Antisocial, p.34
Antisocial, page 34
Enoch read some of the rebuttals, but they all seemed pretty weak. It made sense, of course, that Jewish academics would reject MacDonald’s hypothesis—he was advocating for his ethnic group’s self-interest, and they were advocating for theirs. They could dismiss him as a pariah, or declare his work unworthy of “normalization,” but this just seemed like name-calling. “I’m not seeing three-hundred-page refutations with footnotes, that’s for sure,” Enoch said. “I’m seeing ‘Wow just wow’ and ‘I can’t even’—a lot of status signaling, basically.” What if the normies couldn’t refute The Culture of Critique more convincingly because, deep down, they sensed that the argument was right?
On The Daily Shoah, he called the book “important and devastating, something I urge all of you to read.” Then he offered even higher praise: “It triggered me so hard.” His whole life, his liberal teachers, many of them Jewish, had taught him to question authority, to defy convention, to follow the facts wherever they led. Well, now he had found a set of facts that they were desperate to keep hidden. Normies freaked out at the mere mention of the JQ, which only confirmed that he was onto something.
The anti-Semitism on the podcast grew more pointed and more frequent. Allusions to gas chambers and ovens became almost a verbal tic.* Dunstan made a parody ad for the Hans-Hermann Hoppe Physical Removal Company, and the meme got passed around on r/Physical_Removal and on Facebook groups like Based God Hoppe. The gatherings at Dunstan’s house started to include book burnings: someone would build a bonfire, people would gather around it, and a guest of honor, such as Enoch or Richard Spencer or the comedian Sam Hyde, would give a short speech and then incinerate a book by a Jew or a Communist. Afterward, people might shout “Hail Victory!” or do a Roman salute. It was sort of like a troll, a way to trigger the normies, except that there were, by design, no normies around.
Mike had no idea what any of this would mean for his marriage. That part seemed almost like a Greek tragedy: his wife was the only person in the world who truly understood him, and somehow he had stumbled onto the one thing that risked driving them apart. For a while, he tried to keep his marriage private while building a public career, under a pseudonym, as an anti-Semitic propagandist. The more rational side of him knew that the contradiction would catch up to him one day, but he tried to focus on the present.
* * *
—
There wasn’t one official group called the alt-right—just a disparate alliance of smaller organizations, each with its own hierarchy and internal rules. The leaders of the groups all knew each other, but they operated independently. Unlike some of the other groups, TRS had no application process and no formal membership roll. “I’m not a political leader,” Dunstan said. “I make funny songs and memes and stuff. My job is to get you in the door. The army recruiter guy standing in the mall, trying to get you to sign up—that’s me.”
The Hammerskins and the Alt-Knights were into violent street confrontations. The Nationalist Front were straight-up neo-Nazis; the Traditionalist Workers Party didn’t call themselves neo-Nazis, but they were pretty close. Then there were groups like Identity Evropa, whose members wore preppy clothes and discouraged visible tattoos. IE’s leaders were fully red-pilled, but, for strategic reasons, they used normie-friendly rhetoric. Every few weeks they would engage in a public demonstration, hoping to draw attention to their cause on social media and in the mainstream press. They might hang a huge banner from a highway overpass, fly a drone overhead to film it, then add swelling string music to the footage and post it on YouTube. The banners bore messages like “End Immigration” and “You Will Not Replace Us”—not completely outside the Overton window, but provocative enough to get people thinking, and googling.*
David Duke and Stormfront had a stiff, predictable style—the Daily Shoah hosts called it White Nationalism 1.0—which caused their best arguments to get lost in a fog of tedium and boomerposting. Richard Spencer specialized in dense philosophical essays, not dank memes. Gavin McInnes and Stefan Molyneux were useful entry points—“a lot of our guys started their journeys by finding one of those shows,” Enoch said—but ultimately the alt-light was inadequate as long as they refused to address the Jewish Question. Only TRS had figured out the perfect combination of levity and red pills, an aesthetic that could draw in new listeners and then, over time, lower their resistance to the truth. Their podcasts were not available on iTunes, Spotify, or any other major platform, and yet collectively they draw tens of thousands of listeners a week.
