Fascists Among Us Read online

  As the anti-fascist protests grew, Trump moved to distance himself from the alt-right and from Steve Bannon, who had reportedly scripted his initial ambivalent response to Unite the Right. Within a week, he had fired Bannon, whom he thereafter denounced as ‘Sloppy Steve’.26

  In online forums and social media, fascists could mask their true nature, disguising themselves as shitposters (people who deliberately contribute worthless, irrelevant, or ironic material to an online discussion simply to induce a reaction) and trolls. But the murder of Heather Heyer by a white supremacist forced attendees at Unite the Right to confront fascist violence in a way that sharing memes behind their computers did not.

  By taking to the streets, the far right made themselves a target. In the weeks after Charlottesville, anti-fascists redoubled their efforts, and it became apparent that the alt-right would not again be able to assemble in public without arousing massive opposition.

  Many of the Unite the Right attendees were publicly identified by photos or video footage, and were thus forced either to embrace their fascism in public or (more often) to hastily disavow it. Either way, they lost their reputations, their friends, and their jobs.

  Very quickly, the full scale of the catastrophe the fascists had wrought for themselves became clear. Identity Evropa shed its central cadres in pursuit of respectability.27 The head of the National Socialist Movement handed over leadership to a black civil-rights activist in a bid to duck lawsuits.28 The Traditionalist Worker Party collapsed, after a bizarre internal schism connected to an affair between Heimbach (who was briefly jailed) and the partner of his deputy, Matt Parrott.29

  Jason Kessler became, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a ‘social pariah’ in Charlottesville. Richard Spencer cancelled much of his subsequent speaking tour because of protests, and was banned from using Paypal to receive donations. ‘Antifa is winning,’ he lamented.30

  ‘Augustus Invictus’ fell out with various organisations with which he’d been associated, including the hate group American Guard, which expelled him for his ‘poisonous ideas’. Mike Enoch began feuding with other fascists when leaked personal information revealed his wife to be Jewish. (He later separated from her.) ‘Baked Alaska’, like many other far-right celebrities, lost his social media accounts — and responded with a much-mocked online meltdown. Christopher Cantwell earned the title ‘the Crying Nazi’ after he broke down sobbing on video at the prospect of being arrested. The Daily Stormer struggled to locate a hosting service, eventually retreating to the dark web, and its editor, Andrew Anglin, fled (purportedly to Cambodia).31

  Subsequent attempts by fascists to take to the streets drew pitiful numbers. Perhaps 200 attended a march in Shelbyville, Tennesee, while other advertised events simply didn’t take place.32 The Unite the Right 2 rally, an anniversary event organised by Kessler, attracted maybe 20 people. A later Boston rally mobilised a mere handful.33

  American fascism hadn’t disappeared. But its key figures learned, to their great frustration, that they couldn’t convert their online support into a conventional political movement as easily as they had hoped.

  Such was the context in which Person X developed his own strategy for bridging the gulf between fascism’s online strength and its real-world weakness. That strategy was terrorist murder.

  4

  ‘SCREW YOUR OPTICS!’

  THE CHRISTCHURCH STRATEGY

  ‘Screw your optics, I’m going in.’ This was the message posted on Gab by a man called Robert Bowers, just before he killed seven people in the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.1

  The phrase became a meme on the far right, one that Person X incorporated into his own final 8chan post.

  ‘Optics’ refers to a debate that divided American fascists after Charlottesville. As Unite the Right unravelled, Anglin attacked those alt-right activists who wanted more such marches (in particular, those connected with the Traditionalist Worker Party) as LARPers (live-action role-players). They were embarrassing misfits who discredited the movement.

  ‘We need to remain in the realm of the hip, cool, sexy, fun,’ he said. ‘We need to speak to the culture.’2 Fascists, he insisted, needed to continue propagandising online, developing cadres who might eventually influence real politics.

  ‘We are in no way ready to “take to the streets”. We have absolutely zero infrastructure. We do not have a huge pool of reliable, competent people. We do not have any stable organizations … We do not really have much of anything at all.’3

  His opponents in the TWP and elsewhere responded by labelling him, in the charming parlance of the alt-right, an ‘optics cuck’ (a reference to the ‘cuckold porn’ genre in which white men watched black men have sex with their wives). They claimed that the alt-right had to continue moving into the streets. Wearing uniforms and battling leftists conveyed an attractive image of strength, they said.

  ‘Our conviction,’ explained the TWP’s Matt Parrott, ‘is that a political movement which fails to occupy public space, which lacks the strength to stand its ground in public, is stillborn. That fight isn’t optional, and it’s not one we could or should forfeit on account of “optics”’.4

  The LARPers lost the so-called ‘Optics War’. By Unite the Right 2, fascists could no longer occupy public space, since counter-protests blocked their every attempt. Political frustration over that failure formed the backdrop to the feud in which the TSP disintegrated after Heimbach, quite literally, cuckolded Parrott.

  But if Anglin won, his victory was largely pyrrhic. The increased attention on the fascist scene after Charlottesville made even the old online activism more difficult, as the big social media companies responded to pressure to police their services. Key fascist leaders lost much of their digital presence — in many cases, retreating to niche platforms like Gab.

