November 5, 2020 57
est ratings; and yet their chief goal
was not to help the United States
become a more perfect union but
to catalyze cultural conflict.How do you bear witness to the cre-
ation of a matrix of falsity? The infor-
mational uselessness of what Marantz
sees is the point; reason and observa-
tion are beset by intentional irrational-
ity. Antisocial is a solid, printed book
recording the fleeting furies of the In-
ternet from 2014 to 2017; confronting it
all again, after living through it once,
felt a little like biting into bits of alumi-
num foil with a filling.
Here, holding forth on his “two pri-
mary laws of social media mechanics:
‘Conflict is attention’ and ‘Attention
is influence,’” was the musclebound
outrage- huckster Mike Cernovich,
who’d harassed various colleagues of
mine at Gawker when he seized a lead-
ership role in the anti- anti- sexist out-
rage campaign known as Gamergate.
He and his followers blitzed journalists
with accusations of unethical and bul-
lying behavior in coordinated waves of
threats and complaints on Twitter, and
in the process established the template
for right- wing online warfare. Here was
the vile clown McInnes—willing, at the
urging of a guest on his YouTube show,
to recite thirteen words of the white
nationalist pledge known as the “Four-
teen Words,” substituting only “a fu-
ture for Western children” for “a future
for white children”—joking with the
white nationalist and future Toronto
mayoral candidate Faith Goldy about
relaunching the Crusades. Here was
Lucian Wintrich, the briefly creden-
tialed White House correspondent for
The Gateway Pundit disinformation
website, declaring, after the adminis-
tration claimed the sparse inaugural
crowd was the largest in history, “It’s
just pretension and condescension, on
the media’s part, to make a big deal of
it.”
The paradox of the information and
attention economy is that, while I knew
most of the material in Marantz’s book
on a rational level, it had gone by and
deactivated me, too squalid and de-
pressing to hold in my mind. It was easy
to mistake it for being unreal, a collec-
tion of performances. “I know you from
YouTube,” a secret confidant from the
outside world tells Phelps- Roper via
text message, as she grapples with her
emerging sense that she needs to leave
the church, “and your voice there is dif-
ferent from the one I hear when I read
your words.... You aren’t real to people.
You’re an idea.” This is the condition
Marantz’s subjects aspire to. Late in
the book, Cernovich tells him he’s try-
ing to pivot away from being known as
a Trump loyalist, deleting his old tweets
and denying them. “Some people won’t
believe you, but some people will,” he
says. “It’s all in how you sell it. Mean-
while, I keep moving forward, and the
old stuff keeps receding further into
the past.”Behind all the poses and manners,
the world continues. Marantz is a keen
and witty observer of the spectacle, at-
tuned to the tension between his desire
to expose figures who are “helping the
lunatic fringe become the lunatic main-
stream” and his knowledge that the act
of exposing them grants those people’s
own wish for mainstream attention.
But observation only carries one so
far. Early in Antisocial, Marantz hangs
out with some Proud Boys and their
allies as they prepare for the Deplora-
Ball at Trump’s inauguration. One ofthe Proud Boys approaches a young
woman on the scene, asking her if she’s
the right- wing social- media figure Lau-
ren Southern. She gives him a “long,
withering stare” in return and walks
off. She is, it turns out, a different mem-
ber of the set of “rising social media
stars with peroxide- blonde hair”:
Laura Loomer, herself a far- right vocal
Islamophobe. “An understandable mis-
take,” Marantz writes, and the moment
remains pathetic. But it is much less
amusing now that Loomer’s thirst for
validation has won her the Republican
nomination for Florida’s twenty- first
congressional district—which earned
her a tweet of enthusiastic congratula-
tions from the president.
Later that evening, as Marantz fol-
lows the Proud Boys to the ball, a dif-
ferent interpretation of the whole story
briefly presents itself:Another protester, wearing a black
ski mask and carrying an Antifa
flag, passed by McInnes without
incident, but McInnes shoved him
anyway, then punched him in the
face. “What the fuck?” the man
shouted. Two police officers rushed
to arrest the protester, while several
other officers escorted McInnes
into the Press Club.In this moment, the Proud Boys’ pos-
ture as transgressive outsiders is be-
lied by a grim, fundamental fact: the
cops are on their side. Nearly four
years later, it’s possible to forget that
Gavin McInnes, who once commanded
months of attention, exists. The part
that feels scarily relevant, in the un-
raveling autumn of 2020, as the pres-
ident tells the Proud Boys, in the first
presidential debate, to “stand back and
stand by,” is what Marantz went paston his way into the DeploraBall—the
question of who is free to punch whom
in the face, and who gets arrested for
objecting to it.
