Panic Attack

by Robby Soave

  “I was trying to make a logical argument for the existence of the state and I felt that I was being bested,” Cantwell told me. “So I revised my opinions.”

  Anarcho-capitalism might not seem like an obvious roadway to the alt-right, given that anarcho-capitalists are critical of the police and suspicious of authority, whereas the alt-right thinks of authoritarianism favorably, as long as it’s the right-wing variety and not the left-wing kind. Sure enough, Cantwell harbored “violently anti-cop” and anti-authoritarian views during his anarcho-capitalist phase, he told me.

  What happened next is a testament to the power of random encounters. Cantwell told me he saw a group of women and men on the street at night, involved in some kind of drunken domestic dispute. He tried to deescalate the situation, but one of the men came at him, and so he drew his gun.

  “I was scared to death because I thought this guy was going to make me shoot him,” said Cantwell. “Shockingly enough, I was rather glad to see the police pull up while I had a gun pointed at a man.”

  Cantwell told me he was surprised that the cops didn’t immediately gun him down—he thought the cops were the bad guys. But these officers merely told Cantwell to lower his weapon, then asked what was going on. Cantwell had recorded the exchange with the drunk man on his cellphone, and after showing it to the cops, they gave him back his gun and sent him on his way.

  “Boy, did I feel stupid about some of the shitty things I had said about police,” said Cantwell.

  The episode made Cantwell reconsider his strident anti-authoritarianism. He started listening to more people on the alt-right—at first in hopes of converting them to anarcho-capitalism, but later because he found their racial ideas alluring. The works of economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe, an anarcho-capitalist whose thinking provides a bridge to the alt-right, proved particularly influential. Hoppe’s book Democracy: The God That Failed persuaded Cantwell that a truly anarcho-capitalist society would be authoritarian in character, rather than libertarian. (Hoppe, a fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, does not describe himself as alt-right, and while he favors restrictive immigration policies, he has condemned restrictive trade policies as “inimical to human prosperity.”)5

  Cantwell gradually became persuaded that distinct ethnic groups have distinct interests, and that these interests do not align. Forcing these groups to occupy the same spaces in the same country was a recipe for disaster, and the cause of various social ills: violence, poverty, and so on. The world of cosmopolitan libertarianism, liberalism, and conservatism is a bad one, where ethnic tensions will rule.

  “If my enemies get their way … we’re all going to be some mongrel race of fucking savages, and the Jews are going to rule over all of us,” he said.

  While Cantwell came from anarcho-capitalism, the alt-right has drawn from all corners of the ideological spectrum, including the far left. Despite the movement’s overall hatred of communists, it is not altogether uncommon to encounter former Marxists at alt-right rallies. Certain alt-right activists want something resembling economic equality for poor whites, and some alt-right leaders and friends of the movement have endorsed single-payer health care and abortion rights—both things that would give young men economic security, and thus more free time to advocate alt-right ideas.6 Andrew Auernheimer, a neo-Nazi and alt-right hacker known online as “weev,” was previously involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement.7 Lane Davis, an alt-right blogger and conspiracy theorist now in prison for murdering his father during an argument, took an interest in Marxism, Occupy Wall Street, and even Islamic extremism before eventually finding a home on the far right.8

  Even Richard Spencer, the former editor of the paleoconservative publication Taki’s Magazine and the unofficial leader of the alt-right, sometimes sounds more positively disposed toward the left than the right. When I interviewed him, he criticized the “bumper-sticker Reaganism” of Turning Point USA, expressed skepticism of libertarianism and “free market economics,” and spoke favorably of then-emerging Democratic Socialist candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She resonates with people because she addresses the Zillennial generation’s economic angst and has proposed solutions like greater health care coverage and basic income guarantees—things the alt-right should take seriously as possible means of alleviating the suffering of white Americans, according to Spencer.

  “I want the alt-right to be something that you might associate with the left, in a way,” he told me.

