Culture Warriors

Trump’s Culture Warriors Go Home

They were poised to storm Washington. Then America stopped caring.

By BEN SCHRECKINGER

In February of this year, at the close of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington, the pro-Trump blogger Mike Cernovich trekked to the Capitol Hill townhouse that serves as the personal headquarters for former White House adviser Steve Bannon. The inconspicuous brick building, once the unofficial Washington bureau for Breitbart News, had grown into an unlikely center of political gravity during the presidency of Donald Trump. Now out of the White House, the president’s former chief strategist was still holding court there for a steady stream of journalists, donors and activists.

Cernovich was there to vent. Seated at the long dining room table where Bannon hosts visitors, he complained that Trump had stopped sticking up for his most loyal supporters. He mentioned some public altercations at which anti-fascist demonstrators had assaulted Trump fans. While the president seemed to have plenty of time to engage in feuds with celebrities on Twitter, Cernovich griped, Trump had remained silent on those violent attacks. So, Cernovich noted, had “that sleepy elf,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions. “You can’t wear a MAGA hat and not get a brick thrown at your head,” he said.

After the meeting, Cernovich, a fixture in the capital during the first year of the Trump administration, walked out into the dusk, strolled past the Supreme Court and took out his phone to begin livestreaming to his followers about other subjects. He has not been back to Washington since.

Two years ago, Cernovich was an indefatigable Trump cheerleader, among the most prominent of a small vanguard of Trumpist culture warriors who trolled their way from the fringes of the right-wing internet to real-world relevance. Loosely lumped together as the celebrities of the “alt-right”—a label most of them have since disavowed—they hailed from different corners of the web and professed different views, but they were united by a shared disdain for progressives and establishment Republicans, and a shared faith that the disruptive outsider named Donald Trump could usher in the change they believed America needed.

Once unleashed in Washington, they harbored dreams of taking over the Republican Party and pushing American popular culture sharply rightward. And, at a moment when it seemed that anything was possible in American politics, it looked like this group of fringe web firebrands just might be able to harness the right’s anti-establishment energy into a muscular and profitable movement.

No longer. Halfway into Trump’s term, the president has settled into power, remaking the office in his own attention-sucking style and pushing the national conversation in directions it hasn’t taken in generations. But his most flamboyant supporters, who once planned to overrun Washington, find themselves in retreat. Milo Yiannopoulos, the former Breitbart tech editor and right-wing campus provocateur, has lost his book deal, the sponsorship of his billionaire patrons and most of his staff. Charles Johnson, the online alt-right activist who alarmed the public by attending this year’s State of the Union address as a guest of freshman Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, has quit social media. Lucian Wintrich, the inaugural White House correspondent for The Gateway Pundit, a pro-Trump outlet with a penchant for publishing fake news and conspiracy theories, has been dumped by the site and returned to New York. The white nationalist Richard Spencer, organizer of 2017’s alt-right rally in Charlottesville, Va., has given up his residence in Alexandria, Va., and is living on a family property in Montana, where he is plotting a move to an undisclosed location.

As for Cernovich—a right-wing men’s empowerment blogger who saw Trump as the counterweight to political correctness and establishment conservatism—he’s become disillusioned with politics and increasingly critical of the president. These days, he spends most of his time on other pursuits, including the “Gorilla Mindset” lifestyle-coaching practice he runs from his home in Southern California. In September, he tweeted glumly, “There’s no Wall. She’s not locked up. But Flynn got fired and sent to wolves. And Sauadi [sic] Arabia sold weapons of murder. I give zero f-cks about Republicans losing the House.”

What happened? It turns out that under Trump, not everything was possible after all. After riding the president’s coattails into a hostile capital with dreams of revolution, the original Trump vanguard found there were limits to its influence in both the White House and a GOP that had little taste for its members’ fringe pasts. Demoralized and disappointed with the president, they now squabble among themselves; their stunts no longer shock the public as much as they once did, and some have been barred from the internet platforms that helped bring them fame in the first place.

That’s not to say that all is over for these culture warriors. Many of the currents that pushed these figures to the forefront of the zeitgeist—cultural polarization, anti-establishment fury and the incentives of social media stardom—remain as strong now as they were in 2016. And as they recede from the scene, there are plenty of new faces, some more palatable to mainstream tastes, stepping up to replace them.

***

In retrospect, the first signs of trouble appeared the week of Trump’s inauguration. That’s when 1,000 supporters walked into a room at the National Press Club to attend the “DeploraBall,” an unofficial victory party for the president’s motley band of online fans.

