Antisocial, p.37
Antisocial, page 37
She didn’t follow political news very closely, but as far as she could tell Obama’s presidency was turning out to be a dud. The grand changes he’d promised were not materializing—or, if they were, she wasn’t seeing it. The Republicans were in charge for a few years, then the Democrats took over for a few years; either way, the world kept on looking basically the same. At least, that was the sense she got whenever she turned on CNN or the Today show. Could everything really be as monotonous and predictable as it seemed, or was that also part of the illusion? Late one night, she called her brother, who’d been spending a lot of time watching YouTube videos. He told her about a theory he’d been learning about: that there was a maze of secret underground bunkers below Denver International Airport, and that it might be the global headquarters of the Illuminati. Samantha didn’t even know what that meant, exactly, but the idea freaked her out so much that she kept thinking about it for days afterward. It almost certainly wasn’t true. If anything remotely like that was actually real, she would have heard about it. Right? Unless of course the elites really were powerful enough to keep the whole thing a secret. In which case—well, whatever. What impact did it have on her life? She wasn’t in Denver. She had no way to judge any of these assertions for herself. Lies, damned lies, and statistics: you could comfort yourself by finding articles claiming the bunkers didn’t exist, or you could freak yourself out by looking for evidence that they did. Ultimately it just came down to which sources you chose to reject and which ones you chose to believe.
* * *
—
Her original plan was to stay in the small Southern city for a few months before going back to school. But she was often too passive when it came to big life decisions, and a few months ended up turning into a few years. The café where she worked was a social hub; local activists and poets would spread their stuff across tables and hang around all day, shooting the shit, working on their laptops or pretending to work.
She got to know the master roaster at the café, and they started dating. At night, he’d take her out drinking with the other baristas and line cooks: girls with half-shaved heads and piercings, vegan punks, guys who played in noise-rock bands. Everybody had a thing. Samantha cycled in and out of phases, perennially unsure of what her thing should be. In middle school, her favorite movie had been Empire Records, about a bunch of bighearted misfit kids trying to save their local independent record store. (“Damn the Man! Save the Empire!”) She’d identified so strongly with Lucas, a brooding clerk at the store, that she wore his signature outfit—black sweater, jeans, Pumas—every day for six months. During another phase, which lasted several weeks, she’d refused all sustenance except for saltines, baby carrots, and cranberry juice. Her friends in New Jersey liked to joke that Samantha was always getting into something new and weird, and that she never got in halfway. Samantha thought of her phases as experiments in ascetic discipline, sort of like Steve Jobs’s signature black turtleneck—by paring down your wardrobe and other trivial decisions, you could free up mental space for something more meaningful. She just had to figure out what that something else would be.
In the summer of 2014, when she was twenty-four, she met Richie. She forgot about the master roaster right away. Richie could cook and dance and play the guitar; he was assertive and nurturing and humble all at once. She was always falling for some new guy—that was another of her friends’ running jokes about her—but the connection with Richie was stronger than anything she’d felt before. When he walked into a house party, the room tilted slightly on its axis, everyone unconsciously orbiting a bit closer to him. The first time she went to his place, they stayed up and talked all night. She started to imagine that as long as they kept talking, as long as they didn’t fall asleep, the sun would never have to rise.
There was no way to refer to her feelings, or even to think about them, without resorting to cliché. This only made her appreciate, whenever a pop song came on in the coffee shop (love is a battlefield; love is like a flame) why those radio clichés were so popular in the first place: as trite as they were, they described something irreducibly real. When you were reading Jane Austen in your bedroom, if you came across a description of the heath or the seaside, you just had to take Jane’s word for it. Once you’d seen the south of England for yourself, you could verify: Yes, the hills really are that green. The sea really does roar. Can confirm.