  Spencer, who has moved from Montana to Arlington, Virginia, and back again, is credited with having coined the term “alt-right,” and founded its online home, altright.com, in 2012. He talks like a philosopher, and dresses the part; the left-of-center magazine Mother Jones described him as “dapper,” though many readers balked at this flattery.9

  The two-word summary of Spencer’s thinking is this: race matters. “Race is real,” he told me. “Race is a highly predictive concept for thinking about society and economics, outcomes, and all that kind of stuff.”

  Unlike paleoconservatism, the alt-right is explicitly racial. Its motivating belief is identitarianism: the idea that people belong to racial groups, and that these groups possess very different characteristics. White people and black people have different cultures and traditions, and it would be better for everyone if they self-segregated into different countries. The same would be true for Latinos, Arabs, and so forth.

  The left is often pilloried for embracing identity politics: separating people into categories based on race, gender, sexual orientation, or other attributes. But Spencer thinks this approach has merit—and should be extended to the kind of white European who descends from the culture of Rome.

  “Conservatives love to hate identity politics,” said Spencer. “I think actually the left is getting at something real when they say, ‘I am not just an American citizen. I’m not just an individual consumer or producer in capitalism. I am an African,’ and that emotional resonance, visceral resonance, is so real. The conservatives and libertarians as well just want to run away from that and pretend that it doesn’t exist, or pretend that it is always bad.”

  Spencer, of course, is more adept than most at dressing up white nationalist ideas. Listen to virtually anyone else in the movement, and the cruelty of those ideas becomes more obvious. At the time this chapter was written, for instance, altright.com’s lead article was a commendation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions for cracking down on marijuana users, because “pot makes you into an introspective, effeminate, ‘open-minded,’ bug man,” according to alt-right writer Malcolm Jaggers. “Weed makes you a pussy who’s stuck in your own mind with your precious thoughts. Needless to say, a preoccupation with others’ feelings is not especially masculine.”10

  Masculinity is very important to the alt-right. Men should be tough, and violent when necessary. Alt-right activists associate femininity with liberalism and multiculturalism. One of the alt-right’s favorite pejoratives is “cuckservative,” a portmanteau of “conservative” and “cuckold,” a term for a man whose wife sleeps with other men. Cuckservatives, according to the alt-right, have done nothing to prevent immigrants and minorities from figuratively coming into their houses and sleeping with their wives; to the extent the conservative movement has condoned and supported multiculturalism, conservatives are complicit in this cuckoldry, even appearing to derive sexual pleasure from their own humiliation. It’s an ugly term with a racially charged history. The alt-right doesn’t want people of color sleeping with white women, metaphorically or literally: the latter would dilute the purity of the white race.

  In practice, these beliefs might not sound any less despicable than what the Ku Klux Klan or the Nazi Party believes, and alt-right activists frequently make statements about black and Jewish people that square with a KKK or Nazi worldview. Spencer and the more media-savvy members try to cloak the alt-right in a façade of respectability. They will say that everyone would be better served by a society separated into various racial collectives, but that th
e transition to this utopian future should ideally be peaceful and voluntary. At the rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial, Spencer was asked what he thought about interracial marriage, and replied, “Well, it’s not ideal,” but he didn’t think it was an important concern for his movement. His hope was that white people would want to have white children, rather than mixed-race children, because they were proud of their race and their culture.

  Despite the peaceful nature of the Lincoln Memorial event, alt-right events have occasionally played host to terrible things. Case in point: the infamous August 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where supporters of the alt-right marched in opposition to the city’s decision to tear down a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee, who is considered an icon of the movement. Removing images of white historical figures from public places is viewed by the movement as a form of white erasure, a complaint that calls to mind some of the left’s grievances. Alt-right activists often chant “You will not replace us!” at their marches; they are specifically radicalized by the idea that multiculturalism is about erasing white identity.