It was, in essence, a coming-out party for a new breed of young nationalists. The highest-profile figures in the movement espoused diverse ideologies—running the gamut from economic nationalism to “Western chauvinism” to outright white supremacy—but they had in common a willingness to say, and sometimes do, things that would have been unthinkable in the political realm before Trump. Cernovich organized the event along with several compatriots and served as master of ceremonies. Gavin McInnes, co-founder of Vice Media, who had reinvented himself as a two-fisted defender of Western culture, showed up flanked by a contingent of Proud Boys, members of the “fraternal organization” he founded, and rubbed elbows with Michael Flynn Jr., the square-jawed son of then-incoming national security adviser Michael Flynn. When Jim Hoft, publisher of The Gateway Pundit, took the stage to announce the deployment of the site’s first-ever White House correspondent, the crowd erupted in chants of “real news!”

In the media frenzy it generated and the protests in the streets outside, DeploraBall rivaled the official inaugural festivities themselves. But while the Trumpists toasted their triumph, a schism hung over the event. DeploraBall’s organizers had banned Spencer from attending. When he crashed an after-party at Shelly’s Back Room, a nearby cigar bar, they were noticeably irritated.

Spencer had become the first wedge in the movement not long after Trump’s victory. During the campaign, the other personalities in the Trumpist vanguard had variously tolerated, embraced or ignored Spencer, an unabashed white nationalist who saw Trump as a vehicle for reviving an explicitly racist ideology that was thought to have permanently faded from the mainstream with the end of the Jim Crow era. Less than two weeks after the election, Spencer had convened a conference of fellow white nationalists in Washington, and a video of his speech—“Hail Trump! Hail victory,” greeted by Nazi salutes from some in attendance—went viral overnight. In the ensuing uproar, many of Trump’s culture warriors realized that there was such a thing as too much provocation and that any association with Spencer would be toxic. Many of them disavowed Spencer, racism and the term “alt-right” itself. (Spencer, who still embraces the label, maintains that their views are more aligned with his than they care to admit.)

With Spencer nudged aside, the others began to enjoy real influence in the first days of the administration. Bannon, who had served as a kind of godfather to the group—he once called Breitbart “the platform for the alt-right” before disavowing the term—took his seat in the White House as Trump’s chief strategist, a high-ranking official with undefined responsibilities and regular access to the president. Forbes reported that self-described alt-right activist Johnson was working with billionaire Peter Thiel and other members of Trump’s transition team to informally vet and recommend potential political appointees. Cernovich appeared to have a window into the internal deliberations of the National Security Council, tweeting out accurate details about them and reportedly infuriating Trump’s second national security adviser, H.R. McMaster.

In February, Hoft and Wintrich showed up at the White House briefing room and posed for photos at the podium flashing the “OK” sign, which, depending on whom you ask, is either a white supremacist symbol or an ironic way to upset progressives who think it’s a white supremacist symbol. In April, Cernovich and Cassandra Fairbanks, a social media-famous Bernie Sanders supporter who defected to Trump and went on to work for Russia’s Sputnik News, showed up at the briefing room and did the same. Though the White House traditionally gives briefing room passes to almost anyone claiming to be a journalist, the perception that the West Wing was now open to fringe-right activists alarmed large segments of the public.

***

That proximity to the White House, perceived and real, would not last. The young gate-crashers found themselves increasingly disappointed in Trump himself—most notably after he bombed Syria, which disturbed the largely anti-interventionist crowd. They also engaged in what can only be called a campaign of self-sabotage, a string of public relations catastrophes that guaranteed their continued consignment to the fringes.

In August 2017, Spencer, by then thoroughly ostracized by most of the other Trumpists, helped organize the white nationalist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. The event quickly degenerated into an extended street brawl, and after a white nationalist demonstrator drove his car into a crowd of anti-racist counterdemonstrators, killing a young woman, 10 Virginia residents sued Spencer and other rally organizers, seeking to hold them liable for the violence. Spencer, who once entertained visions of bringing an alt-right think tank with gleaming headquarters to downtown Washington, has struggled to pay the legal fees. (The suit is ongoing.)

More devastating, Spencer said in an interview, is that Charlottesville prompted social media, web hosting and payment processing firms to take comprehensive steps to banish the alt-right, making it nearly impossible for the movement to raise money and propagate its message. “Two years ago, Silicon Valley was our friend,” Spencer says, meaning that its technologies provided the tools for his movement to grow. “When that is taken away in one swoop, it’s difficult to recover.” Charlottesville also heightened pressure on Trump to oust Bannon; within a week of the demonstration, Bannon was out of his job at the White House, and the Trumpists had lost their most powerful champion in the administration.