In D.C., during a panel discussion with Enoch and other alt-right leaders, Richard Spencer said, “There’s something interesting about our movement, something new, and I think The Right Stuff probably deserves more credit for it than anyone. There’s this trollish hilarity that’s almost become inseparable from our movement.”
“I believe the term the left used for this, in the sixties, was ‘culture jamming,’” Enoch said.
The focus of The Daily Shoah broadened with time. The cohosts started critiquing “leftist culture,” by which they meant all of mainstream culture—everyone who opposed the alt-right’s pro-white advocacy. By attacking leftist and centrist arguments relentlessly, both in good faith and in bad faith, Mike Enoch hoped to convert those opponents who were open to conversion and to sap the morale of those who weren’t. “The left—they don’t know how fucking predictable they are,” he said on the podcast. “I hear one thing about you, I can predict ten other things.” Most leftists were too mortified by the alt-right’s arguments to examine them in much detail, and Mike Enoch used this information asymmetry to his advantage. “We understand your narratives better than you do,” he said.
In July 2015, a group of TRS contributors worked together for several days to propel the word “cuckservative” from the fringes to the mainstream. Erick Erickson, a prominent Never Trump conservative, complained on Twitter that trolls were pestering him with the epithet. The Daily Caller followed up with an explainer piece called “What’s Behind the ‘Cuckservative’ Slur? (NSFW).” After that, a Daily Shoah cohost recounted, the word “cuckservative” reached a mainstream audience, just as the alt-right had hoped. “It went viral,” the cohost said. “It reached all the way to BuzzFeed.”
TRS trolls used the same tactics to promote other hashtags—such as #NRO Revolt, about how “the National Review version of conservatism has totally failed America.” They explained on the podcast how the trolling campaigns worked: by creating a surplus of activating emotion in neocons and SJWs on social media, the trolls were able to turn their enemies into host organisms, spreading the alt-right’s message for free. “When a hashtag gets a lot of action, it trends on Twitter, and it shows up in important people’s feeds,” a guest on the podcast explained. “The ‘cuckservative’ Twitter campaign really got us on the map. Now the National Review’s writing articles about us.”
“We hit them at emotional flashpoints that they cannot ignore, and we get them to promote our narrative,” Enoch said. “But be smart. If you start posting, like, Hitler or Confederate Flag avatars, it’s not gonna work. . . . Remember, this is a psyop. We are engaged in a psychological operation against them.”
* * *
—
On the show, whenever the cohosts mentioned a Jewish journalist or politician, they would emphasize the name, pronouncing it in a whiny, nasal accent and adding a reverb effect. This innovation—the Echo, they called it—became one of their signature memes. On 4chan and 8chan and Twitter, TRS’s followers approximated the Echo in writing, surrounding Jewish names with triple parentheses. This seemed at first like just another distasteful joke, but its deeper purpose was to “name the Jew”—to show how many there were, how many positions of authority they occupied—with the ultimate goal of rousing white people out of their complacency. “You’ll talk to white Americans today, and they don’t actually know if someone’s Jewish or not,” Enoch said on the podcast. This allowed Jews to operate in plain sight, using ambiguous-sounding names like Miller or Kahn, presenting as white one minute and then as oppressed minorities the next. Enoch spun his northeastern upbringing as an advantage: having grown up around Jews, he understood the enemy. “I have very honed Jewdar,” he said on the podcast. “I can tell. And they get very nervous about it, because historically, when gentiles, en masse, start noticing, it means something’s up.”