  The Charlottesville rally drew some of the most significant members of the alt-right, including Cantwell, Spencer, Baked Alaska, and Jason Kessler, the white nationalist who helped organize the event. It quickly descended into chaos. A counterdemonstrator, Heather Heyer, was run over and killed after an alt-right sympathizer drove his car into the crowd. On Twitter, Kessler responded to Heyer’s death with a link to the Daily Stormer, an explicitly neo-Nazi website, and the following statement: “Heather Heyer was a fat, disgusting communist. Communists have killed 94 million. Looks like it was pay back time.”11

  Cantwell turned himself in to the authorities after learning there was a warrant out for his arrest; he was accused of pepper-spraying counterdemonstrators in the face. Cantwell said it was self-defense, and that the media has been determined to misrepresent the situation so that he ends up in prison.

  “The media has absolutely been saturated with fuckin’ propaganda against me,” he told me.

  Since the alt-right—much like antifa—is prepared to meet aggression with violence, violence can and does ensue at their events. After Spencer spoke at the University of Florida in October 2017, three of his supporters drove to a bus stop and started yelling “Heil Hitler” at random commuters.12 An argument followed; one of the white nationalists drew a gun and, at the behest of his compatriots, fired a single shot that hit no one. Police eventually caught the trio—brothers Colton Fears and William Fears, and Tyler Tenbrink—and arrested them. Tenbrink, the one who actually shot at the bus passengers, was a convicted felon in possession of an illegal gun. All three were charged with attempted homicide. Authorities dropped the charges against William Fears, though he was later arrested for domestic violence.

  These incidents make several things clear. First, the alt-right is not fundamentally different from the KKK, the far-right white nationalist group that predates it in America.

  Second, although alt-right activists like to complain that their free speech rights are being violated, they are even more confused about the First Amendment than their extremist counterparts on the left. The First Amendment does not guarantee anyone a platform on Twitter, nor does it establish a right to threaten to kill liberals, assault counterdemonstrators, or shoot at commuters.

  Third, although Trump is not a member of the alt-right, it’s possible to see why his victory gave the alt-right such hope. “Trump is overall a move in the right direction as far as recent presidents are concerned,” Kyle told me. The alt-right attorney was disappointed that the president wasn’t keeping some of his campaign promises—building the wall, pulling out of NAFTA, avoiding military intervention in Syria—but said that “Trump has added a nationalistic flair to American political discourse, which is invaluable.”

  Cantwell, for his part, denied that Trump was one of them. “All of Trump’s children are married to, or dating, Jews,” he said. “So the idea that he’s like some kind of closet Nazi is foundationally ridiculous.”

  But it’s not ridiculous for some alt-right-adjacent folks to occasionally think Trump is dog-whistling at them. Two weeks after the Charlottesville rally, the president gave a speech in Phoenix, asking, “Does anybody want George Washington’s statue [taken down]? No. Is that sad, is that sad? To Lincoln, to Teddy Roosevelt. I see they want to take Teddy Roosevelt’s down too. They’re trying to figure out why, they don’t know. They’re trying to take away our culture, they’re trying to take away our history.” Whether Trump knows it or not (I’m betting not), this statement plays directly into alt-right fears about white culture being replaced.

  Liberals could have scored a win here by retorting, No one wants to tear down George Washington’s statue. Washington isn’t morally equivalent to Robert E. Lee. Unfortunately, left-leaning political analyst Angela Rye had appeared on CNN just days before and declared, “I don’t care if it’s a George Washington statue, or a Thomas Jefferson statue, or a Robert E. Lee statue. They all need to come down.”

  The Daily Beast’s editor in chief at the time, John Avlon, who appeared in the same segment with Rye, immediately chimed in with, “You’re feeding in to Steve Bannon and Trump.”13 And he was exactly right. As we will see throughout the rest of this chapter, there’s a powerful symbiosis at work here. The right’s extremism fuels the left, and the extreme left responds in a way that makes the extreme right feel vindicated. And vice versa.

