Panic Attack

by Robby Soave

  At the same time some Tumblr and Twitter users were trying to crush the souls of people who wouldn’t draw sufficiently overweight anime characters, a corresponding culture of horror and abuse was rising on the right. Its homes were the forums Reddit and 4chan. Pepe the Frog originated on 4chan, as did the Republic of Kekistan—originally just kek, a variant of lol, or “laughing out loud,” which itself was a holdover from earlier internet chatrooms.

  The excesses of social justice Tumblr galvanized Reddit and 4chan, whose users associated callouts with thought control, censorship, and political correctness run amok. “One of the things that linked the often nihilistic and ironic chan culture to a wider culture of the alt-right orbit was their opposition to political correctness, feminism, multiculturalism, etc., and its encroachment into their freewheeling world of anonymity and tech,” wrote Nagle.

  Over time, online anti-PC culture drifted rightward, and became as abusive and harassing as anything on the left. The GamerGate movement (for a brief overview of this, return to Chapter Two) mirrored the Tumblr activists’ attacks on Paige Paz: legions of right-wing dudes sent death threats and rape threats to several prominent feminists who (gasp!) had dared to say that some videogames contained sexist tropes.

  Many of the leaders of this movement—Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos was one—declined to label themselves as alt-right, likely calculating that this would hurt their bids for mainstream attention. “Alt-lite” became their preferred description. But their audiences never fit so well into neat categorization, and many of their fans were either fellow travelers of the rising white nationalist tide, dabbling in it, or entrenched.

  Is there a line between attacking feminists and minorities because you want to make some warped point about political correctness and doing it because you’re a racist and sexist who actually hates them? If such a line even exists, many online cultural combatants have long since crossed it. And Spencer’s movement was waiting to welcome them with open arms.

  Living Hell

  “The thing that is important to know about [the alt-right] is that they consider themselves victims of other races,” Mary told me. “They believe this, that other races are coming to destroy them and they want to eliminate white people through interracial marriages and they want to destroy Western civilization. They want to take things from white people. It’s very much like a victim mentality. Like they have to defend themselves from people of other races.”

  Mary speaks from a position of considerable knowledge. For three years—a time that she would later describe as a “living hell”—she was married to a member of the alt-right. (“Mary” is a pseudonym.) Her story is an illustrative glimpse into one young man’s radicalization.

  In the late 2000s, Mary was a conservative college student with an interest in writing. She met her future husband, Brad (not his real name), at a Republican political conference in Washington, D.C.

  “This was during the Bush years,” she told me. “I assumed that he, even if he was more conservative than me, that he must be somewhat mainstream if he’d be going at all.”

  There were warning signs. Mutual acquaintances warned Mary about Brad’s college antics, which involved frequent clashes with the left over political correctness. Some said Brad was a racist. But to Mary, he seemed harmless—even dorky.

  Months later, they connected on Facebook. Then they went on a first date. Mary thought Brad seemed friendly—not at all like his reputation. She asked him straight out whether he was some kind of white supremacist. He utterly denied it, she said.

  Within two months, Mary was pregnant, and the couple decided to get married—something Mary now considers “probably a big mistake.”

  Mary received a clue that something was off about Brad on the day of their daughter’s birth. Mary looks like the kind of woman a white supremacist would want to marry—she’s light-skinned and blond-haired—but their infant daughter had brown hair, which Brad remarked upon almost immediately. He expressed optimism that she would grow out of it, according to Mary.

  Over the next year, Brad was largely absent from the white nationalist movement, Mary told me. But he gradually became more and more involved with white supremacists. Sometimes he would invite such people to their apartment; more often, he communicated with them online or over the phone.

  “You would rarely see these people in person,” Mary told me. She was embarrassed when they hung out in public: Brad and his white nationalist friends would talk about things like “the Jewish problem” and “spiritual whiteness,” she said.

  Brad was also obsessed with guns, and routinely stockpiled ammunition. He became convinced that black people would riot if the jury decided to acquit George Zimmerman for Trayvon Martin’s murder, and tried to persuade Mary as well.

  “He’s fascinated by guns, he owns an AR-15, he is always looking for reasons to buy ammunition,” Mary told me. “He’s very attached to the idea that there’s eventually going to be a race war or something, where he’s going to have to defend himself.”

  Zimmerman was indeed acquitted, but no such riots took place. Mary said she felt “foolish” for thinking Brad might have been right.

  Mary slowly became both more aware of the depths of Brad’s racism and less susceptible to him. They started fighting regularly. Mary developed a prescription drug addiction. Brad became more committed than ever to the alt-right cause, and more desperate to rope Mary into it. He brought her with him to a two-day alt-right conference in another city. This experience finally confirmed for Mary what had grown more and more apparent: she wanted no part of a movement whose adherents got together to chant “Sieg heil!” Two months later, they separated. They are now divorced, but share custody of their daughter.

