Antisocial, p.48
Antisocial, page 48
*The simplest metric, as usual, was the size of each demicelebrity’s Twitter following—most of the A-listers had follower counts in the six figures—but there were other metrics as well. Jeff Giesea qualified for the A-list table not because of his social media following but because of his wealth, and because he was an effective behind-the-scenes organizer. Jack Posobiec, who had more than a hundred thousand Twitter followers, was shunted to the B-list table, perhaps because he was too young and overbearing.
*In 2017, Cynthia Baker, a professor of religious studies at Bates College, wrote a book called Jew, about the contested history of the word. “Jew, for some, is a term of deep pride,” she wrote; “for others, it is a term of deep loathing.”
*Loomer, on Twitter, had once inaccurately quoted Winston Churchill—“Islam is as dangerous in a man as rabies in a dog”—and then added, “When a dog has rabies, you have to kill it.”
*As I compiled my notes from these conversations, it struck me that the alt-light demicelebrities who expressed the most shock and outrage about the neo-Nazis were also the ones who happened to be Jewish. I wasn’t sure what to make of this—small sample size, and correlation doesn’t prove causation—but I couldn’t help noticing the pattern.
*“What’s your plan now?” I wrote. He responded with a link to a three-second YouTube clip of Bane, the villain from The Dark Knight: “Crashing this plane with no survivors!”
*“I think this guy, of all of them, is the one I find the most infuriating,” my wife said one morning. She had left the house, realized that she’d forgotten her wallet, and come back inside to hear Molyneux’s voice emanating from my laptop. “It’s not just the racist pseudoscience. I mean, the racist pseudoscience is bad, obviously, but I think what gets me more is his priorities. The guy claims to be Mr. Rational Philosopher, and yet every single day he looks around and goes, ‘Yep, the most important injustice today is still the fact that white people don’t have enough power.’ Seriously? Is everything not enough?” She was running late for work, but she had been holding this back for a while, apparently. “California is on fire,” she said. It was one of the times that California was on fire. “The ice caps are melting. This dude can’t think of a single better way to occupy his time?”
*When 4chan turned drinking milk into an alt-right meme, Mike Enoch added “Lactose tolerant” to his Twitter bio. Someone who knew him as a child told me, “The funny thing was, anyone who knew him knew that any exposure to dairy would make him sick.”
*Anthony Cumia, one half of Opie and Anthony, was fired by his radio bosses in 2014, after he posted pictures of a black woman on Twitter and called her an “animal pig face worthless meat sack.” In a Fox News appearance, Cumia explained that “there is a huge violence problem in the black community,” and added, “I will never apologize for this . . . this is exactly who I am.” The following month, he founded his own online streaming network featuring audio and video talk shows hosted by edgy comedians. One of the network’s most popular shows was The Gavin McInnes Show.
*He didn’t notice it at the time, but he would later note sardonically that all three of those writers happened to be Jewish.
*“In a covenant concluded among proprietor and community tenants for the purpose of protecting their private property, no such thing as a right to free (unlimited) speech exists,” Hoppe wrote. “There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society.”
*“Protagoras said man is the measure of all things. He was an old white cis-sexist shitlord.”
*One of The Right Stuff’s prominent allies was Andrew Anglin, the publisher of the neo-Nazi site the Daily Stormer. In late 2017, the Daily Stormer’s style guide, which also served as a propaganda manifesto for the alt-right movement, was leaked to a reporter at The Huffington Post. “The reader is at first drawn in by curiosity or the naughty humor, and is slowly awakened to reality,” Anglin wrote. “Dehumanization is extremely important, but it must be done within the confines of lulz,” or laughs. Anglin didn’t put much stock in originality. “The basic propaganda doctrine of the site is based on Hitler’s doctrine of war propaganda outlined in Mein Kampf,” he wrote, including a link to the book. “All enemies should be combined into one enemy, which is the Jews.”
*This slur, popular on The Daily Shoah, derived from the cohosts’ habit of saying the phrase “I didn’t do nothin’!” in dialect reminiscent of a minstrel show.
*Democritus, in ancient Greece, had an intuition that the world was made up of homogenous, indivisible atoms; 2,400 years later, Rutherford and Bohr expanded this intuition into a proper scientific theory. This was roughly the way the contemporary anti-Semites of the alt-right thought of MacDonald’s work. For thousands of years, from the Seleucid empire to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, people had sensed that the Jews were not to be trusted; MacDonald had finally fleshed out this intuition, demonstrating “scientifically” that anti-Semitism had been justified all along.