Enoch recorded his part of The Daily Shoah from his one-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side. After the dox, his wife told her friends and family that, although she had been aware that he hosted a podcast, she didn’t know anything about its contents. This was false. Sometimes, when the cohosts were shitposting about sci-fi movies or bad nineties fashion, Mike’s wife, in the background, would add a joke to the conversation. A few minutes later, presumably while she was still in the room, the conversation would drift, as it always did, to jokes about dindus and lampshades.
On December 22, 2015, Mike’s wife appeared on a special Christmas episode of The Daily Shoah to recite a poem, a parody of “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” “She wrote this,” Enoch said, “and she’s really proud of it.” The poem demonstrated a deep familiarity with the show’s tone, and with several of its inside jokes:
’Twas a TRS Christmas, and all through the house,
Not a creature was stirring, not even my spouse
The cucks were all prepped for the ovens with care,
Just waiting for morning to pop ’em in there. . . .
Out Communists, out Socialists, out left-libertarians!
Out betas, out allies, SJW contrarians
Out beaners and dindus and Muslim jihadists
Spare us your Syrian-refugee problems
Just fash away, fash away, fash away all!
Elsewhere in the poem, she referred to herself as a troll. She was an aspiring writer, and presumably she wanted to demonstrate to her husband and his friends that she, too, could excel at their game. Maybe she convinced herself that the words she was repeating were empty signifiers. Under the cloak of anonymity, writing for a receptive audience, she may have imagined that the poem was just another thing on the internet, just an edgy joke that went a bit too far.
* * *
• • •
During one of my visits to Mike Sr. and Billie’s house in New Jersey, I met their other son, who asked to go by Jay. He worked at a local multiplex; when I met him, he was just getting home from a shift and was still in his work uniform. Before the dox, he and Mike Enoch had maintained a good relationship. Every few weeks, Jay would take a train to New York. They would see a movie together, usually the latest superhero franchise, and Jay would sleep over.
After Mike Enoch was doxed, Jay said, “I was a big target.” Some of Mike Enoch’s followers, apparently upset that he had a nonwhite family member, found Jay’s Facebook page and defaced it, sending him threats and vile images. “I just deleted them, just blocked the people,” Jay said. “I didn’t even want to acknowledge it.” The two brothers hadn’t spoken since. After Charlottesville, whenever Jay was asked to explain his relationship to Mike Enoch, he would respond, “He used to be my brother.”
“I think he still thinks he’s trolling,” Jay continued. “I also like to troll online, so I sort of get it. I learned it from him, I guess.” Even though Jay loved heavy metal, he said, “I’ll go online and push people’s buttons—‘Dude, Danzig sucks’—even though Danzig’s one of my favorite bands. It’s funny sometimes. But you also have to know when to stop.”
While we talked, Jay scrolled through Facebook on his phone. “There’s all this stuff about white nationalists on Facebook right now,” he said, clicking on a video from Charlottesville. “This is weird. There’s even footage of the car driving through people.”
Mike Sr. leaned forward on the couch: “Don’t look at that. You don’t wanna see that.”
“Yeah, probably not,” Jay said, moving on to the next story in his feed.
Between January, when Mike Sr. found out about his son’s online persona, and August, when the name Mike Peinovich began to appear in national newspapers, the two Mikes saw each other just once, in the lobby of a Manhattan bank. “My mother left each of her grandkids, including Mike E., a small inheritance,” Mike Sr. said. “I couldn’t bear the thought of any of that money falling into the hands of these hate groups, so I set up a trust, and I got the paperwork together, and I just prayed that he would sign it.” Mike Enoch deliberated for a few minutes, then signed the documents.
As they waited for the paperwork to be processed, they made labored small talk. “He told me he’d been going to the gym and not eating carbs,” Mike Sr. said. “He didn’t say where he was living, or what he was doing with his days. It felt like talking to someone I hardly knew.” Before he left, Mike Sr. made one last request. He asked his son to legally change his last name. He could change it to Enoch, or Paine, or anything, really, other than Peinovich. Mike Enoch agreed.