One by one, the group’s most prominent figures dropped from public view, often brought down by their own behavior. Yiannopoulos had lost his book deal with Simon & Schuster and resigned as tech editor of Breitbart in February, after anti-Trump Republicans dug up old video of him speaking approvingly of pederasty. In September, he attempted a comeback with a “Free Speech Week” at Berkeley intended to bring a slate of controversial right-wing speakers to the progressive campus. But on the eve of the event, the student group sponsoring it called it off, citing pressure from university administrators.

Yiannopoulos, ever the showman, had a comeback planned from that as well. An email written by the then-CEO of Milo Inc. and reviewed by Politico Magazine outlines an elaborate vision for a news conference to be held on Treasure Island, in the San Francisco Bay, in lieu of Free Speech Week. Yiannopoulos would arrive by speedboat, flanked by security guards who would “leave the boat like Navy SEAL badasses” while a “Miami Vice-style soundtrack” played over the livestream. From there, Yiannopoulos was to take his seat at a table along with Cernovich, anti-Islam activist Pam Geller and other allies, presumably to condemn progressives in harsh terms. Every college Republican in the state of California was to be invited to attend in person. The extravaganza never came together. Yiannopoulos’ swing through the Bay Area ended not with a bang, but a whimper: a livestream rant delivered from his hotel room.

Rather than pursuing his grandiose vision of cultural revolution, Yiannopoulos found himself bogged down by petty interpersonal feuding with Wintrich and other fellow travelers. Several weeks earlier, the pair had dined with Ann Coulter at an Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side. Wintrich says Yiannopoulos belittled him and undermined him in front of Coulter. “He was also really jealous that Ann liked me,” Wintrich recalls. (Asked about the dinner and the feud between the two provocateurs, Coulter said, “I would take what either one says about the other with a grain of salt.” She added: “The only person Milo is ‘jealous’ of is Beyoncé.”)

Not long after, in November 2017, BuzzFeed published an explosive exposé that included footage of Yiannopoulos, during the 2016 campaign, singing karaoke at a bar in Dallas for Spencer and other members of the alt-right while they raised their arms in Nazi salutes. Both Johnson and Wintrich say they served as sources for the article’s author, Joe Bernstein, fleshing out Yiannopoulos’ ties to Spencer. Johnson, who had once considered Yiannopoulos an ally, says that he provided BuzzFeed with the karaoke footage, though he declined to explain his motives on the record. “The video I thought was pretty damning and extremely homoerotic,” Johnson says. “I still like Milo, and I think there’s a path back for him, but he has to be about more than himself.” A spokesman for BuzzFeed declined to comment on the story’s sourcing.

For Yiannopoulos’ patrons, the conservative megadonors Robert and Rebekah Mercer, the story was the final blow. In the immediate wake of its publication, the Mercers disowned him, putting his business on the path to severe financial distress.

Then, this past August, Wintrich was fired from The Gateway Pundit shortly after appearing as a guest on a podcast hosted by Nick Fuentes, a 20-year-old Boston University dropout who attended last summer’s Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville and spoke at a white nationalist conference in April. (Wintrich had retreated to New York from Washington months earlier, after being ignored at White House news briefings.) Yiannopoulos wasted no time in gloating over the firing, calling attention to it in a blog post in which he also claimed Wintrich once tried to have sex with him. Wintrich raised this claim with me, telling me that in fact it was Yiannopoulos who asked to sleep over at his place in New York and tried to have sex with him. “We did drunkenly make out briefly, but that is as far as I would let him take it,” Wintrich says, before launching into a mocking imitation of Yiannopoulos, saying, “Oh, Lucian, I’m so cold. Keep me warm.”

In response to questions from Politico Magazine for this story, Yiannopoulos responded only, “Go fuck yourself,” via text message.

The constant infighting has worn thin on many in this loose-knit network, some of whom would not discuss their gripes on the record. Cernovich has no such qualms. “I just found myself around people who half of them I just really don’t like at all,” he says. “You’re working with people who are really just bad people, man. They’re gossipmongers.”

Even the Trumpists’ publicity stunts are starting to fizzle, as the enthusiasm of their followers wanes and the shock value fades with repetition. The Unite the Right 2 rally, held in Washington in August as a sequel to Charlottesville, was a shadow of the previous summer’s fiasco. Fewer than 40 demonstrators showed up, and they were shouted down by thousands of anti-racist counterdemonstrators.

