Book Notes: Anti-Social: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation

or perhaps the current conservative movement in America isn't about governing, but winning

I logged off of Facebook for the last time in the summer of 2020 at the height of the presidential election campaign. I just couldn’t take the bullshit any longer. Now I have a clear idea of what I was reacting to thanks to Andrew Marantz’s book Anti-Social: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation. Oh, had I only discovered this book sometime in 2020, things would have made so much more sense. Well, probably not, but in hindsight, it certainly seems so.

The opening depicts a fantastic contrast of self-described “Deplorables” preparing for the “DeploraBall” surrounded by camera equipment and listening to Bob Dylan sing about the death of Emmit Till. If that’s not enough to get your head spinning, one of the members of the party, Cassandra Fairbanks calls Dylan one of her idols. It’s true cognitive dissidence. At least that’s what I thought when I started the book.

As a native of one of the states of the confederacy who grew up listening to the dulcet tones of soft bigotry all around me (and occasionally not all that soft), I was completely ready to gloat at my mental superiority over these easily persuadable dingbats. However, after some true introspection, I understand how close I could have come to being one of them.

I remember standing in the voting booth in 1996. I was eighteen, staring at a ballot for President of the United States and I wanted to have an impact, but at the same time, I had no idea what that meant. I had promised an elderly white dude in an American flag hat down at the mall that I would vote for Ross Perot. Seemed like a good way to start my career as an adult, middle finger raised high.

I was a real libertarian at heart. I believed in the individual’s ability to do anything they set their mind to. I believed that anyone, ANYONE could make something of themselves if only the government would get the hell out of the way and let individuals make decisions on their own. Typing that now, it reeks of privilege and a young man that had very little life experience outside of his own bubble. I was lucky enough at the time to recognize that bubble, even if it would take time to recognize the privilege. However, my entire generation grew up privileged to not have a technology-fueled cheering section to support my stupidest beliefs.

“If filter bubbles were bad for democracy, then, were Google and Facebook also bad for democracy?” (pg. 76)

We are living in an age where we can completely ignore sources of information that do not fall in line with our belief systems. We don’t even have to try to ignore them. It’s a feature in the system, not a bug. To take that a step further, we can participate in enormous communities across the globe that hold similar beliefs (our cheering section). Ignoring challenging opinions is easier than remembering your password which requires fifteen letters, upper case & lower case, numbers, symbols, and a partridge in a pear tree.

In the open marketplace of ideas, what was to stop a lie from out competing a fact? (pg. 58)

I only wanted to check the score of the Arkansas Razorback game, but somehow ended up listening to Jordan Peterson’s faux authenticity as the antagonist to the word police all because I subscribe to the Joe Rogan podcast (I mean he does some pretty interesting interviews guys). Oh, and God forbid you have to research an unusual topic. My wife is an amazing make-up artist, but don’t ever scroll through her Instagram search feed unless you are an iron-stomached horror fan. Which I am. So, I find it fascinating 😯😮😵😱🤓.

Techno-heavy, though the title of the book might be, the meat of the pages are about how the Alt-Right abducted the Narrative, primarily from those under forty. Gen X might see the similarities in the loss of their grandparents to Bill O'Reilly and Fox News in general. Hope you guys cashed in them, “Gold(ish)” coins.

Although there is an attempt to define “alt-right,” primarily by pointing at their actions outside the mainstream, what you learn more about are the nuances of the various groups. However, What they all have in common is an enemy.

Of all the malign forces that he perceived in the world, perhaps the most pernicious was what he called “the Narrative”—a non-negotiable vocabulary that every member of polite society was required to learn. (pg. 116)

The Narrative could be further defined by what fits within the Overton Window. For the uninitiated, it means the window of human discourse or a range of acceptable policies and politics within the public mainstream. The further away from the center of the window you go, the less acceptable an idea. The alt-right seeks to shift the window, making what was formally unacceptable, acceptable.

Marantz spends an inordinate amount of time entrenched with the alt-right(lite) leaders. He has a superpower for listening to things he clearly thinks are reprehensible, but is able to turn off that knee-jerk contrarian response, and instead focuses that energy on pointed questions. You can find a list of people mentioned, quoted, and noted here. Some examples include Cassandra Fairbanks, Mike Cernovich, Laura Southern, Gavin McInnes, Peter Thiel, and a host of other special assholes. The most striking part of the whole list is how few of these people you might have heard of pre-2020 (the book’s publication year), and they are now common names when discussing the coming tide of white nationalism.