Socrates was a man; men are mortal; therefore Socrates was mortal. Richie was an American male below the age of thirty; it was the twenty-first century; therefore Richie derived much of his sense of humor—much of his understanding of the world—from the internet. Whenever he or Samantha did something stereotypically American, he would say, “We’re such fucking burgers.” This was a 4chan thing: Americans were burgers, Canadians were leafs. He showed 4chan to Samantha a few times, but she could never get through more than a page or two before wrinkling up her nose and closing the tab. Burger and leaf were the least of it—every other post was faggot this or kike that or kill yourself, slut. She had no problem with dark humor when it served a purpose, but this seemed gratuitous and exhausting.
“Not for me,” she told Richie.
“Fine, but you’re not gonna get half my jokes,” he said.
They broke up a few times, unprepared to handle the intensity of their feelings, but they always got back together. It went on like that for months. When the Academy Award nominations were announced in early 2016, there were, for the second year in a row, no people of color among the twenty acting nominees. The hashtag #OscarsSoWhite trended on Twitter, or at least on woke Twitter.
“If they were truly woke, their hashtag would be #HollywoodSoJewish,” Richie said.
“Well,” Samantha said, “Jewish people are white, so . . .”
He gave her a Meaningful Look whose meaning she could not begin to fathom. “Yeah,” he said. “Sure they are.”
In November of that year, Samantha told her friends that she was planning to vote for Hillary, but she didn’t end up voting at all. Richie voted for Trump. He drove around town on Election Night, elated, a victory party of one. He’d never been overtly political before, but when he talked about Trump—the God-Emperor, as 4channers called him—Richie sounded like an ardent nativist. This made him an outlier in Samantha’s circle of friends, but she was in no mood to pick a fight with him, at least not about politics. He was entitled to his opinion.
* * *
—
Everyone began to notice that Richie was changing somehow. It was as if his personality was a faint pencil sketch that was now being traced over in charcoal. He grew a beard. He started powerlifting. Instead of playing the guitar at house parties, he stayed home and played chess online. The first few times she asked what was going on with him, he stared at her and said nothing. When he did finally answer, all he would say was that he’d been reading a lot of new blogs and subreddits, and that they were teaching him how to become a better man.
She became a manager at an upscale bar in town. Some mornings, when she was hungover, she would vow never to drink again. Then she would drink again, and Richie would give her shit for it. “If you keep acting like such a degenerate,” he’d say, “then I won’t be able to defend you on the Day of the Rope.” She didn’t get the joke. It must have been another 4chan thing. She asked what it meant, but he just laughed and changed the subject.
One night, standing outside the bar on a cigarette break, she googled “day of the rope” on her phone. She opened a thread on a subreddit called r/OutOfThe Loop, and she felt queasy and lightheaded as soon as she saw the words, even before their meaning reached her brain.
“What is the ‘day of the rope’?” the original post read.
“It is pure unfiltered hate,” the top answer read. “As I understand it, the original concept of the day of the rope was aimed purely towards racial purification.” The phrase came from The Turner Diaries, a 1978 novel that was found in Timothy McVeigh’s car after the Oklahoma City bombing. In the book, an underground syndicate of white Americans starts stockpiling weapons, scheming to take their country back. When the uprising happens, the syndicate’s first move is to execute all nonwhites, including Jews. This sparks a civil war that culminates in a mass public hanging of all white “race traitors”—judges, journalists, anyone with mixed-race children. That’s the Day of the Rope.
Samantha drove to Richie’s house and barged into the living room. “What the fuck is this about?” she asked, showing him her phone, her hand trembling. He sat silently on the couch. She paced around the room, terrified, alternately yelling and going silent.
After a while, he looked up at her and started talking in an eerily calm voice. “I’m a fascist,” he said. “I’ve been reading a lot about this, and I’ve come to the conclusion that the white race will not survive unless we stand up for our interests.”