In September, the right-wing activist Laura Loomer interrupted a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing at which Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was testifying to protest the platform’s decision to suspend the accounts of various Trump supporters. A year earlier, when she and fellow pro-Trump provocateur Jack Posobiec had interrupted a Central Park staging of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” in which Caesar was modeled on Trump, the public disruption had made national news. This time, coverage of the Capitol Hill stunt focused more on the deadpan response from Missouri Republican Rep. Billy Long, who drowned out Loomer’s screams with a stream of auctioneer babble.

***

One way to see the vanishing of the Trumpists is that they won: Now that their ideas have become mainstream on the right, it’s their revolutionary style that keeps them sidelined as individuals. Charlie Sykes, a conservative commentator and critic of Trumpism, says the movement’s success has been the Trumpists’ undoing. “Since Trumpism has become normalized in the GOP, they no longer played an essential role,” Sykes says of the original crew. Their provocations “made them a liability,” he says, “and there were more than enough new-generation grifters to take their place.”

Indeed, Sykes is correct that there is a new set of young Trump supporters eager to make names for themselves waging culture wars on social media. Ali Alexander, a 33-year-old political operative who previously went by the name Ali Akbar, has become an increasingly prominent pro-Trump voice on Twitter and in video livestreams during which he rails against feminist lawyer Gloria Allred and lauds Kanye West. On the eve of the 2016 election, Robert Mercer donated $60,000 to a PAC that Alexander advises. Alexander, who identifies himself as black and Arab, brings a more new-age approach to the culture wars, calling himself an “interpreter of energy for this period.”

A more prominent torchbearer is 25-year-old Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, a nonprofit aimed at instilling conservative values in college students. Kirk is a favorite of right-wing donors worried about campus leftism, and in the Trump era, he has deftly pivoted his organization from Koch-style free-market advocacy to a more nationalist, culture war take on politics—so far, without visibly hurting his donor support.

But even as more palatable culture warriors like Kirk come to the fore, the cadres of 2016 have not given up. Cernovich continues to prosecute his longstanding grudge against the mainstream media, drawing attention to journalists’ embarrassing old tweets and working on a documentary about “fake news.” Politically, he has found his eyes wandering leftward, where he says the president’s shocking 2016 overthrow of the establishment has paved the way for this year’s progressive challengers. “If you look at Trump and you think he’s a buffoon, you say, ‘Well, goddamn it, anything really is possible,’” Cernovich says. “He opens the American dream up to all these women and minorities and Muslims.” In particular, Cernovich says that even though he rejects her politics, he has become an admirer of the democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who became a national sensation when she upset incumbent New York Congressman Joe Crowley in a Democratic primary in June. “She just slaughtered fucking Crowley, just slaughtered the machine, and now she’s like the ‘it’ girl,” he says. “I like to watch peak human achievement.”

Gavin McInnes maintains that the Proud Boys are stronger than ever, despite their account’s suspension from Twitter in August after the platform deemed them an “extremist group.” “We actually have fulfilling political lives outside of the video game that is Twitter,” he says. He claims membership has grown from 3,000 at the beginning of 2017 to 10,000 as of September, when hundreds of Proud Boys “got shitfaced and partied” at the group’s “West Fest” summit in Las Vegas. The summit featured two onstage weddings, live boxing and an awards ceremony with categories such as “best fighter” and “best gay.” Yiannopoulos, who has been living in Miami while putting out a podcast, flew in for the summit. At one point, he put on a dreadlock wig and unsuccessfully attempted to claim the title of “best black.” In October, McInnes and the Proud Boys made national headlines when the group was involved in violent clashes with Antifa demonstrators on both coasts in the same weekend.

From his current perch in Montana, Spencer says he is planning to move to an undisclosed location and continue his work. He says he is currently trying to build a payment processing system that will allow him to resume raising money online (PayPal has blocked payments to his think tank), while he bides his time and plots a comeback from exile. For now, he is waiting for the right opportunity. “Sometimes not doing anything and just meditating and being patient and letting history develop a little bit, that seems to be the better option,” he says.

As for Johnson—who was banned from Twitter in 2015 after the platform determined he had threatened a Black Lives Matter activist, then migrated to an alt-right imitator called Gab—he has now quit social media altogether, citing security concerns and a belief that social media use is unhealthy. Currently based in California, he says he is operating by the motto “discreet and elite,” and he maintains relationships with several lawmakers, including Gaetz, who is close to Trump, and Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican. Johnson is considering moving outside the United States.