Antisocial, p.36
Antisocial, page 36
We talked about Israel for a while. Or rather, he talked and I listened. He seemed to assume that I was a center-left Zionist (against settlements, in favor of everything else), although I’d given him no indication one way or another. Zionism is one of the alt-right’s favorite talking points—If they get to have an ethnostate, why don’t we?—and Enoch followed Israeli news far more closely than I did. “The Chief Rabbinate requires proof that someone is Jewish—racially Jewish, mind you—before they can get married in the state of Israel,” he said. “Some rabbinical rulings even suggest using DNA tests for this purpose. What’s your take on that?” I stayed quiet and ate my wurst. Even good-faith discussions about Zionism, among family or friends, often grew heated. What was the point of debating halachah with a professional anti-Semite?
He invited me on The Daily Shoah for a discussion about MacDonald’s book and the JQ.
“I don’t think that’s gonna happen, man,” I said. Philip Roth once wrote about how nothing could make an ambivalent Jew feel more unambivalently Jewish than sitting in a church, but Philip Roth never sat in a beer hall with a not-quite-Nazi.
When it was over, we lingered outside on the street corner. I was eager to get home, and I kept looking for natural ways to end the conversation, but Enoch seemed to be in no rush at all. He puffed on his vape pen, which was shaped not like a pen but like a first-generation Walkman brimming with liquid glycerine. Smoking is a bad idea, but at least it looks cool; this clunky piece of plastic, filling up his entire fist, reminded me of what child-development experts call a transitional object. “I’m getting the fuck out of this city,” he said. “There’s nothing for me here anyway.”
A few weeks later, he moved to Dutchess County to be closer to Dunstan. Most days, they recorded the podcast from Dunstan’s man cave, which was full of microphones, weight lifting equipment, and merchandise bearing The Right Stuff’s logo. They set up a paywall on their site; subscribers, in addition to the usual audio, got to watch a video feed of the cohosts holding forth, for hours, while sitting on reclining office chairs. Snippets of the video feed sometimes surfaced on YouTube, and whenever I watched one I found it overwhelmingly boring and sad. Dunstan had tacked a TRS flag to the wall behind him, but the upper corners kept drooping to reveal the Iron Maiden poster beneath it. Every few minutes, Enoch would put on reading glasses, scroll to a new headline that he considered worthy of mockery, then take off his glasses and rub his eyes.
* * *
• • •
When my piece about Enoch came out, the trolling was milder than I expected. The following episode of The Daily Shoah included a twenty-one-minute response segment—“This Freudian bullshit is how Jews approach everything”—and then an abrupt segue to some shitposting about Charlottesville. On Twitter, Enoch wrote a mock confession (“I admit it fam: I was red-pilled by childhood allergies”). He also released “The Marantz Tapes,” two lengthy compilations of excerpts from our phone calls.
The “tapes” were mostly banal bits of conversation interspersed with Seinfeld-style theme music. The audio was selectively edited, of course, but then so were the quotations I’d used in my piece. The next time we talked on the phone, Enoch brought up the tapes and asked what I thought of them. “You know, I’m a journalist, too, in my own way,” he said. “Or, not a journalist, but an opinion maker or whatever the hell you wanna call it.”
* * *
—
Near the end of 2017, Roy Moore, a far-right extremist, state judge, and alleged pedophile, ran for U.S. Senate in Alabama. A few days before the election, at a campaign event, one of the few African Americans in the audience asked Moore when America had last been great. “I think it was great at the time when families were united,” Moore said. “Even though we had slavery, they cared for one another. . . . Our families were strong, our country had a direction.” Obviously, in this context, “our families” meant “white families.”
