person to hang out with in the whole family. But facts are still facts. A guilt trip might be enough to deter some people, but it wasn’t going to work on him.
He was willing to be proved wrong, of course. But when he went looking for counterarguments he never seemed to find anything direct and thorough—just the Democrat narrative that every problem could be solved by spending, and the Republican narrative that everything could be solved by tax cuts, and the History Channel narrative that Hitler was Lucifer and Martin Luther King was the Messiah, and the social-justice-Twitter narrative that white men were the root of all evil. Those were all forms of emotional badgering, not rational debate. When he googled race and crime, he found Jared Taylor. When he googled race and IQ, he found Steve Sailer. He also found the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the SPLC warning the normies not to look at the crimethinkers’ sites, but those warnings never seemed to include point-by-point refutations of the actual arguments. There were red pills everywhere if you knew where to look.
Mike Enoch was still frequenting open debate forums, unleashing his fury on liberals and left-libertarians and neocons. Through these forums, he met a few like-minded friends—a painting contractor from Dutchess County, New York; a devout Christian from Tennessee; a philosophy student at the University of Nebraska; an EMT from Virginia. They’d all been Ron Paul supporters before that movement dissipated. Now they called themselves postlibertarians, although they weren’t sure what would come next. They started a private Facebook group, where they sent one another essays and video clips by up-and-coming dissidents such as Richard Spencer and Chris Cantwell, also former Ron Paul supporters who were looking for something new. The private Facebook group turned into a sprawling continuous conversation, an ongoing debate about the merits of various microideologies (paleoconservatism, radical traditionalism, neoreaction) mixed with plenty of shitposts and 4chan references and offensive jokes. When they came up with a good talking point, they’d A/B test it on Reddit or Twitter, honing it to see which version would most efficiently drive the shitlibs insane. Together they were inventing a way of thinking, a new way of talking, a new way of seeing the world.
In mid-2012, Mike Enoch put up a message on The Emptiness: “This is an archive of my anti-statist site content from 2010–2012. Those were fun days but not really what I am interested in writing about or pursuing right now.” That December, with his new friends from the postlibertarian Facebook group, he started The Right Stuff. “We’re right wingers,” the About Us page read, “but we welcome comments from intelligent and civil people across the political spectrum.” A few months later, the About Us page was amended: “While unabashedly authoritarian, fash-ist, and theocratic, we welcome comments from intelligent and civil people across the political spectrum.” In 2016, the page was edited yet again: “Even though you are wrong, we are open to outside opinions. . . . Also we’re white and we’re not sorry.”
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The Right Stuff published blog posts such as “Right Wing Trolls Can Win,” “The Rational Racist,” and “The Trans*valuation of All Values,” a Nietzschean critique of Caitlyn Jenner’s gender transition.* One page of the site was set up to accept donations, in dollars or bitcoin. The site also hosted several podcasts, each with its own parody logo: Fash the Nation, Nationalist Public Radio, Good Morning White America. The Right Stuff’s landing page featured a rotation of paired photos and phrases, each pair designed to be maximally jarring: a smiling photo of Joseph McCarthy with the text “Your rational world is a circle jerk”; a squadron of Italian Fascisti overlaid with the message “Democracy is an interracial porno.” The fashy memes were an in-joke for the site’s regular visitors, but they were also supposed to be exported to the wider world. Mike Enoch built freshrarememes.com, a site with step-by-step instructions that made it easy for his followers to combine images and text in provocative new ways. Another TRS blogger set up a Facebook page, Fashy Memes, which spawned dozens of imitators: Lazer-Beamed Memes with Fashy Themes, Alt-Right Memes for Fashy Teens, Counter-signal Memes for Fashy Goys.
The idea was to make the memes subversive enough to plant doubt in the normies’ minds, but not overt enough that they’d be detected by Facebook’s content moderators. It was a difficult balance to get right. The best way to learn was through trial and error. You could tell whether you were succeeding because the results were immediate and objective—you just needed to look at the engagement statistics at the bottom of each post. If you went too far, your whole page might get shut down; but this almost never happened. For the most part, Facebook’s content moderators seemed to be looking for nudity, profanity, direct threats, or overt ISIS propaganda. Even if an alt-right propaganda page did get flagged for review, the memes were usually oblique enough that the moderators wouldn’t understand what they were looking at. And, if your Facebook page did get shut down, you could always start a new one.
By the time The Daily Shoah launched, in 2014, Enoch had grown confident in his white-nationalist views, but he was not particularly anti-Semitic. The goal of the podcast was to shock both liberals and “basic-bitch conservatives,” and the show’s name was an efficient way to achieve that goal. “At first, it was a joke,” Mike Enoch explained on Chris Cantwell’s podcast. “It was a funny pun. But we kinda put ourselves in a box.”
On certain parts of 4chan—especially /pol/, the message board for “politically incorrect” conversation—people gave each other kudos for coming up with new racist slurs, the more shameless the better.* The standard epithets showed up often, but people got more points for calling women “skags” or “trollops,” or for calling black criminals “dindus.”* People on /pol/ also talked incessantly about the Jews: They’re devious shape-shifters! They look white, but they’re not! Mike Enoch didn’t understand the obsession. Either Jews were white or they weren’t. If the white nationalists in America ever successfully established an ethnostate, and if they didn’t want Jews to be a part of it, then the Jews could go live in their own ethnostate, the one that the UN had already established for them. This would present problems for his marriage, obviously, but he would cross that bridge when he came to it. Frankly, he knew from years of involvement with radical politics that you don’t start packing your bags for the utopia right away. You lay out your vision of an ideal society; you start making it seem conceivable, even plausible; you gradually broaden the Overton window; and maybe, one day, the world starts to inch closer to your vision.