The Turner Diaries was fiction, he explained. The revolution wouldn’t have to be violent, necessarily; that part was just an edgy meme. Still, edgy memes served an important purpose—they shocked white people out of their complacency. That was what had happened to him. From there, he had moved on to the more academically rigorous alt-right sites: Radix Journal, VDARE, American Renaissance, The Right Stuff. Of course he was put off by the arguments at first—everyone was—but that was just a vestige of social conditioning, an irrational fear response that kicked in whenever you started to look too closely at the evidence. The mainstream media elites had trained everyone to be uncomfortable with any information that hadn’t been prevetted. But the media elites were just trying to sell you their own narrative, and there were some questions that they never seemed to raise. Why, for example, had the United States suddenly been flooded with nonwhite immigrants—59 million of them since 1965—after being a majority-white nation for centuries? Were the immigration statistics and the crime statistics and the IQ statistics all just a coincidence, or were they part of some larger scheme?
She didn’t have the data to rebut his talking points, and he knew it. She stood there in silence, letting him say whatever he was going to say. “You might hate me after this,” he concluded, “but at least I respect you enough to tell you the truth.”
She gathered her things to leave. There was no point in responding. He didn’t try to stop her; he just walked out to the front porch, lit a cigarette, and watched her car pull away.
On the drive home, she was crying so hard that she could barely see the road. She would never talk to Richie again, that much was clear. The only real question was what this indicated about herself. They’d been together, off and on, for more than two years. How had she missed the warning signs? Was she just a gullible idiot? Or was she, deep down, a monster like him?
She walked inside and opened her laptop on the kitchen counter. Before ending this chapter in her life, she decided, she owed it to herself to understand, if only in an anthropological way, how Richie had gone so horribly wrong. She decided to look at some of the sites he’d mentioned, the ones he’d called “academically rigorous.” She was a curious person, and she liked to think that she had enough integrity not to flinch in the face of any idea, no matter how unpalatable it seemed.
Five days later, after reading every alt-right article and watching every alt-right video she could find, she called Richie. She had looked into it, she said. He was right. She wanted to become an advocate for the white race, too.
* * *
—
It actually did feel a bit like watching the Matrix dissolve into a green curtain of digits. Or like stepping through a looking glass, or emerging from Plato’s cave, or staring up at a mountain and seeing only emptiness. She finally understood why those allegorical tropes were so enduring across centuries. Just like the love songs on the radio, the clichés were cliché for a good reason, but you could only appreciate it by experiencing it for yourself. She still saw her coworkers every day, and they still saw her; but in a way they couldn’t really see her, because she had been transformed.
When you looked at the alt-right’s actual posts and videos—not at how they were portrayed on CNN or Wikipedia or BuzzFeed, but at the content itself—it was often fairly polished, even cerebral. The caustic LARP-y memes, like the ones on 4chan, still rubbed Samantha the wrong way; but those were just a small part of the movement. Jared Taylor was a Yale graduate with a gentle Southern baritone and the demeanor of a sweater-wearing dad. Richard Spencer was supposed to be some super-Nazi boogeyman, but when she looked at his YouTube channel she didn’t see a sputtering maniac; she saw hour-long lectures about politics and race and opera and Romantic poetry. All day, in her car or through her earbuds, she listened to alt-right podcasts and videos and livestreams. At first she found them shocking; then she found them engrossing; eventually, the dialogue started to merge with her internal monologue, until she could hardly tell the difference between what they said and what she thought.
Becoming a member of the alt-right, it turned out, wasn’t exactly a process of logical persuasion. It was more like a gradual shift in your mental vocabulary. Before, she had spent her morning commute listening to NPR, or to Dan Savage’s sex-advice podcast. It suddenly seemed bizarre that nobody had had a problem with her spending her mornings learning all the details of fisting and “water sports,” but that, if any of her coworkers ever heard the words “survival of the white race” playing over her car stereo, she would probably have to flee the state. Why the hostility? Were white people really so problematic that they weren’t even allowed to survive?
