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By Don Jolly
On Tuesday, the thirteenth of October, the Democratic party held their first primary debate of the season. It was, as Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley explained in his closing statement, “a very, very different debate from [the one] you heard from [the Republicans.]”
“On this stage,” he continued. “You didn’t hear anyone denigrate women, you didn’t hear anyone make racist comments […] and you didn’t hear anyone speak ill of another American because of their religious beliefs.”
He was right. The night was a performance of conspicuous civility. Bernie Sanders elected not to hit Hillary Clinton on the subject of her private e-mail server, speaking on behalf of “the American people” who are “sick and tired” of the scandal. O’Malley won some rare applause by describing the opposition’s frontrunner as a “carnival barker,” in contrast with the statesmen sharing his stage. Overall, the night focused on the issues as the candidates themselves choose to articulate them: Sanders railed against oligarchs on behalf of the middle class, Hillary Clinton attacked the National Rifle Association with poised intelligence and Jim Webb rambled in a low, gravely whisper about Vietnam.
After the debate, Sanders stuck around for a backstage interview with CNN, the network responsible for broadcasting the proceedings. He echoed O’Malley’s point. “I think the American people want substantive discussions of substantive issues,” he said. “Look: the middle class in this country is disappearing. We have twenty-seven million people living in poverty. We have a campaign finance system which is corrupt. The rich are getting richer, everybody else is getting poorer…
“I think the point needs to be made … while there are differences of opinion up here, this was a serious, substantive debate on the major crises facing our country — unlike the Republican debate, which was naming calling and which seemed like a food fight.”
CNN made out reasonably well regardless. According to Brian Stelter at CNN Money, the debate “averaged 15.3 million viewers,” making it “the highest-rated Democratic debate ever.” Of course, the Republican debate broadcast by CNN last month “averaged more than 23 million viewers,” making them “the highest rated new ‘show’ of the Fall TV season,” but some drop off had been expected — after all, “Republican and Democratic debates [are] ‘apples and oranges,’” Stelter concluded.
I watched the debate with some neighbors in Brooklyn. Nancy, a stand-up comic and ardent Sanders supporter, agreed with Stelter and her candidate of choice — the democrats were for real, she said. “They’re classy and they respect each other. They’re on this other level — governors, senators, a secretary of state…
“The Republicans are all under qualified,” Nancy concluded grinning ear-to-ear, “and the Democrats are all overqualified!” Victory, it seems, was in the bag.
The sideshow is the sideshow. But the relevant authorities agree — our country will, most likely, remain in capable hands.
In our last dispatch, I began talking about the basic rhetorical strategies of the internet underground — the anarchic dodge and weave that the users of massive message boards have employed for more than a decade to stay ahead of mass media’s grinding orthodoxies. This year, and this election cycle, have seen those techniques of rhetoric congeal into political positions stable enough to serve as the engine of a dissident alternative media.
For now, they shape the race.
On the morning of the 13th, hours before the Democratic debate, the New York Times ran a beautiful piece by journalist Jennifer Steinhauer about the impossibly task facing congressional Republicans in appointing a new Speaker of the House, to replace the disgraced John Boehner. The internet was frustrating the process, she said.
“House Republicans and their staff say millions of Republican primary voters have their opinions shaped by sites like Beitbart.com,” Steinhauer explained, citing a popular rightwing media platform. But Alex Marlow, Breitbart’s editor in chief, claimed to wield no control over his readers. “Our goal is not influence,” he told the Times. “It is reporting and highlighting stories important to grass roots conservatives… to those in Congress and on the national political stage who want to better understand the constituency’s interests and worldview, we feel Breitbart News is a good place to start.”
And it is – if you want to understand the “interests and worldview” of a diverse coalition of reactionary voices from both political and apolitical corners of the internet. Among this grouping, the internet natives posting on places like 4Chan are particularly well represented. Breitbart has, over the last few years, made common cause with the internet’s most deliberately perverse.
The loose alliance between “grassroots conservatives” and the internet underground announces itself clearly in Breitbart’s coverage of GamerGate — a shitstorm of internet drama so labyrinthine and hyperbolic that it has lasted for more than a year and grown to encompass multiple police investigations, a serious bomb threat at a Miami conference center and a United Nations report on the issue of “Cyber Violence Against Women And Girls.” Somewhere, in all that mess, some people are arguing about the cultural future of videogames. But that hardly matters anymore.
As with most ongoing Internet dramas, GamerGate is a deceptively broad term applied to many discrete arguments, incidents and brush fires that have been playing out on various platforms since August of last year. One side of the debate, speaking roughly, is composed of videogaming elites – journalists, players and developers who feel that the medium needs to “grow up,” and abandon the adolescent boorishness which became a defining aspect of its community in the wake of hyperviolent 1990s games like Quake and Doom.
Their opponents are, primarily, rank-and-file gamers — such as the active posters on 4Chan’s videogame board, /v/. To them, games without adolescent boorishness are hardly games at all, and the idea of moderating online discourse on any subject looks like a surrender to the mainstream.
Milo Yiannopoulos, the Breitbart writer most publically identified with GamerGate, penned an admiring tribute to the internet underground on September 1st of this year. The crude gamers, he argued, were like the Hobbits from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings — a subculture so far from the currents of power that their alienation has become an asset. “Despite the common stereotypes of gamers as losers, nerds and shut-ins,” wrote Yiannopoulos “[they have] proved to be the perfect opponents for cultural authoritarians” – his euphemism for the global left.