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The Daily Shoah came out weekly, at first, despite the name. The cohosts were the core members of the postlibertarian Facebook group: Jesse Dunstan, the contractor from upstate New York, who called himself Sven; Cooper Ward, the Nebraska philosophy student, who went by Ghoul; and the EMT from Virginia, Alex McNabb, who never bothered to use a pseudonym. (“My family knows about this,” he said. “They don’t really give a shit.”) Some episodes featured other alt-right guests, six or eight of them at a time, all talking over one another on an unsteady Skype connection. The tone of an episode could swing, sometimes within a single sentence, from sincerity to sarcasm to reverse sarcasm. The distinctions were so subtle and ever-shifting that the cohosts sometimes had to tell each other, on air, “I actually meant that,” or “I was just doing a bit.”
The show aimed to be a full-throated defense of white nationalism that didn’t take itself too seriously. It followed the old drive-time shock-jock format, with recurring comedy bits such as prank calls, interviews with notable 4channers, and a news-analysis segment called the Shitlord Report. Dunstan, who had played guitar in a prog-metal band before getting married and having kids, recorded parody songs in his basement and inserted them between segments. He rewrote the lyrics to Danzig’s “Dirty Black Summer,” turning it into a commentary on the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri. “I Need to Know,” by Tom Petty, became the anxious inner monologue of a would-be white nationalist awaiting his 23andMe results. (“I need to know / I need to know / If I’m 3 percent Heeb then it better say so.”)
The cohosts ribbed each other with constant banter, or “bantz”: McNabb was an interrupter, Dunstan was always out of the loop, Enoch kept starting long monologues with “Here’s the thing.” The Right Stuff blog was so rife with acronyms, abbreviations, and multivalent memes that they posted a “TRS Lexicon” on the site for the uninitiated. “People criticize us for doing too many in-jokes,” Enoch said on the podcast. “It’s on purpose, to create a feeling of in-group cohesion. We’re giving you real narratives, but we’re also creating a sense of community.” And it was a community—not just for the listeners, but also for Mike Enoch, their de facto leader. Some weekends, he took the train up to Dunstan’s house in Dutchess County, where they hosted cookouts for the show’s cohosts and core fans. The gatherings were small, to ensure everyone’s safety and anonymity. Sometimes people would ask Mike to give an impromptu speech about current events; other times, the gatherings weren’t all that political, just a chance for like-minded guys to have a beer and enjoy being part of something real.
“Our society is constantly sending us the message: ‘You’re born into this situation of rootlessness and ennui, and there’s nothing you can do about it,’” Enoch said on the show. “‘Don’t try to recapture roots by going out and engaging in activities that build camaraderie with people you can relate to. Just stay online and be an urbanite who consumes media through a screen in a small apartment.’” TRS was a way out of the postmodern hamster wheel, a way to live with purpose. He told his parents, without going into much detail, that he had a new group of friends now. Sometimes, instead of calling them his friends, he used the word “brothers.” He said that they were building something constructive, helping young men find their way in the world. When his parents asked more specific questions, he didn’t answer. Still, it was clear that he had found his people.
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The cohosts of The Daily Shoah all agreed that mainstream culture was beyond repair. It almost went without saying. Instead, they spent most of their time differentiating themselves from their ideological neighbors, mocking the cranks and yokels of the far-right internet—anime fanboys, 9/11 truthers, Alex Jones fans, manosphere goons like Roosh V and Mike Cernovich. One target of frequent mockery was the group of alt-right losers who blamed all their personal shortcomings on a shadowy Zionist conspiracy. “There’s definitely overrepresentation of Jews in high finance,” Enoch said in an early episode. “But that’s not really where you need to be pointing fingers, ’cause that’s not actually the issue.”
In January 2015, he downloaded a PDF of a book by Kevin MacDonald, a former psychology professor at California State, Long Beach, called The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Political Movements. People on 4chan were always posting about it, and Enoch wanted to see what the fuss was about. Three hundred pages long and heavily footnoted, the book, published in 1998, was a touchstone of contemporary intellectual anti-Semitism.* MacDonald called himself an evolutionary psychologist, and his argument was that the best way to understand Judaism was not as a religion but as a “group evolutionary strategy.” Over millennia, he argued, Jews had developed distinct traits: ambition; high verbal intelligence; loyalty to insiders; wariness of outsiders; a fierce instinct for self-preservation, even at the expense of their host society. The result of all this, in the twentieth century, was that American Jews were prepared to undermine their own country by diluting its traditional heritage. They were doing this, in part, by using their disproportionate influence as cultural gatekeepers to promote lax immigration policies, decoupling the United States from its history as a majority-white nation. (MacDonald seemed to assume, like Peter Brimelow and other paleoconservatives, that the United States would be less likely to thrive without a white majority.) Like so much of what the Jews did, MacDonald wrote, their quest to undermine white hegemony was an attempt, either conscious or unconscious, at self-preservation. A cohesive white majority might expel the Jewish nuisance from its midst, as so many nations had done in the past. Therefore, it was in Jews’ interest to keep white Americans divided and demoralized, allowing a coalition of ethnic minorities, Jews among them, to rise to power.*
“In science there are a thousand bad ideas for every good one,” Steven Pinker, the Harvard cognitive scientist and bestselling author, wrote. He had read a summary of MacDonald’s argument and found that it “fails two basic tests of scientific credibility”; therefore, he indicated that he wouldn’t deign to read MacDonald’s book. “In the marketplace of ideas, a proposal has to have enough initial credibility, and enough signs of adherence to the ground rules of scientific debate, to earn the precious currency of the attention of one’s peers.” Other prominent scientists either trounced MacDonald’s arguments or, more often, ignored them.