As despicable as these ideas might seem to those of us still peering through the Window, these belief systems are sophisticated, researched, and well-thought-out. They all just happen to be based on holding the value of the self higher than that of society. Are they also racists? To the core. But that doesn’t mean everyone speaking this language ultimately believes everything they are saying. Logical discourse is a normies exercise. For these folks, it’s about beating the other through any means necessary.

“To beat a person, you lower his or her social status,” he once wrote on Danger & Play. “Logic is pointless.” (pg. 163)

How do you engage in debate, negotiate details, find compromise, and affect change with people that see the world through this lens? You don’t. They aren’t interested in working with you through those means. They will take what they want through fear, anger, and force. To reach your goals in any other way is a sign of weakness.

One of the more interesting sections of the book for me was a moment of realization for one of Marantz’s interviewees. She noticed how one mantra in particular which sounded like a joke, began to sound serious. Now, how this could be seen as a joke to anyone is beyond my understanding, but the human mind’s capacity for convincing itself of absurdities is something we can all witness on the daily news. Let me introduce you to the Day of the Rope.

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. (pg. 323)

This is not a joke. This is a goal, and we now know this to be true.

This movement can be traced through the anti-civil rights movement, the Southern Strategy, Ronald Reagan’s dog-whistling, the Tea Party, and the Birther Conspiracy, to the current full-blown saying the quiet part out loud modern conservative movement. They are preying on young, white, disenfranchised, men(primarily) who are looking for something or somewhere to place blame, and there is nothing easier than pointing somewhere other than the mirror.

Could I have walked down this path? Contrarianism is attractive when you are young. Blazing your own trail on your own rules away from the trappings of authority figures is the story of legends. However, this dish has a racism base and is covered in bullying sauce. It’s not something I can swallow, not then and certainly not now.

If you are looking for a deep dive into how we got to our current state of political discourse, are baffled by the modern conservative movement, or think you can still have a logical debate with someone wearing a stop-the-steal t-shirt, read this book.

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Passages of Interest:

“There have always been those on the fringes of our society who have sought to escape their own responsibility by finding a simple solution, an appealing slogan, or a convenient scapegoat,” President John F. Kennedy said in 1961. “But in time the basic good sense and stability of the great American consensus has always prevailed.” (pg. 3)

The arc of history bends the way people bend it. (pg. 4)

Defy convention. Blow up the system. Question everything. (pg. 25)

Lee Atwater a Republican consultant and the Paganini of the modern political dog whistle, once explained the Southern Strategy, a ploy by which his party used coded racism to appeal to white voters. “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger,’” Atwater said. “By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you, it backfires—so you say stuff like ‘forced busing,’ ‘states’ rights,’ and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract.” Ronald Reagan, running for president in 1980 delivered a campaign speech in Neshoba County, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had been murdered sixteen years prior. “I believe in states’ rights,” Reagan said. When he became president, he hired Atwater as a White House aide, then as the deputy director of his reelection campaign. The day after the 1984 election, which Reagan won in the biggest landslide in American history, Atwater left the government to join a D.C. lobbying firm co-founded by Paul Manafort and Roger Stone.
Atwater didn’t invent the Southern Strategy. Barry Goldwater used it, unsuccessfully, in 1964; then Richard Nixon won with it, pitching himself as a law-and-order candidate who spoke for what he would later call a “silent majority.” (pg. 30)

The American Conservative was willing to publish opinions that were too edgy, or too racist, for the editors of National Review. (pg. 32)

When it comes to core matters of principle, though, it’s not always possible to be both evenhanded and honest. (pg. 43)

By all accounts, Richard Spencer coined the term “alt-right” in 2008. (pg. 43)

“Most people assume that there’s an innate, reliable correlation between how good something is and how popular it will be,” I began. “I think the correlation is unreliable at best.” Thiel held one of eight seats on the board of directors at Facebook, a company whose public-facing dogma took for granted that “good” and “popular” were interchangeable concepts. (pg. 48)

Traditional media gatekeeping was, inarguably, a deeply flawed system. But what if it turned out to be, like democracy, the worst system except for all the others? (pg. 50)

He invoked the Overton window, a metaphor invented in the 1990s by a libertarian think tank to explain how cultural vocabularies fluctuate over time. Ideas in the center of the Overton window are universally acceptable, so mainstream that they are taken for granted. The outer panes of the window represent more controversial opinions; radical opinions are close to the window’s edge; outside the window are ideas that are not just unpopular but unthinkable. The point of the metaphor is that unthinkability is a temporary condition. The window can shift. (pg. 54)

