Birth of a White Supremacist: Mike Enoch's transformation from leftist contrarian to nationalist [View all]

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Mike Enoch’s transformation from leftist contrarian to nationalist shock jock.


The second person listed on the flyers, immediately below Spencer, was a white-nationalist shock jock named Mike Enoch. The name might have been unfamiliar to most Americans, but, to an inner cadre of Web-fluent neo-fascists, Enoch is an influential and divisive figure. In May, David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, tweeted, “Hate him or love him—Mike Enoch is someone to pay close attention to.” Just three years ago, Enoch could be heard mocking Spencer (“talks like a fag”) and Cantwell (“a dickhead turtle”), criticizing their ideologies as too extreme. But that was before his radicalization was complete. These days, Enoch routinely refers to African-Americans as “animals” and “savages,” and expresses “skepticism” about how many Jews died in the Holocaust. Apart from interviews with Spencer and Cantwell, who are now his close friends and ideological allies, he largely eschews attention from the media. He prefers to speak—voluminously, articulately, and with an uncanny lack of emotion—on his own podcast, “The Daily Shoah.” (The title, a pun about the Holocaust by way of Comedy Central, reflects the over-all tone of the show.) “The Daily Shoah” is the most popular of more than two dozen podcasts on the Right Stuff, a Web site that Enoch founded in 2012. Once an obscure blog about “post-libertarian” politics, the site is now a breeding ground for some of the most florid racism on the Internet. One of its pages is set up to accept donations, in dollars or bitcoins; another is devoted to “fashy memes,” songs and images that extol fascism in an antic, joking-but-not-joking tone. The podcasts—meandering, amateurish talk shows hosted by bilious young men who make Rush Limbaugh sound like Mr. Rogers—are not available on iTunes, Spotify, or any other major platform, and yet collectively they draw tens of thousands of listeners a week.

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It was obvious to him that the country was profoundly off track, and that both major political parties were morally and intellectually bankrupt. The only question was which utopian system should replace the current one. He read books by Noam Chomsky and articles on antiwar.com, which published critiques of American foreign policy from the far left and the far right. He dabbled in leftist anarchism, but discovered glaring flaws in the ideology; after that, he became a Trotskyist. One Saturday, he later wrote, he found himself at a meeting “in a run down YMCA in Brooklyn with a group of middle-aged Jewish public school teachers.” They were discussing what stance to take on Islamic terrorism. “An overwhelming sense of loathing washed over me like an awesome wave,” he wrote. “The people I was around suddenly seemed twisted and horrible. A revelatory religious experience is the closest thing I can compare this experience to.”

He began reading books by Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, and Ludwig von Mises, the grandfather of libertarianism. For a few years, he was an enthusiastic and doctrinaire libertarian. He started a blog called the Emptiness, where he wrote posts such as “Socialism Is Selfish” and “Taxation Is Theft.” Through online debate forums, he met a few like-minded friends—a painting contractor from upstate New York, an E.M.T. from Virginia, a devout Christian from Tennessee. They called themselves “post-libertarians,” though they weren’t sure what would come next. In a private Facebook group, they debated the merits of various micro-ideologies—paleoconservatism, neo-reaction, radical traditionalism—and made jokes that were too self-referential or too offensive to share with the wider public. Each time Mike E. adopted a new world view, he was able to convince himself that his conversion was rational, even inevitable.
Within a few years, he started to wonder whether libertarianism was too tepid. After all, its premises pointed toward a starker conclusion: if the state was nothing but a hindrance to freedom, why not abolish the state altogether, leaving only the unfettered market? From there, he went even further. What if you couldn’t account for people’s behavior without considering their cultural background, and even their genetic makeup? “Slapped in the face by the reality of human bio-diversity,” he later wrote, “I had to come to grips with the fact that libertarianism isn’t going to work for everyone, and the people that it isn’t going to work for are going to ruin it for everyone else.” Human biodiversity: the idea that people are different, that they differ in predictable ways, and that some people—not just individuals but groups of people—might be inherently superior to others.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/16/birth-of-a-white-supremacist