The day after the rally in Charlottesville—on what happened to be Mike Sr.’s seventy-third birthday—he texted Mike Enoch, reminding him of his promise. “Please change your name,” he wrote. “You have abandoned your heritage, your ideals and your family.”
He waited a few minutes. The text bubble with three dots appeared on the screen. Then came Mike Enoch’s response: “Whatever.”
He was going back on his promise. “I’ve thought about it and decided not to do it,” he wrote. “It’s my name.” He insisted that any angst his family was experiencing was not his fault but the fault of the media: “You’re being gaslit by CNN. I can advocate whatever I want, I’m an American citizen with rights.” Mike Sr. didn’t respond right away. His son kept typing: “You can believe the media if you want, but that’s pathetic, tbh. You should be more open-minded.”
Mike Sr. thought of a few potential responses to this, but nothing that seemed likely to have any effect. Instead, he repeated his request: “Change your name.”
Mike Enoch refused. “Perhaps if you had shown more sympathy and interest in fairness,” he wrote, “my decision would be different.”
“Thanks for the birthday present,” Mike Sr. wrote. That was the last time they communicated.
* * *
• • •
On a Friday afternoon, a month after I started visiting the Peinoviches at their home, Mike Enoch called my cell phone. “I hear you’ve been talking to my family,” he said. I told him that I’d been hoping to speak to him, but that it would have to wait; I was in the middle of lunch. “What are you having?” he asked. I didn’t want to tell him the real answer—a bagel and lox—so I lied and said I was eating a salad. As if we were on his podcast, he went on a comedic riff about a take-out chain called Just Salad: “I’ve always thought that that was a nice little double entendre, to appeal to social-justice-minded white people.” He was about to board a train to Washington, D.C., so we agreed to talk again that night. I assumed that he would record the call, troll me for a few minutes, and then play the audio on his show, as he’d done with other reporters.
In the end, we spoke for more than two hours. He was surprisingly forthcoming. Many of the earliest English-language novels, such as Tristram Shandy and Robinson Crusoe, start with a recitation of the protagonist’s family lineage, and Michael Enoch Peinovich began his narrative that way, too. “My family always LARPed as WASPs, even though we’re not Anglo-Saxon,” he said. “My dad wore tweed jackets, that whole thing.” His biological mother, he said later, “was always a bit of a race realist on this point. She’s completely Norwegian, while my dad is half Norwegian and half Serbian.” She was a committed liberal, but on this point, at least, they seemed to find some common ground. “My mother always said, ‘Your temper comes from your Serbian side,’” he added. “I’m quite sure she meant that in a racial sense. And I think there’s something to that.”
Every journalist develops a technique to keep people talking. Nodding and rapt eye contact work well in person, but not over the phone. One of my techniques, which I wasn’t aware of at the time, was to repeat the word “Right,” even when my interview subject was saying something horribly wrong. Midway through my conversation with Enoch, my wife popped her head into the room, signaled for my attention, and mouthed the words “Is he recording?”
I muted the phone and said, “I think so.”
“Well then stop agreeing with him!” she said.
In hindsight, Enoch told me, he was always more wary of African Americans and Jews than he let on. “I noticed these differences, even when I didn’t necessarily put emphasis on them or think that they were socially deterministic,” he said. He now spoke freely about his “intense, personal antipathy for Jews,” but insisted that he did not hate black people: “I just feel sorry for them and see them as a social problem.” I asked how to square this with the fact that he had a black brother. “He’s only a quarter black,” he responded, and that was all he would say on the record.
A few times, I tried to ask another obvious question: If you never liked Jews, why did you marry one? The first time I asked, he sighed and said, “I don’t really know.” The next time, he said, “She’s only half Jewish, for one thing. And Jews have certain physical features that I don’t think are particularly attractive. She didn’t have those. I thought she was very pretty.” Nor did she exhibit what he considered typical Jewish traits: “The pushiness, this absolute inability to empathize with others, an exploitative personality. She didn’t have any of that.”