The window is not static, bro. They can’t keep calling us fringe forever. Wait two years, five years, ten years. You’ll see. (pg. 54)

“How much of what you say do you actually believe?” I asked. Instead of answering, he looked up at me and grinned. (pg. 56)

The Right Stuff: “The culture war is being fought daily from your smartphone.” (pg. 57)

Anything can happen. America was having a kind of national conversation, but too often it was reduced to a binary debate: optimistic determinism or pessimistic fatalism. (pg. 57)

In the open marketplace of ideas, what was to stop a lie from out competing a fact? (pg. 58)

What was unacceptable can become acceptable. (pg. 59)

To change how we talk is to change who we are. (pg. 61)

If filter bubbles were bad for democracy, then, were Google and Facebook also bad for democracy? (pg. 76)

The concept of the meme was invented in 1976 by Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist at Oxford. (pg. 84)

“Computers are increasingly tied together. Many of them are literally wired up together in electronic mail exchange. … It is a perfect milieu for self-replicating programs to flourish.” He was talking about computer viruses. He couldn’t have predicted BuzzFeed, or ClickHole, or Pepe, or Pizzagate. (pg. 85)

N.K. Humphrey, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Cambridge, stood the idea a step further: “When you plant a fertile meme in my mind, you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.” (pg. 85 footnote)

By Sailer’s lights, this meant that Republicans should drop their disingenuous platitudes and campaign openly as a white-identity party. Then, once they were in power, they could enact prowhite policies—deporting undocumented immigrants, reducing immigration quotas, retracting birthright citizenship—thus maintaining a white majority that could deliver future elections to the GOP. (pg. 114)

Of all the malign forces that he perceived in the world, perhaps the most pernicious was what he called “the Narrative”—a non-negotiable vocabulary that every member of polite society was required to learn. (pg. 116)

Some were alienated young men—restive, thwarted, full of depthless rage at women or at the world. (pg. 121)

Human biodiversity: the hypothesis that people are different, that they differ in predictable ways, and that some groups of people—some races, for example—have drawn stronger cards in the genetic lottery. (pg. 121)

There is no such thing as a society without a Narrative; there are only better Narratives and worse ones. (pg. 124)

The most effective way to gain “immense personal power,” according to another influential manosphere post, was to exhibit the “dark triad” or personality traits: Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy. (pg. 144)

“To beat a person, you lower his or her social status,” he once wrote on Danger & Play. “Logic is pointless.” (pg. 163)

“‘How can you write these terrible things?’ He’d go, ‘You don’t understand, babe, this is just how guys talk.’” (pg. 178)

In the 1880s, or even the 1980s, journalists could hamper the spread of a meritless story by debunking it, or simply by ignoring it. (pg. 182-3)

… one of the primary responsibilities of the media is to mediate—to distinguish spin from substance, fact from fabrication—and the rumor, being without merit, was deemed unfit to print. (pg. 183)

The alt-right had something akin to a Pledge of Allegiance, an old white-nationalist shibboleth known as the Fourteen Words: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” (pg 189)

He said that he had a “post-modern theory” of reputational impermanence—which seemed to be, essentially, that almost every moral boundary was permeable and almost every fact was negotiable. (pg. 195)

“Is there any way Hillary can lose tonight?” I asked Jesse Jackson, who happened to be standing next to me as we waited to pass through a metal detector. “Long answers,” he said. “Gotta go short on words, long on meaning.” (pg. 199)

Most of them wore MAGA hats, but even without any identifying flair, you could tell at a glance that they were Trump kids. They had a giddiness about them, as if they were getting away with something. (pg. 200)

“Most people know what it’s like for some smug, elite asshole to tell them, ‘You can’t say that, it’s racist, it’s bad.’ Well, a vote for Trump meant, ‘Fuck you, you don’t get to tell me what to say.’” (pg. 207)

Part of the goal was to gaslight the normies, to make them doubt even their simplest perceptions. Everything was open to interpretation. Even what looked like clear evidence of avowed hatred could turn out to be a deepfake, or an in-joke shrouded in endless layers of ambiguity. (pg. 234)

He had such a limited rhetorical toolkit—a meager lexicon, a warped memory, a weirdly specific kind of monotonal charisma—and yet, with those rudimentary implements, he was able to do so much. He was a vocalist with a raspy timbre and a half-octave range, but he sang with feeling. (pg. 247) referencing Trump