*This was why the protesters in Charlottesville had chanted, interchangeably, “You will not replace us!” and “Jews will not replace us!” According to alt-right dogma, which had been heavily influenced by Kevin MacDonald, white genocide—also known as the Great Replacement—was already happening, and not by accident. It was a grand conspiracy being perpetrated against white people by the Jews.
*Enoch’s extended monologues were called “ovenside chats”; the upper-middle class was the “oven-middle class”; a series of interviews with fellow white nationalists was called “Between Two Lampshades.” On CafePress, a site that lets you custom-print any logo you want on a piece of merchandise, they ordered a box of Daily Shoah oven mitts—“Pop ’em in!”—and sold them for $14.88 apiece, or the cryptocurrency equivalent.
*IE also put up posters on college campuses, featuring the group’s URL and its cleanly designed teal-and-white logo. “Our postering campaign is the beginning of a long term cultural war of attrition against academia’s Cultural Marxist narrative,” the group’s site read. “As students begin to realize that the direction their lectures take them is based upon false assumptions by their instructors, they will begin rejecting the false narratives and begin looking to us for answers.”
*From the Daily Stormer’s style guide: “The site continues to grow month by month, indicating that there is no ceiling on this.” Also from the style guide: “We should always claim we are winning, and should celebrate any wins with extreme exaggeration.”
*My wife worked as a public defender for several years. Some of her clients were accused of crimes that were horrifically violent or deeply shameful, but their parents’ reactions, which ranged from permanent ostracism to total forgiveness, didn’t correspond neatly with the gravity of the accusations. “You can never predict what anyone’s response is going to be,” my wife told me. “But it’s usually a good bet, in my experience, that a mother is going to try to be there for her son, pretty much no matter what.”
*Richard Spencer, for example, tweeted, “Heyer’s death was deeply saddening.” (The next day, however, when Spencer appeared on The Daily Shoah, his comments about Heyer’s death were far less diplomatic.)
*In 2017, on Twitter, Iowa congressman Steve King wrote that “culture and demographics are our destiny. We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”
*After the mass murder at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, I wrote a short blog post about Kevin MacDonald, internet radicalization, and why the alt-right was so hung up on the Jews. The next day, Enoch read the headline of my piece on the air. “‘The Dark, Specific Logic of Online Hatred,’” he said sardonically. “Maybe that’s what TDS should stand for. ‘The Dark Specific.’”
*“Tucker Carlson is basically ‘Daily Stormer: The Show,’” Andrew Anglin, the publisher of the Daily Stormer, wrote, in a tone of grateful disbelief. “Other than the language used, he is covering all of our talking points.”
*Researchers have been trying to develop such a formula at least since 1947, when Theodor Adorno and three psychologists published a personality test called the F-scale. It remains, as they say, more an art than a science.
*After he appeared on an alt-light podcast that veered a bit too close to outright white nationalism, Wintrich was fired from The Gateway Pundit. With his newfound free time, he planned to start working on a book. “I’m still in the research phase,” he told me. “I recently came across this wonderful essay, I’m sure you’ve heard of it—‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’? I just adored it. It’s so old, and yet still so wildly relevant.”
*Cernovich had long worried about Trump’s capriciousness—“Why is it in anyone’s self-interest to stay loyal to a guy who shows zero loyalty to anyone?” he once asked, in private—but he’d tried to keep his frustrations to himself. The final straw was the precipitous rise and fall of Anthony Scaramucci, the investment banker and smooth-talking media operator who became the shortest-serving White House communications director in history, serving for a total of eleven days. In July 2017, the day Scaramucci was fired, Cernovich told me, “The Mooch is one of the only people around Trump, except for Don Jr. and one or two others, who actually use social media the way it’s supposed to be used. If they’re throwing him under the bus, then they truly have no plan at all.” A few weeks later, Cernovich went to Manhattan to interview Scaramucci for Hoaxed, and I tagged along. We sat in the opulent basement of the Hunt & Fish Club, a Midtown steakhouse of which Scaramucci was part owner, waiting for the cameras to be set up. “Ask me whatever you want,” Scaramucci told me. “Trump Organization finances? Kushner’s deals in China? Let’s chop it up.” I made sure he knew that I was a journalist from The New Yorker, and that we were on the record. “No problem!” he said. “Come on, I’m a front-stabbing motherfucker, everyone knows that.” This surprised me, seeing as Scaramucci’s recent comments to another New Yorker reporter (“I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own cock”) had cost him his job in the White House. Nevertheless, Scaramucci proceeded to dispense his gossip, and I dutifully wrote it down. (I looked into it later, and little of it checked out.) “Want more?” he said. “I’ll tell you whatever you’re interested in. I get along great with reporters, you know.” Ten minutes later, he sat in front of the camera for his interview. “The media has destroyed itself in an effort to remain profitable,” he said.