  In a context of widespread demoralisation, Person X offered a third alternative in the Optics War. As the ‘screw your optics’ slogan suggested, Person X scorned Anglin’s commitment to exclusively online fascism. Yet he also rejected Unite the Right-style rallies and other attempts to build a conventional political movement.

  He embraced, instead, terrorism. He was not, of course, the first to do so. In his manifesto, Person X claimed he took ‘inspiration from Knight Justiciar [Anders] Breivik’, the man who killed 77 people in Norway in 2011.5 He even claimed (probably falsely) to have received endorsement for his own attack from Breivik’s (probably fictitious) organisation.

  But Person X developed a distinctive understanding of the strategic value of terror. His murders were, he said, vengeance against those whom he called ‘invaders’, and a contribution to their extermination. More importantly, they would ‘show the effect of direct action, lighting a path forward for those that wish to follow’.6

  The claim that terrorism might ‘light a path’ goes back to the nineteenth century, when anarchists like Johann Most advocated so-called propaganda by the deed, in which daring blows against oppressors supposedly inspired the masses into imitative revolt.7

  The strategy rarely worked in the way that Most claimed, simply because of the gulf between its democratic rhetoric and its elitist practice. Even on occasions when the people approved of an attack on a tyrant or industrialist, they weren’t necessarily stirred into action. They were as likely to conclude that politics could be left to those revolutionary ‘heroes’ who would take action on their behalf.

  Person X’s version of the methodology made, at first glance, much less sense than Most’s.

  The original exponents of propaganda by deed planned their actions to generate maximum sympathy, targeting, for instance, particularly cruel autocrats or capitalists widely despised by the populace.

  That was not what Person X did. He did not bomb a symbolic target, or kidnap an unpopular politician, or stage a dramatic skyjacking, or something of that sort. He slaughtered peaceful worshippers — an atrocity calculated
to repel even many who might otherwise have sympathised with Person X’s racism.

  The horror and disgust expressed by New Zealanders was entirely predictable. If ordinary people did not support fascists marching in the street, they were scarcely likely to applaud cold-blooded murder.

  Not surprisingly, commentators judged Person X a fantasist, deluded by his own propaganda into believing that mass slaughter would somehow inspire a fascist revolution. But they did not grasp how Person X’s strategy reflected a broader debate.

  Despite his rhetoric about the masses, Person X did not intend his manifesto for the public. He deliberately sought to baffle ‘normies’ via his shitposting, with the document studded with 8chan humour.8 Rather than addressing ordinary people, Person X wrote his document for the fascist right, going out of his way to exclude those who couldn’t grasp the internet irony in which the fascist right was steeped.

  In that sense, he belonged on Anglin’s side in the ‘Optics War’. He recognised the importance of internet culture to the far right: ‘memes,’ he said, ‘have done more for the ethnonationalist movement than any manifesto’.9 Yet he also argued, explicitly, that memes were not enough — and he included in his manifesto the fascist kitsch that Anglin despised.

  The document contains, for instance, no fewer than three sentimental poems: works by Dylan Thomas, Rudyard Kipling, and William Ernest Henley, presented entirely without irony. It concludes with photos of blonde women staring at babies, images of domestic harmony quite at odds with the pornographic sensibilities of 4chan, 8chan or The Daily Stormer. Person X even breaks into faux-Romantic prose, advising his readers to consider death ‘as certain as the setting of the sun at evenfall’.10

  Thus, while much of the manifesto reads like a shitpost, other sections drip with the maudlin sincerity that shitposters despise. It blends the opposing positions in the ‘Optics War’ into a third, and different, perspective.

  The synthesis was possible because of the form of terror that Person X embraced — one with a distinctive place in contemporary Western culture.

  In 1966, a man called Charles Whitman murdered his mother and his wife, and then, carrying an arsenal of weapons, climbed atop a 307-foot tower at the University of Texas in Austin to open fire on students and staff. In total, he killed 17 people.

  Today, we might be horrified at Whitman’s rampage, but it does not baffle us. We are accustomed to gunmen shooting up schools or workplaces. Yet, prior to 1966, such crimes were almost unknown.

  Discussing what he calls ‘autogenic massacres’, the forensic psychiatrist Paul Mullen claims that they ‘do not even begin to appear until the twentieth century and only emerge as a recurring theme in the last thirty years’.11

  The statistics are contested, since much depends on how one defines a ‘massacre’, a ‘rampage’, or a ‘mass killing’. But, in the fifty years prior to the University of Texas murders, records show only 25 public mass shootings in which four or more people died in the United States.12

  By contrast, a list compiled by Mother Jones identifies at least 110 such incidents since 1982. ‘They are occurring more often,’ the magazine concludes. ‘An analysis of this database by researchers at Harvard University, further corroborated by a different study from the FBI, determined that mass shootings have tripled in frequency in recent years.’13

  Furthermore, autogenic massacres have developed well-defined, almost rigid, generic conventions. The killer makes detailed preparations, stockpiling guns and ammunition, and often assembling a uniform or costume. He writes a note or shoots a video, detailing his grievances and complaints. He finds a concentration of people and opens fire, shooting indiscriminately until he turns his weapon on himself, is slain by police, or (more rarely) captured.