Alt-right talking points kept drifting toward the center of the national vocabulary. They were repeated again and again—by YouTubers, by talk-radio hosts, even by sitting members of Congress.* “Virginia has transformed politically because it has been transformed demographically,” Tucker Carlson, the most popular cable anchor in his time slot, said in November 2017. “Twelve percent of Virginia is foreign-born, and that has made all the difference. . . . They’ve replaced you.” Like Moore, Carlson was making a naked appeal to white racial grievance. The word “you” could only have referred to white people; the word “replaced” seemed like a clear allusion to the alt-right’s Great Replacement theory, the substance of many of the slogans and chants in Charlottesville.
Laura Ingraham, another Fox News host with an immense platform, invoked race even more overtly: “The Democrats mostly want to replace those old, white, yahoo conservatives with a new group of people who might be a little bit more amenable to big government.” Some nights, instead of haranguing the Democrats, Ingraham used more specific dog whistles, railing against “globalists,” or “elites,” or George Soros. I texted Enoch, asking him whether he thought that Ingraham was nodding toward the JQ. “There is always the likelihood that she is aware,” he replied. “Nixon was. Billy Graham was. Tucker most certainly is.”
I asked Enoch, “Have you been surprised by how many mainstream figures, elected officials, etc. have recently started to dog-whistle in a more overtly white-nationalist direction?”
“I find it odd that this country ever stopped being white nationalist,” he responded. Still, he marveled at how quickly the unsayable had been made sayable: “It shows that our strategy of widening the Overton window is working.”
* * *
—
In 2018, Enoch and Dunstan rebranded The Daily Shoah as TDS, an initialism that now purportedly stood for nothing. (“Tedious,” they often pronounced it.)* They made an effort to refrain from egregious racial slurs or explicit glorification of violence. They were trying to creep toward the outer edge of the mainstream—or, at least, trying to avoid the kind of viral attention that might cause their domain server to notice their site and ban it. “It is a meme war,” Enoch said on TDS. “We’ve managed to stay alive, and to punch way above our weight.”
Longtime fans noticed the show’s new tone. On 4chan, opinion was divided:
No naming the jew. entire conversation feels tense. What aren’t they telling us?
If there are any people in the world that need to be careful it’s these guys because the jews will assfuck them into oblivion at the drop of a shekel.
(((peinovich)))
They kept A/B testing, trying to continue dropping red pills without getting deplatformed. Instead of fantasizing about physically removing all liberals from society, the cohosts alluded more obliquely to “urbanites” and “bugmen”; instead of assailing the Jewish agenda by name, they referred to “cultural Marxism” and “the J-left”; instead of joking about turning George Soros into a lampshade, they simply maintained that, like any plutocrat with an international reach, Soros was a fair target for political critique. It was a new version of the Southern Strategy—what might be called the Soros Strategy. “Our role is to be the intellectual vanguard,” Enoch said. “We have almost a direct alt-right-to-Tucker pipeline. He waters the narratives down somewhat, makes them acceptable so he won’t get kicked off of Fox News, and then he puts them out there.”*
In September 2018, on his prime-time show, Carlson asked, “How, precisely, is diversity our strength?” A few weeks later, he declared that immigration “makes our country poorer and dirtier and more divided.” A guest on Fox Business referred to the “Soros-occupied State Department.” In advance of the midterm elections, the National Republican Congressional Committee released an ad in which George Soros sat with hands folded ominously, his image crudely Photoshopped next to stacks of cash. The ad looked like something that Mike Cernovich might have tweeted in 2016 to promote one of his trending hashtags. At the time, such a tweet would have been seen as bizarre, negligible, unthinkably fringe. Two years later, it was merely controversial.
* * *
• • •
I was at a coffee shop in my neighborhood when I saw a Periscope notification. Will Chamberlain was filming a new video, a discussion of my recent article on “Mike Enoch and the anti-Semitic rabbit hole.” That was a tough one to avoid clicking on right away, but I managed to wait, per my new rule, until the stream was over.
“The intellectual path that Mike Enoch went down, at least at the start, was really similar to the intellectual path that I went down,” Chamberlain said. “It’s interesting to see why he went all the way down the rabbit hole to white supremacy and why I feel like I didn’t.”