He had invited the press corps into an elegant ballroom in order to debase them, and they had broadcast their debasement line, on TV and on Twitter. It was the meta media equivalent of the schoolyard bully tactic known as “Why are you hitting yourself?” (pg. 248)

Corey Stewart, a revanchist Republican and an unsuccessful candidate for governor of Virginia, sat on a divan explaining why Confederate monuments must be preserved. Stewart—a son of Duluth, Minnesota, who now lived in a restored plantation house in Virginia—had clearly made the calculation that the best way to advance his political career in Trump’s America was to pander to racists, more or less openly. It was the Southern Strategy: Post-Subtlety Edition. (pg. 260)

I do not think it is outside of the realm of what’s possible that within the next five or ten years, probably closer to five, we will have alt-right men and women running for political office. (pg. 266)

A red pill is a dose of truth; a black pill is a reason to succumb to nihilistic depression; a white pill is a reason to be optimistic. (pg. 268)

I angled my screen toward the window, a movement I now made so often, in so many public places, that I often did it without thinking. (pg. 276)

“The police didn’t have riot gear, but the fucking hate groups did?” (pg. 281)

Somehow, he had fallen into a particularly dark rabbit hole, where many of the worst ideas in modern history were repackaged as a solution to twenty-first-century malaise. (pg. 282)

… “who only knows how to oppose and who chooses his positions based on what will be most upsetting to people around him.” (pg. 283)

He had the sort of grades that are common among smart but disobedient kids: As in classes that interested him, Ds and Fs when he was bored or felt that the teacher didn’t deserve respect. (pg. 283)

“I had come to grips with the fact that libertarianism isn’t going to work for everyone, and the people it isn’t going to work for are going to ruin it for everyone else.” (pg. 288)

His family, his teachers, his pastors, his peers—they had all recoiled from the reality of European superiority not because the notion was demonstrably incorrect or morally repugnant, but because they were too afraid to think for themselves. (pg. 288)

Instead of living in fear that someone might accuse them of racism, why not advocate unapologetically for white interests? (pg. 289)

… the Democrat narrative that every problem could be solved by spending, and the Republican narrative that everything could be solved by tax cuts, and the History Channel narrative that Hitler was Lucifer and Martin Luther King was the Messiah, and the social-justice-Twitter narrative that white men were the root of all evil. (pg. 290)

They’d all been Ron Paul supporters before that movement dissipated. Now they call themselves postlibertarians, although they weren’t sure what would come next. (pg. 290)

You lay out your vision of an ideal society; you start making it seem conceivable, even plausible; you gradually broaden the Overton window; and maybe, one day, the world starts to inch closer to your vision. (pg. 292)

They explained on the podcast how the trolling campaigns worked; by creating a surplus of activating emotion in neocons and SJWs on social media, the trolls were able to turn their enemies into host organisms, spreading the alt-right’s message for free. (pg. 298)

A propagandist with enough time and talent can explain away even the most glaring contradiction. (pg. 305)

… the checker was wary of overemphasizing the intelligence of a person who had reached such colossally stupid conclusions. We had a long discussion about it, in which I counter that intelligence and morality were independent variables—that a lot of bright people held reprehensible beliefs, and that the fact that an otherwise smart person could succumb to internet neofascism was part of what made internet neofascism so terrifying. (pg. 309)

“The Democrats mostly want to replace those old, white, yahoo conservatives with a new group of people who might be a little bit more amenable to big government.” Some nights, instead of haranguing the Democrats, Ingraham (Laura) used more specific dog whistles, railing against “globalists,” or “elites,” or George Soros. I texted Enoch, asking him whether he thought that Ingraham was nodding toward the JQ. “There is always the likelihood that she is aware,” he replied. “Nixon was. Billy Graham was. Tucker most certainly is.” (pg. 312)

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. (pg. 323)

… white supremacy is not so superficial a problem that it can be solved by getting rid of a few bad apples. (pg. 337)

What we need, and urgently, is a new moral vocabulary. (pg. 337)

Some types of people seem to be particularly susceptible to extremist online propaganda; people with weak real-world social ties; people with unstable senses of self; people with too much verbal intelligence and not enough emotional intelligence; people who prize idiosyncrasy over logical consistency, or flashy contrarianism over humble moral dignity. (pg. 338)

“You don’t want to be so in love with oversight that you become the Stasi, and you don’t want to be so terrified of oversight that you become a breeding ground for Nazis. It sounds simple, but it’s unbelievable hard to get right.” (pg. 348)

… the arc of history is not bent inexorably or automatically. It does not bend itself. We bend it. (pg. 358)

Terms:

Parody Songs: “Weird Al” Yankovic wannabes litter the internet and some of these gems can still be found on Youtube. Most of them are ridiculous, poorly edited mashup videos with a single line of the song changed to fit the alt-right meme of the moment. Short of promoting any individual video, a google search should fill your playlist with cringe-worthy crap.