*This made them harder to find, but not impossible. Nothing ever truly disappears from the internet. Then again, as Cernovich was happy to admit, “People can keep bringing up old screencaps of this or that tweet, and I can just keep brushing it aside. ‘Nah, that looks forged.’ ‘That’s taken out of context.’ ‘Maybe I got hacked.’ Some people won’t believe you, but some people will. It’s all in how you sell it. Meanwhile, I keep moving forward, and the old stuff keeps receding further into the past.”
*When historians look back on the Trump era, they may see this as one of its few silver linings. If Hillary Clinton had been elected president, as everyone expected, it’s unlikely that public opinion would have turned so swiftly against the social media tycoons, forcing them to reckon with what they had wrought.
*In 2016, a group of computer scientists at three universities published a study called “You Can’t Stay Here: The Efficacy of Reddit’s 2015 Ban Examined Through Hate Speech.” Did shutting down a few toxic subreddits, such as r/FatPeopleHate and r/Coontown, “diminish hateful behavior” overall, or did it merely “relocate such behavior to different parts of the site”? Using regression analysis to interpret a data set of 100 million Reddit posts, the researchers concluded that the ban had worked: “Users participating in the banned subreddits either left the site or (for those who remained) dramatically reduced their hate speech usage.” (Eshwar Chandrasekharan et al., “You Can’t Stay Here: The Efficacy of Reddit’s 2015 Ban Examined Through Hate Speech,” Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 1, no. 2 (November 2017): http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf.)
*“I don’t even understand these two,” someone said, glancing at two of the subreddits on the list. “One is called DinduNuffin and the other is DidntDoNuffin. Is that a meme I don’t know?” No one in the room could explain it, so the job fell to me.
*“I don’t think I’m going to leave the office one Friday and go, ‘Mission accomplished—we fixed the internet,’” Huffman once told me. “Every day, you keep visiting different parts of the site, opening this random door or that random door—‘What’s it like in here? Does this feel like a shitty place to be? No, people are generally having a good time, nobody’s hatching any evil plots, nobody’s crying. OK, great.’ And you move on to the next room.”
*This was a quote from Reagan’s address to the 1992 Republican National Convention. In that speech, as in so many similar speeches by Kennedys and Clintons and Bushes and Obamas, Reagan expressed his faith in the basic munificence of the American national character, his foundational belief that We Are Good. “My fellow citizens,” he said, “I have always had the highest respect for you, for your common sense and intelligence and for your decency. . . . May all of you as Americans never forget your heroic origins, never fail to seek divine guidance, and never lose your natural, God-given optimism.”
*“I know how to talk to him,” Mike told Shauna, in my presence, in the car after dinner. “He’s read the books I’ve read. He knows the media gossip I know about. What am I gonna talk about with my mom? The sweet mercy of Jesus?”
*Yiannopoulos attempted to sue Simon & Schuster for breach of contract. The lawsuit was unsuccessful, but it did allow the book editor’s comments on Yiannopoulos’s manuscript (“gratuitous”; “irrelevant”; “a sea of self-aggrandisement and scattershot thinking”; “let’s leave ‘cuck’ out of it”; “DELETE UGH”) to be added to the public record.
*Peterson’s book 12 Rules for Life, a hodgepodge of clinical psychology, Jungian mythology, and self-help, sold three million copies in its first year, an unprecedented level of viral success for a previously unknown writer.
*“If you’re playing a collectivist game, I don’t give a damn if you’re playing it on the left or the right. It’s a bad game.” This was how Peterson put it in May 2018, speaking before a crowd of thirty-six hundred people at an amphitheater in London, but he has reiterated the same sentiment dozens of times. His disavowals of the alt-right sometimes sound uncomfortably close to Mike Cernovich’s disavowal, on his blog, in the summer of 2016. Peterson is a contrarian, and it’s possible that he simply resents being asked to repeat anything so dully conformist as the truism that Nazis are uniquely despicable. But some truisms are worth repeating, and some questions have only one right answer.
*After “crisis,” according to Kuhn, comes “revolution,” and with it the emergence of a new paradigm. Kuhn was writing about science—the book in which he laid out his theory was called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions—but his central metaphor came from politics. “In both political and scientific development,” he wrote, “the sense of malfunction that can lead to crisis is prerequisite to revolution.”
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Andrew Marantz, Antisocial