“Mike Enoch nearly destroyed my life,” a commenter wrote. “Daily Shoah drew me in, nearly caused me to abandon everything.”
“Can we just ignore them and maybe they’ll go away?” another commenter wrote.
A commenter called @ActualRacist tried to say something, but Chamberlain blocked the comment before it showed up.
Enoch’s path, Chamberlain said, was not mere fodder for intellectual curiosity. It also raised a more practical question: “How to change it, how to bring people back from the brink.” There were still untold numbers of aimless young people on Twitter, many of whom should have been intelligent enough to know better, who nevertheless remained susceptible to the allure of white-nationalist propaganda. “These are kids that need to be deradicalized,” he said.
The American Berserk II
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The Mountain
When Samantha was halfway through high school, her family moved to a featureless cul-de-sac in a drab Florida suburb: Orange Julius, Cracker Barrel, highway, strip mall. As soon as she got there, she wanted to leave. Her parents were fighting all the time; it seemed to her that she was expected to fix their relationship, but she had no idea where to start. She had a younger brother, and they were extremely close—“codependent” was the word she used, half ironically, although it was a precocious word for her to know, much less to know how to use half ironically. She was like that, though. She would surprise her teachers by remembering some offhand comment, verbatim, months later; then, on other days, she’d skip school and drive around aimlessly, smoking weed and listening to Joy Division. She sometimes tried to justify her behavior by referring to that old Mark Twain line about how you shouldn’t let your schooling get in the way of your education, but maybe a more honest explanation would have been good old teenage nihilism.
Somehow, the two books that made the most sense to her were Fight Club and The Sayings of the Buddha. The first step toward true liberation was recognizing that the world you saw around you was actually an illusion, a thin veneer over a vast, howling void. (Fight Club: “I am so ZEN. This is BLOOD. This is NOTHING.”) There was an old Buddhist parable about a man walking down a long path. At first, he looks up and sees a mountain in the distance. Then, when he’s farther along on the path, he looks up again and sees a void where the mountain used to be. Only much later, near the end of his journey, does he fully understand the truth—that all is emptiness, including the mountain—at which point he is suddenly able to see the mountain again. This was the kind of thing that Samantha liked to think about while the rest of her classmates were hanging out at the mall, smoking cloves, and debating whether the Rays were going to win the pennant. No wonder she hated high school.
Before her family moved to Florida, she’d spent her entire childhood in a rural town in central New Jersey, a few miles inland from the Shore. She’d always been too passive, too pliable about defining herself; instead, she let other people define her. They called her Stargirl, a reference to a young-adult novel about a quirky kid who gets kicked off the cross-country team because she refuses to follow the marked path. Samantha was fine with that reputation. She leaned into being Stargirl, wearing flowy skirts and quoting weird indie movies. Now, in Florida, she was nothing. “sometimes i think about disappearing,” she wrote on her Tumblr. “it feels like nothing to wake up. there is no home to return to.” At every summer job, on every family vacation, she would meet some guy who claimed to love her, but it never turned out to be the kind of love that involved paying attention to what she actually said or who she actually was.
She was a senior in high school when Obama ran for president, and she volunteered to canvass for him on the weekends. Politics didn’t generally appeal to her, but everyone seemed to agree that the Bush era had been a total disaster, and Obama seemed like a smart guy with a good heart. Still, although she didn’t mention it to anyone, she was a bit jealous that he got to be so many things at once—Hawaiian, Kansan, Kenyan, Indonesian—while she was still nothing. In New Jersey, she’d spent weekends hanging out with her friend Rowena, whose mom served ackee and saltfish and told stories about growing up in Jamaica, or with her friend Sơn, who taught her the occasional funny phrase in Vietnamese. What did Samantha have to offer her friends? “Come over this weekend, we can help my grandma cook spaetzle.” “Cool, where’d she learn that?” “Oh, you know, when she was growing up in Germany in the thirties.” That was not a conversation anyone wanted to get into. Instead, Samantha stuck to the occasional self-deprecating joke on behalf of all white people: we have no rhythm, our food has no flavor, we ruin everything we touch.