  A Tale of Two Tumblr Pages

  In the previous section, I traced the intellectual roots of the alt-right and described the real-life activities of several of its best-known leaders and foot soldiers. But there’s another story of where the alt-right came from, and you won’t hear the names Buchanan or Spencer in this tale.

  It’s the story of Tumblr.

  Tumblr, an online blogging platform and social networking community, debuted in 2007. “Tumblr is so easy to use that it’s hard to explain,” reads a note on Tumblr’s website that captures its essence fairly well. The site is whatever its users want it to be: a blog, or a diary, or a place to post photos, videos, or whatever. (Prior to Yahoo’s acquisition of the company in 2013, 11 percent of Tumblr’s most popular blogs were pornographic.)

  It was particularly popular with young, earnest, socially conscious, far-left folks who would come to be known to the right under the derisive monikers of “social justice warrior” and “crybully.”

  “If the generation of college-going millennials that followed the rise of this online culture could be described, as they are today by the conservative press in particular, as ‘generation snowflake,’ Tumblr was their vanguard,” wrote Angela Nagle in her essential 2017 book, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right.

  Tumblr users perfected the art of the callout—of publicly shaming someone else for saying something that was problematic on leftist grounds, such as sexism, racism, or ableism. But often their targets just didn’t deserve anything approaching the level of ceaseless opprobrium the platform delivered. Consider a 2015 incident involving Paige Paz, a twenty-year-old self-described Tumblr artist who liked to draw pictures of characters from cartoon shows.14 Paz had a habit of drawing different versions of the made-up characters: in one drawing, she chose to depict a pony character (from the show My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic) as a Native American adult.15 But this got her in trouble with the so-called crybullies—one Tumblr user commented about the not-a-pony picture, “This is stereotypical and therefore racist.” It got worse: when Paz drew a dark-skinned character with slightly lighter skin, she was accused of racism. She was accused of transphobia for drawing characters as the wrong gender. She was accused of fatphobia for drawing characters who were thinner than they were supposed to be.

  “If you support drawing canonically fat characters as skinny or worse, whitewashing PoC [person of color] representation, you can unfollow me right now because I don’t need your shit,” wrote one critic. />
  At one point there were as many as forty different Tumblr pages that existed for the sole purpose of calling out Paz.16 Even if one thinks that what Paz did was somehow wrong, her critics were guilty of much worse sins. “I’ll continue making fun of her lazy art and her bigotry until something changes,” said one.17 Others urged her to kill herself, which she eventually attempted, unsuccessfully.

  Tumblr culture became toxic and militantly PC—but so did other corners of the internet, including Twitter, where some edgy young extremists goad each other to commit suicide by drinking bleach. In her book, Nagle highlights a few choice examples: Arthur Chu, a Jeopardy champion noted for his unusual winning strategy, once wrote on Twitter, “as a dude who cares [about] feminism sometimes I want to join all men arm-in-arm & then run off a cliff and drag the whole gender into the sea.” And “Brienne of Snarth,” a personality active on both Twitter and Tumblr, gave the following response to the death of a two-year-old who was killed by an alligator at a Walt Disney World resort in Florida: “I’m so finished with this white men’s entitlement that I’m really not sad about a 2yo being eaten by a gator bc his daddy ignored signs.”

  There’s a grating obnoxiousness to this brand of weird wokeness. It’s purely performative, done for no other reason but to send a social signal: I am the most progressive, because I am willing to say a truly horrible thing in service of my progressivism. I am better than you.

  “The hysterical liberal call-out produced a breeding ground for an online backlash of irreverent mockery and anti-PC,” wrote Nagle. “After crying wolf throughout these years, calling everyone from saccharine pop stars to Justin Trudeau a ‘white supremacist’ and everyone who wasn’t With Her a sexist, the real wolf eventually arrived, in the form of the openly white nationalist alt-right who hid among an online army of ironic in-jokey trolls.”