Counter-Signal Memes: Hand-drawn memes typically using MS Paint (a program that I haven’t opened this millennium) that parody liberal or left-leaning orthodoxy. For more, here’s a concise history of their use.

Pepe the Frog “sad frog”: Created by Matt Furie in 2005 for his comic “Boy’s Life”, the character was co-opted by hate groups and became a dog whistle for racists and antisemites in particular. The L.A. Times did a nice piece on the history of its use in popular culture from its original iteration. More from KnowYourMeme.com and the Anti-Defamation League.

Aesthete: an affinity to art

Anodyne: not likely to provoke offense

Fatuous: silly

Cuck: Short for Cuckold. A weak, servile man or one whose significant other has been unfaithful. This is one of the primary insults used by the alt-right, a society full of incels. The irony of these two terms living so close together is a metaphor for the whole movement.

Contrarian Question: From Peter Thiel, “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”

Doxing: to publish an individual’s personal information on the internet for malicious purposes.

Overton Window: The window of human discourse, or a range of acceptable policies and politics within the public mainstream. The further away from the center of the window you go, the less acceptable an idea. The alt-right seeks to shift the window.

Exegesis: critical explanation of an exalted text

Vituperative: Bitter and abusive

Semiotic: in reference to signs or symbols

Filter Bubbles: the results of an algorithm that dictates the content you see in searches

Insouciance: indifference

Rapacity: aggressive greed

Preprandial: before a meal

Cuspidate: terminate at a point

Solipsism: theory that the self is all that can be known to exist

Macrotargeting: The packaging links in ways that were likely to induce a spike of activating emotion in most everyone who saw them. This was a successful technique in the early days of social media that drove the algorithm to increasingly more terrible ideas.

Bromides: a trite and unoriginal idea

Moore’s Law: the number of microchips in a processor doubles every two years even though the cost of the computer halves

Metcalf’s Law: every time you add a user to a network the number of connections increases proportionally to the square of the number of users

Singularity: the moment in the hypothetical future when machine growth is self-sufficient and outpaces human growth

Simulation Hypothesis: all life is a computer-generated simulation a la the Matrix

Internecine: bad for people on both sides

Manosphere: The manosphere is a collection of websites, blogs, and online forums promoting masculinity, misogyny, and opposition to feminism. Communities within the manosphere include men's rights activists, incels, Men Going Their Own Way, pick-up artists, and fathers' rights groups. I would love to poll the user group here. Oh the irony you would likely find.

PUA: acronym from the manosphere meaning - Pick Up Artist

Inchoate: just begun

SJW: alt-right acronym for Social Justice Warrior

Virtue-Signal: to construct a self-righteous public persona advertising one’s obeisance to the Narrative.

Cuckservative: A derogatory slang for a moderate or compromising conservative. See, you never compromise, you win.

Millenarian: the doctrine of or belief in a future (and typically imminent) thousand-year age of blessedness, beginning with or culminating in the Second Coming of Christ

Reductio ad absurdum: a method of proving the falsity of a premise by showing that its logical consequence is absurd or contradictory.

Xeriscaping: the process of landscaping, or gardening, that reduces or eliminates the need for irrigation.

Taciturn: to say little

Deus Vult: quite literally “as God wills it.” Also the battle cry from the eleventh-century crusaders as they killed and pillaged Muslim cities.

Shibboleth: a custom, principle, or belief distinguishing a particular class or group of people, especially a long-standing one regarded as outmoded or no longer important.