On one level, it was legitimately true that white people had fucked over the rest of the world for centuries; if it made her friends feel better to hear her acknowledge this fact, then she was down to do her part. On another level—a more mystical, beneath-the-veneer-of-illusion level—wasn’t race ultimately just a distraction? Every few days, it seemed, one of her friends, white or nonwhite, would post a link to some BuzzFeed listicle about the 12 Worst Things White People Did This Month. Samantha sometimes felt like sticking up for herself, but she worried that if she did, even in a quippy way, she would get called out for her white fragility. One of Samantha’s black friends posted an article on Facebook about some jackass at a college in Maryland who had recently formed a White Student Union. The post racked up comments:
Ugh.
Fuck this dude and his privilege.
White people gonna white people.
Samantha was the only white person her friend had tagged in the post, so she tried to do her part: she typed a comment about how, as an unelected representative of Caucasians everywhere, she condemned the actions of this garbage human. Again, fair enough. Either the guy was being a dumb troll or he was an actual racist; either way, he did sound like an asshole. Still, though, what did it mean that her friend had tagged her in the post at all?
After high school, she started working at a Chipotle in town, dating anyone who seemed interesting, trying to figure out what might come next. For some reason, she was fixated on the idea of applying to mortuary school, which seemed like something that Margot Tenenbaum, her favorite movie character, would do. But then Chipotle offered her a job managing a new location in another state. It was an opportunity to get away, and she took it.
* * *
—
The job was about halfway between Florida and New Jersey, in one of those small Southern cities that was always showing up on Top-10 lists of the most underrated places to visit for a weekend. She knew no one there, which suited her fine. There were a few colleges nearby, and some microbreweries, and a walkable Main Street with brick buildings that were about half a century less old than they looked. A few weeks after moving, she quit the Chipotle job to work at a café and bar downtown—morning shifts as a barista, night shifts as a bartender. She was good at service, not only because she knew a lot about coffee and beer and wine but because she knew how to connect with people. You could call it flirting, and sure, sometimes it was flirting. Other times, though, it was more about being who the customer wanted you to be—coming across as quick and witty, or intuiting that the customer wanted to be slightly quicker and wittier than you and toning it down accordingly. It was just a sense. Some people had it, and she was one of those people. At first there was nothing, the usual emptiness, two lonely strangers in a bar. Then: a spark, a fleeting mutual secret, a wisp of intimacy. She’d tried all the drugs, or most of them, and intimacy was her favorite one.
She wore ballet flats to hide how tall she was. She could never tell if she was wearing too much or too little makeup. Was she pretty? Pretty was the opposite of how she felt, but then again self-esteem had never been one of her specialties. Still, it was an observable fact that she did not have trouble attracting men’s attention. People were drawn to her. It wasn’t good or bad; it just was. Except, if you wanted to overthink it—and overthinking was quite high on her list of specialties—people weren’t really drawn to her, per se, because she was just anticipating what they were likely to want and then mirroring it back to them. Laid out coldly like that, it could sound manipulative, but she wasn’t interested in manipulation. She was interested in connection.
People were always telling you to follow your bliss, which sounded nice in theory, but in practice they only seemed to respect one particular kind of bliss-following. In books and movies, the Serious Man who wanted to discover his true identity was always going on a solitary quest, or hiding away in a cabin to write the Great American Novel. Well, she had tried being alone with her own brain, and it never went smoothly. It wasn’t as if she wanted to be a conformist shill—whatever the establishment consensus was, she’d always positioned herself as far from it as possible. Still, when she tried to consider what her true identity might be, or what having a true identity even meant, she could only approximate the concept by imagining herself from the outside in, through the eyes of other people.