  It’s difficult to say exactly how or why Brad became this way, and it would be foolish to think he wasn’t always at least a little racist. But his desire to publicly associate with a movement dedicated to the cause of white identitarianism increased over time—in proportion to what he perceived as rising leftist identitarianism. Mary specifically cited leftist excesses on college campuses as one of the things that radicalized Brad.

  “On campus, definitely,” Mary told me. “[Campus leftists] have definitely fueled the radical right, I think, with their antics. I think that’s how Brad got radicalized.”

  Mary told me that in college, Brad was involved in a conservative student group, and once invited a right-leaning congressman to speak on campus. In a turn of events that will be familiar to readers by now, student protesters crashed the event and disrupted the congressman’s speech.

  “They stormed the stage and attacked people, these demonstrators did,” Mary told me. “I think that just pushed [Brad] further to the right. He just got more and more radical the more he was attacked on campus. It backfires, I think.”

  Red-Pilled

  There is a critical early moment in the 1999 film The Matrix when the seemingly all-knowing Morpheus (played by Laurence Fishburne) offers protagonist Neo (played by Keanu Reeves) a choice: take the blue pill or the red pill. The blue pill would lead Neo back to the Matrix, a simulated reality where human beings go about their lives, blissfully unaware that they are actually slaves to a vast, totalitarian artificial intelligence system. The red pill would cause Neo to wake up—for the first time in his life—and join the human resistance in the actual world outside the Matrix, a place Morpheus refers to as “the desert of the real.” This duality is also echoed in the climax of the second film, The Matrix Reloaded, when Neo must choose between two doors: one that will take him back to the beginning while ensuring humanity’s survival, and one that will allow him to go forward but risks total extinction of humankind.

  In the years since The Matrix’s release, the red pill has become an important metaphor for the men’s rights movement, a mostly online community that believes men, rather than women, are the victims of discrimination in modern society. They cite custody battles, divorce proceedings, and sexual assault disputes as exam
ples of situations where men are at a distinct disadvantage. Men’s rights activists, or MRAs, refer to the act of discovering this truth as “red-pilling.” There’s no going back for them: their eyes have been opened to the way things really are.

  Some of the MRAs’ complaints contain tiny kernels of truth. For instance, while most people understand that men commit the overwhelming majority of violent crimes, less frequently discussed is the fact that most victims are also men, rather than women. Men, for whatever reason, commit suicide at a much higher rate than women. According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, men are three and a half times more likely to kill themselves than women are.18 In 2017, white men accounted for seven in every ten suicides. Among young people, female suicide rates have increased—but they’re still significantly lower than the teen male suicide rate (5.1 per 100,000 girls vs. 14.2 per 100,000 boys).19 Homelessness also affects more men than women.20 MRAs claim that male victims don’t get nearly as much attention as female victims—that modern society is relatively indifferent to male suffering.

  The movement takes these grievances much too far, however, and the online forums and discussion sites of the men’s rights movement are teeming with people who believe awful, misogynistic things about women and feminists—and hunger for revenge against them. An offshoot of the MRA community, Men Going Their Own Way (or MGTOW, pronounced like “mig toe”), believes men should disassociate themselves from women entirely.

  It should come as no surprise that the radical element of the men’s rights movement overlaps substantially with the alt-right. Young men who buy into their own victimhood and rail against a supposed women-centric modern culture and media establishment are vulnerable to being captured by charismatic extremists who give them an “other” to hate: globalism, social liberalism, immigrants, and more.

  In the fall of 2017, I appeared on a panel at Harvard University that was cosponsored by the Open Campus Initiative student group, Spiked magazine, and the Institute for Humane Studies. My co-panelists were the feminist author Wendy Kaminer (mentioned in Chapter Four), Spiked editor Brendan O’Neill, and Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker. We were asked to discuss the topic “Is Political Correctness Why Trump Won?”

  Each of us thought the answer was at least a partial yes. For my part, I read a series of emails I had received in response to a Reason magazine article in which I made the case that the public voted for Trump in order to fight back against political correctness run amok.21 Voter after voter told me that this was exactly the reason they had voted for Trump.

  “I too am sick of the antics of the PC crowd telling me what to think,” wrote one. “Best regards for a Merry Christmas, happy holiday or whatever our betters tell us to call it.”

  “I support gay marriage and transsexual people’s rights,” wrote another. “However, I do not support them to the exclusion of other citizen rights … this blind adherence to political correctness was my main issue in the recent political arena.”

  Pinker’s comments at the Harvard event have stuck with me as well.22 He worried that the alt-right and other extremist ideologies were winning over vulnerable young people precisely because campus political correctness had rendered certain truths unsayable on campus.

  “People who gravitate to the alt-right … swallow the red pill, as the saying goes, when they are exposed for the first time to true statements that have never been voiced in college campuses or in the New York Times or in respectable media,” said Pinker. These statements “are almost like a bacillus to which they have no immunity, and they are immediately infected with a feeling of outrage that these truths are unsayable, and have no defense against taking them to what we might consider rather repellent conclusions.”