Panegyric: a public speech or published text in praise of someone or something

Lingua Franca: trade language or common language of a specialized group

Vertiginous: causing vertigo

Postlapsarian: after the Fall of Man

Koan: practice to provoke the "great doubt" and to practice or test a student's progress in Zen

Risible: to provoke laughter

Retinue: a group of advisors following a person of importance

Ascetic: severe self-discipline from all forms of indulgence, typically for religious reasons

Ineluctable: unable to escape

Names of Note:

Milo Yiannopoulos: He is a former editor for Breitbart News that rose to prominence within the alt-right movement. He was eventually ostracized after a video surfaced where he gives the Milo stamp of approval for adults to have sexual relationships with 13-year-olds. His last known location was as an intern for the esteemed 😳 representative from the great state of Georgia, Ms. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Mike Cernovich: Alt-right social media personality, political propagandist, and regular host on the Alex Jones Show … so a natural conspiracy theorist as well. He is listed as an extremist by the Southern Poverty Law Center due to his involvement in the #Pizzagate scandal.

Cassandra Fairbanks (MacDonald): A journalist, activist, and former reporter with the Russian-owned news network Sputnik. She was one of the organizers of the Deploraball.

Lauren Southern: Canadian alt-right YouTuber and blogger who ran in a federal election in 2015 with the Libertarian Party.

Bill Mitchell: A Trump apologist and podcaster.

Jim Hoft: A far-right pundit and Founder of Gateway Pundit who has recently jumped on Trump’s big lie bandwagon.

Roger Stone: Part-time Batman villain and political lobbyist for all things hashtag racist. He’s worked on campaigns from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan, to Orange Julius.

Alex Jones: Lead host of Infowars, propagator, and supporter of white nationalist agendas and conspiracies. He’s probably best known for calling the Sandy Hook mass shooting a hoax for which he is currently being indicted.

Gavin McInnes: Canadian far-right nationalist, podcaster, and writer who founded the neo-fascist group The Proud Boys.

Ayn Rand: The goddess of libertarian thought, and my personal introduction(indoctrination) into the ideas around libertarianism.

Mike Cernovich: American alt-right social media personality, political commentator, and conspiracy theorist. Cernovich describes himself as part of the "new right" and some have described him as part of the "alt-lite". Cernovich has been a regular host of the far-right The Alex Jones Show on InfoWars. Appearing on InfoWars should be proof enough that you are a loon.

David Lane: He coined the 14 words. "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children." He was a member of the white supremacist group known as the Order.

The Proud Boys: an American far-right, neo-fascist, and exclusively male organization that promotes and engages in political violence in the United States.

Richard Spencer: a neo-Nazi, antisemitic conspiracy theorist, and white supremacist. A former editor, he is a public speaker and activist on behalf of the alt-right movement.

Andrew Breitbart: an American conservative journalist, and political commentator who was the founder of Breitbart News, a co-founder of HuffPost, and godfather of the modern alt-right movement. He passed away in 2012.

Peter Thiel: a German-American billionaire entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and political activist. A co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, he was the first outside investor in Facebook. Check out, “The Enigma of Peter Thiel,” on Unpopular Front.

Here are some additional names, some alt-right, and some general mentions found in the book that I noted. Interesting to see how many of the above or below will be or are already being investigated or indicted.

Taki Theodoracopulos, Pat Buchanan, Mary Clare Reim, Yonathan Amselem, Laura Loomer, Lee Atwater, Ann Coulter, William F. Buckly Jr., Viktor Orban, Martin Shkreli, Mike Flynn Jr., Gen. Mike Flynn, James O’Keefe, Lucian Wintrich, Richard Hofstadter, Mike Enoch, Jack Murphy, Stephen Miller, Richard Rorty, Donna Zuckerberg, Phillip Roth, Emerson Spartz:, Richard Dawkins:, Jimmy Odom, Keith Ferrazzi, Steve Sailer, Nick Bostrom, William F. Buckley, Paul Gottfried, Saul Alinsky:, Roosh V (Daryush Valizadeh), Paul Graham, Steve Huffman, Alexis Ohanian, Mencius Moldbug, Colin Flaherty, Ben Goldman/Danny Gold, Paris Wade/Swade, Mark Dice, Matthew Chapman, Dana Rohrabacher, Kevin McCarthy, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Chris Cillizza, Bill Mitchell, Pamela Gellar, Peter Brimelow, Jom Hoft, Lucian Wintrich, Laura Penny, Karl Shapiro, Jack Posobiec, Jerome Corsi, Mary Clare Amselem, Corey Lewandowski, Brad Parscale, Katrina Pierson, Franklin Wright, David French, Faith Goldy, Robert Warren Ray, Stefan Molyneux, James Alex Fields, Murray Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Murray Rothbard, Andrew Anglin, Kevin MacDonald, Sam Hyde, Nathan Damigo, Robert Mercer