Or, half- hopefully, there’s Phelps-
Roper’s account of Fred Phelps, fading
into dementia and soon to be stripped
of his pastorship and church member-
ship, stepping outside to face a group
of activists who had bought the house
opposite Westboro Baptist Church
and painted it in LGBTQ rainbow col-
ors. Phelps- Roper describes what her
brother Zach told her had happened
next:“You’re good people,” Gramps
called out to them from across
the street, before he was hustled
back inside by Westboro members.
At the church meeting where he
was excommunicated, the elders
gave this incident as the clearest
evidence of my grandfather’s her-
esy—casting his lot in with the
Sodomites—and judged that he
was lucid when it occurred.The monstrous, consoling myth of
the United States is that judgment is
coming, but for someone else. The
pious Westboro believers and the In-
ternet crypto- Nazis and the sin- and-
crime-soaked Trump administration
share the same structure of faith: they
are the elect, singled out for favor by
God or fortune, and the rest of the
world deserves nothing but suffering
and contempt. In the space where righ-
teousness used to be, there is a welter
of competing self- righteousnesses.
Where a nation might have been, there
is a daily chart angling sharply upward,
counting the pointless and preventable
deaths of other people. We are, it turns
out, all in this together. QLETTERS
WEIGHING
RESTORATIVE JUSTICE
To the Editors:
Reading Michelle Kuo’s review of Danielle
Sered’s Until We Reckon [NYR, August 20],
I could not help wondering if the “restor-
ative justice” practice it discussed could po-
tentially result in further victimization for
crime victims. For example, if a case was
designated as eligible for this type of prison
alternative and the defendant agreed to
participate, would not the crime victim also
feel pressured to participate? If the victim
declined and requested that the prosecu-
tion proceed as usual, the defendant could
rightly feel that they were now being prose-
cuted not by the relative abstraction of the
state but that they were being prosecuted
very specifically by his or her victim. But
for the victim’s preference for traditional
prosecution, the defendant would avoid
prison altogether, thereby increasing his or
her motive for future retaliation against the
victim (or even present retaliation or intim-
idation by associates of the defendant).
In our criminal justice system, crimes are
tried and punished in the name of the state.
In New York, the official designation of all
criminal cases begins “The People of the
State of New York vs... .” This is because the
alleged offense has been committed not just
against an individual victim but against the
state itself and its people. It is a more mod-
ern framework of criminal justice, whereas
the restorative justice model suggests some-
thing more regressive—the ancient practice
of an aggrieved party meting out justice on
their own terms. While restorative justice
may not be as vengeful or violent as those
bygone practices, it still crudely places pun-
ishment outcomes in the hands of victims.
Criminal law is just that—law. It isn’t
an expression of individual preferences
between parties. It is law—and when it is
broken, certain consequences apply, re-
gardless of a particular victim’s (or family
member’s) personal feelings.John Fitzgerald
Beacon, NYMichelle Kuo replies:I am skeptical when people describe our
system as less vengeful or less violent than
that of bygone eras. I do not know how
to compare forms of cruelty. Quartering
was violent, yes, but at least it was quick
and public. Solitary confinement—being
trapped twenty-three hours a day in a room
the size of an elevator, with no human con-
tact—can last your whole life, and there’s
nobody to bear witness.
John Fitzgerald wants a system in which
impersonal “law,” and nothing else, adjudi-
cates crime. It’s tempting to see the law thisway, as Kafka (its most famous critic) did,
as something formal and closed: Law with
a capital L. In truth, though, law is prolif-
erative and lowercase, and too much of it,
as former prosecutor William Stuntz writes,
amounts to no law at all.
Stuntz concludes, in his groundbreak-
ing The Collapse of American Justice, that
given the voluminous “menu of options”
available to prosecutors, there is no rule
of law in the criminal system, only the dis-
cretionary power of state officials. This is
why so many innocent people plead guilty.
For those who do commit crime, it is why
they might receive a life sentence for paltry
crimes. Consider the case of Paul Hayes, an
African- American man who forged a stolen
check in the amount of $88.30. Under Ken-
tucky law he faced two to ten years; when
he refused to sign a plea deal, the prose-
cutor threatened a second charge under a
repeat offender law that carried a life sen-
tence. Hayes chose to go to trial and lost.
He appealed to the Supreme Court and lost
again.
In Fitzgerald’s critique, restorative jus-
tice outsources the prosecution of crime to
the whims of a victim, when that person’s
vengefulness or magnanimity should be
irrelevant to public justice. But how just
is public justice? Crime stirs the passions.
In California, voters passed the “Three
Strikes and You’re Out” law. It was writ-
ten so broadly that Leandro Andrade re-
ceived fifty years to life for shoplifting nine
video tapes from two Kmarts. The Supreme
Court found this law constitutional, noting
popular support as one reason for uphold-
ing it. Since then, other defendants have
received life sentences for crimes such ascongratulates
LOUISE GLÜCK
Recipient of the
2020 Nobel Prize in Literature