  Pinker gave the example of differences between the sexes. “This is not controversial to anyone who has even glanced at the data,” said Pinker. “Men and women give different answers as to what they want to do for a living and how much time they want to allocate to family vs. career and so on. But you can’t say it.” Indeed, at Harvard University, President Larry Summers drew furious criticism from faculty in 2005 for discussing scientific research related to this issue, and later resigned.

  As Pinker emphasized during his remarks, some evidence of certain sex-based differences would not mean that women should be treated differently, or that stereotypes about the sexes should be taken seriously, or that broad conclusions should be drawn. But a young person, having learned that this truth was withheld from him for so long, is unlikely to accept the qualifying arguments for why these facts ultimately don’t mean very much. The person “will be vindicated when people who voice these truths are suppressed, shouted down, assaulted,” according to Pinker. “All the more reason to believe the left, mainstream media, and universities can’t handle the truth.”

  It would, of course, be wrong to blame the left for the alt-right’s bad behavior and odious beliefs. The alt-right is a white nationalist movement, wholly undeserving of public sympathy. Its ascendance is a testament to the enduring power of racism in the twenty-first century.

  But by turning away from bedrock principles of liberalism, free speech, and inclusion, the left has made it easier for people to swallow the red pill. Shutting down abhorrent far-right speakers backfires in that it distracts from the speakers’ messages, casting them as martyrs and making their critics on the left seem like the intolerant ones. And of course, the tendency among some on the left to label everyone on the right a Nazi—not just Richard Spencer but Charles Murray and Ben Shapiro as well—creates a boy-who-cried-wolf problem and promotes ignorance. I disagree vehemently with many of Shapiro’s opinions, but it’s ludicrous to call him a Nazi or associate him with the alt-right. (Not least of all because Shapiro is in fact Jewish, and has been subjected to considerable anti-Semitic harassment from pro-Trump trolls.)23 Or consider this: in the summer of 2017, a fact-checker for the New Yorker named Talia Lavin claimed that a wheelchair-bound ICE agent had a Nazi iron cross tattooed on his shoulder. She was mistaken; the cross was Maltese, the symbol of the agent’s Marine platoon.24 Lavin resigned from the New Yorker, but the left-wing watchdog group Media Matters hired her as a “researcher on far-right extremism” a few weeks later.25

  The alt-right, thankfully, has earned less attention since the 2017 Charlottesville march. But it would be a mistake to think the movement—a living, breathing example of racial identity politics taken to a xenophobic extreme—has disappeared.

  “The play is not over,” Spencer told me. “There are going to be more acts to it.”

  — EPILOGUE —

  WHEN EXTREMES MEET

  I always made one prayer to God, a very short one. Here it is: “O Lord, make our enemies quite ridiculous!” God granted it.

  —Voltaire

  “America is a racist, sexist, classist, homophobic country,” the speaker, Amanda, told an audience of perhaps sixty students. Later, she would challenge the students to “know their own intersectional story,” since all struggles against oppression are part of the same global conflict. “If Mother Nature is your shit, then fuck with Mother Nature,” she said. “Your issue is connected to every other fucking issue.”

  But one issue loomed larger than all the others and was always present.

  “Capitalism is in the room with every social justice issue we talk about,” said Amanda.

  Amanda’s specific issue that day was reclaiming the concept of the “nasty woman,” the derogative label Trump had applied to Hillary Clinton during the third presidential debate. During her presentation, Amanda reverently played a clip of the speech given by Ashley Judd at the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., in which the actress proudly declared, “I am a nasty woman.”

  The presentation was part academic lecture, part sermon, part poetry slam—delivered by a tall, rail-thin black woman wearing a black button-down shirt and a tie. Amanda is not her real name: I have chosen to redact her identity, since I never asked for permission to quote her,
and was not formally invited to attend the conference at which she spoke. Indeed, I overheard the first half of her presentation while hiding in a stairwell adjacent to the conference room.

  The event in question was a national convention for students interested in social justice, diversity, and leadership on their campuses. It was hosted by a nonprofit organization that sponsors training programs for schools. The young people who attend these kinds of events return to their colleges ready to preach the gospel of social justice to their peers. Curious about the sort of professional training the would-be leaders of the college activism movement were receiving, I decided to attend. (For reasons that will become clear in the very next paragraph, I have redacted the name of this convention and the organization responsible for it.)

  A ticket to the convention cost an eye-popping $400–$500 per person, with the exact price depending on how early you registered. According to its schedule, the convention consisted of a series of presentations, workshops, and small-group discussions. For the discussions, participants were divided into twenty groups of ten people. It seemed likely to me I would have to either pretend to be a student or risk being thrown out. Instead, I opted to sneak in without registering, listen in on a few conversations, and sample one of the lectures. The first thing I saw was one student holding another, who was crying. After hurrying past a public restroom that had been relabeled “gender neutral” by decree of a flyer depicting the symbol for a man, a woman, and a triceratops along with the message “All are welcome,” I found myself in the stairwell next to the room where Amanda was speaking, watching through the window of a door.