She kept watching alt-right videos, waiting for the mask to slip—for some leader of the movement to reveal overt hatred or obvious hypocrisy—but she couldn’t honestly say that she ever saw it. “Look at Japan,” Nathan Damigo, an alt-right activist, said in one YouTube video. He mentioned that the country was 99 percent ethnically Japanese, which seemed impossible. Samantha paused the video to look it up. Accurate. “Is anyone demonizing them, saying that they want to do horrible things to other people?” Damigo continued. His point was that racially homogenous societies were not inherently hateful—that, in fact, they led to higher trust, lower crime, and more social stability.
He wore a fitted gray suit, slicked-back hair, and a teal-and-white lapel pin in the shape of a triangle. He didn’t sneer or use ethnic slurs. He was patient, almost academic. The way Damigo told it, he just wanted white people to be able to thrive without having to apologize constantly for their own existence. Listening to him, Samantha remembered something her grandmother had told her when she was younger: “Never, ever apologize for who you are.”
The normal world kept running its tired old script, but she wasn’t buying it anymore. Once, for a second, she turned on a comedy game show on NPR; the announcer made some awkward joke about how Trump was a dimwit, and she turned it right back off. NPR was supposed to be neutral, objective journalism, yet they couldn’t even hide their contempt for the man half the country had just entrusted with the presidency. Her normie friends on social media, instead of making arguments against the alt-right, mostly resorted to dismissive jokes, or conjectures about what the alt-right’s words might secretly be implying. Samantha couldn’t believe how easy it was to tune it all out.
She moved in with Richie, and the alt-right internet became their world. “Let’s do an experiment,” he said one night, opening a bottle of wine and sitting next to her on the living-room couch. She listed all the people she’d been learning about—Damigo, Spencer, Kevin MacDonald—and they looked them up, one by one, on the normie internet. She knew what they’d find, of course: Nazi this, white supremacist that. But she had just heard Damigo explain, in his own words, why he was not a supremacist, merely a separatist. “This is what I tried to warn you about,” Richie said. “The media’s always trying to sell you something.”
He introduced her to The Daily Shoah, and they played a drinking game: chug whenever Sven can’t keep up with the conversation, or whenever Enoch starts one of his rants with “Here’s the thing.” The podcast was about politics, sort of, but it was also about instilling a sense of community. The cohosts could turn any banal phrase into an inside joke or a non-sequitur riff. The memes about dindus and ovens and helicopters were still too much for Samantha’s taste, but ultimately Mike and Sven seemed like smart guys who had thought hard about the underlying philosophical arguments. If they needed to be edgy to prove their shitlord bona fides, she could live with that.
The symbol from Nathan Damigo’s lapel pin, the teal-and-white triangle, popped up again and again on the internet. She started to recognize it as the logo of Identity Evropa. “We are a generation of awakened Europeans who have discovered that we are part of the great peoples, history, and civilization that flower from the European Continent,” their website read. “We oppose those who would defame our history and rich cultural heritage.” She examined the whole site and couldn’t find a single word she objected to. Every other ethnic group was allowed to express its identity and advocate for its beliefs. Why shouldn’t European-Americans have a seat at the table? “Join us,” the site read. “Become part of something bigger than yourself.”
The application took about thirty seconds.
“Are you of European, non-Semitic heritage?” Yes.
“Have you ever been convicted of a felony?” No.
“Do you have any visible tattoos?” Um . . . define visible.
One of IE’s leaders interviewed Samantha over Skype. He assured her that her tattoos wouldn’t be disqualifying—the main purpose of the question was to rule out anyone with tattoos of SS bolts or swastikas, and also to keep track of members’ identifying markings in case they ever got doxed. She and the interviewer developed an instant rapport. She knew enough about the alt-right, at this point, to intuit how he’d want her to come across: a strong woman, but still feminine; confident enough to keep up with the guys, but subservient enough to know her place. Within a few minutes, she could tell that it was working—that this was a game she would be able to win. The conversation went for much longer than the scheduled half-hour, and he accepted her into IE on the spot.