  This, says Mullen, is ‘a relatively new form of behaviour in western cultures but one that has now acquired a clear social script and which appears to be becoming increasingly frequent’.

  Mullen and others have put considerable effort into assembling psychological profiles of shooters. After analysing a number of surviving killers, Mullen concludes, perhaps not unexpectedly, that ‘they had personality problems and were, to put it mildly, deeply troubled people’. But then he adds, ‘Most perpetrators of autogenic massacres do not, however, appear to have active psychotic symptoms at the time, and very few even have histories of prior contact with mental health services.’

  In any case, individual profiling cannot explain the emergence of the gun-massacre script — why ‘deeply troubled’ people carry out massacres when they didn’t fifty years earlier — nor its development. In 1986, for instance, mass shootings broke out in a string of workplaces across the US; in 1997, the phenomenon spread to schools.14

  In his book Going Postal, Mark Ames offers a social and historical analysis, associating what he calls ‘rage murder’ with profound changes in American society. ‘The rage murder is new,’ he argues. ‘It appeared under Reagan, during his cultural and economic revolution, and it expanded in his aftermath.’15

  He focuses, in particular, on the workplace shootings of the 1980s, which began with a number of massacres carried out by postal employees (hence his title). At the time, the service was under particular pressure from what we’d now call neoliberal reform, as redundancies, cost-cutting, and productivity increases fostered stress and insecurity among the workforce. When Ames interviewed massacre survivors, they sometimes expressed a surprising sympathy for the shooters. The experience of work — the activity that most people spend most of their lives performing — had become a nightmare, as job satisfaction gave way to perpetual anxiety, and the solidarity between employees collapsed into bullying and minor harassment.

  Ames says that workplace massacres migrated into the US school system in the 1990s, precisely because the education system manifested the worst aspects of the Reaganite workplace culture. There was, he argues, the ‘continuity of misery and entrapment from school to office’:

  Even physically, they look alike and act on the mind in a similar way: the overhead fluorescent lights, the economies-of-scale-purchased industrial carpeting and linoleum floors, the stench of cleaning chemicals in the restrooms, the same stalls with the same latches and the same metal toilet paper holders.16

  Contextualising the crimes in this way doesn’t mean understanding them as exclusively (or even primarily) goal-driven. Autogenic massacres do not involve the oppressed striking back against their oppressors. On the contrary, one reason they resist analysis is that they often seem so undirected, with the killer opening fire on a crowd, or targeting complete strangers.

  An autogenic massacre becomes more explicable if we focus on the act itself rather than its outcome — if, that is, we confront the possibility that, for the perpetrator, the point of the killing lies in the killing itself.

  In his classic essay ‘Why Men Love War’, William Broyles, Jr discusses how much he — and other Vietnam veterans he knew — had enjoyed armed combat:

  As anyone who has fired a bazooka or an M-60 machine gun knows, there is something to that power in your finger, the soft, seductive touch of the trigger. It’s like the magic sword, a grunt’s Excalibur: all you do is move that finger so imperceptibly just a wish flashing across your mind like a shadow, not even a full brain synapse, and poof! in a blast of sound and energy and light a truck or a house or even people disappear, everything flying and settling back into dust.17

  The passage describes violence as an end, not a means, with the almost magical experience of power unrelated to any outcomes. Broyles and his friends enjoyed killing — irrespective of whether that killing helped win the war.

  He continues:

  Part of the love of war stems from its being an experience of great intensity … War replaces the difficult gray areas of daily life with an eerie, serene clarity. In war you usually know who is your enemy and who is your friend, and are given means of dealing with both …
War is an escape from the everyday into a special world where the bonds that hold us to our duties in daily life — the bonds of family, community, work, disappear. In war, all bets are off.’18

  Another veteran describing combat in Vietnam to the psychiatrist Jonathan Shay spoke of something very similar. ‘I felt like a god, this power flowing through me,’ he said.19

  By walking into school with an assault rifle, or opening fire in a crowded street, the damaged men that Mullen describes could experience, for an instant, a power and intensity entirely absent from their everyday lives. In a sense, it doesn’t matter who they shoot — they feel godlike because they are shooting someone.

  That perhaps illuminates the gendering of rampage killings, crimes overwhelmingly committed by men. The rage murderer takes up his gun not simply because he feels disempowered, but also because of his particular understanding of that disempowerment, his sense of it almost as a slight.

  Hannah Arendt notes that rage doesn’t arise in response to an incurable disease, or to an earthquake, or ‘to social conditions which seem to be unchangeable’. Instead, she says, it erupts only when someone believes ‘that conditions could be changed and are not’.20

  Men and boys learn to associate masculinity with autonomy, control, and dominance. Their inability to assert such things — and the ensuing sense of their inadequacy alongside other, more successful men — might feel like an existential wrong, sufficient to make them crave the distinctly masculine power they identify with violence. The socialisation of women and girls, by contrast, presents disempowerment as naturally feminine — making, perhaps, a gun rampage a less obvious response (than, say, forms of self-harm).