“The left relies on destroying the reputations of their opponents,” Yiannopoulos continued. But 4Chan posters, and those like them, have no reputation to destroy. The world — or at least the mass media — already thinks of them as socially stunted and potentially insane. Which makes them, in Breitbart’s complimentary view, invincible. “When you’re already hated by the left, the right, and the media, the only way to go is dank,” concluded Yiannapoulos.
“Dank,” is a common 4Chan term – a good word to describe powerful weed. “Dank memes” are posts or images that satisfy the people who consume them, and prove both popular and shareable, within limits. On 4Chan, if a meme gets too big it becomes regrettable — a mass idea in need of subversion, rather than one capable of being subversive in itself. Last week, for instance, I detailed the rash of posts that sprung up in the wake of the recent community college shooting in Oregon, imitating the shooter’s supposed warning. The pattern was simple – imitate the format of the original, but substitute pop-cultural, political or historical figures for the original maniac: “Some of you guys are alright, don’t go to [X] tomorrow.” On October 13th, a variation on this was posted next to an image of Luke Skywalker – “some of you guys are alright, don’t go to the death star tomorrow.”
Response was tepid: “this meme is now completely out of gas,” read the first reply. It lasted longer than some, and went farther. But in the end, it died. It wasn’t the dankest meme, in the end – but it wasted some minutes on a brilliant fall.
If Yiannopoulos had been writing a similar tribute in 2002, he might have said “comedy gold” instead. That was the complimentary term favored by Something Awful when tribute.avi was posted. But it’s 2015, now, thank god… “Dank” sounds better – wetter, more earthy.
Comedy, it seems, has become an ancillary goal.
On Tuesday, hours before the Democratic program began, Donald Trump posted a drawing of himself as Pepe the Frog. Pepe, as I reported in the last dispatch, is 4Chan’s unofficial mascot — a sadsack amphibian used to illuminate the emotional state of those posting him. Different Pepes can connote anything from murderous rage to lonely resignation, but Trump’s image, which has over 5,000 “retweets” and “favorites” as of this writing, depicted Pepe smiling smugly, holding a hand contemplatively beneath his chin. Just as the Pepe posted before the Oregon shooting was equipped with a pistol, Trump’s frog came complete with a suit, an American flag lapel pin and the candidate’s signature swept-right hair. He was shown standing beside a podium, on which was reproduced the presidential seal. “SEAL of the PRESIDENT of the UNITED STATES,” it read, its seriffed font contrasting with the crudity of the frog.
In his attached message, Trump made his allegiance plain: “You Can’t Stump the Trump,” he wrote.
“Can’t Stump the Trump” has become, since August, a common phrase in internet discussions around the candidacy of the current Republican frontrunner. It’s funny, it makes him sound invincible — and it rhymes. It’s “I Like Ike” with fangs. What’s more, it speaks to the power of alienation gestured to by Yiannopoulos, and implicitly, sanctions the strength of the politically untouchable. With this tweet, Trump has announced himself as the presidential candidate equivalent of a shut-in dork, a raging skinhead and a morose mass shooter – someone so far out of the mainstream’s spectrum of acceptability that the disapproval of the powers that be means nothing to him.
Trump isn’t the first right-wing media figure to embrace this rhetoric. On September 2nd, a day after Milo Yiannopoulos compared arguing about videogames online to tossing the errant Ring of Power into Mount Doom, a celebrity of somewhat recent and controversial vintage, replied to a Twitter question in the negative, and received great acclaim across the underground. The question was: “Is it possible for you to be bamboozled? fooled? … Flim flammed?” Its questioner was referring another charismatic phrase born of Internet contrarianism: “Can’t flim-flam the zim-zam.”
The “zim-zam” is George Zimmerman, the Florida man who shot and killed a black seventeen year-old named Trayvon Martin in February of 2012. He earned the moniker in 2013, when the Internet underground was laughing at the perceived incompetence of the prosecutors seeking to convict him of the crime.
Today, George Zimmerman has a respectable following on Twitter: over fifteen-thousand people receive his messages.
His response to the question on September 2nd was short, and to the point.
“Nope,” he said. The crowd went wild – comparatively. His tweet was linked far and wide, but earned few favorites.
George Zimmerman and Donald Trump (by Matthew H. James)
Trump’s Twitter resembles Zimmerman’s in style, although the candidate is markedly more restrained and, to best of my knowledge, has never murdered anyone. On July 25th, for instance, Trump made news by sniping at then-candidate Scott Walker. “@ScottWalker is a nice guy,” Trump wrote, “but not presidential material.” Zimmerman weighed in on the Walker on September 10th: “Scott Walker should be a spokesman for Downy, ’cause boy, is he SOFT!!!” Thirty retweets, sixty-four favorites.
On the Eighth of August, Trump won twenty-thousand favorites and over twelve thousand retweets by noting that there are “so many ‘politically correct’ fools in our country.
“We have to all get back to work and stop wasting time and energy on nonsense!” he concluded.
Zimmerman, too, is no fan of political correctness. “Thank you, Patriots for supporting the fight against political correctness,” he wrote, on August 31st, linking to a print of the Confederate Battle Flag he’s been selling online since summer. “Rebel flag print sales are going strong!”
All boats, it is said, benefit from a rising tide.
On Twitter, in the aftermath of Tuesday’s Democratic debate, Bernie Sanders gained just below fifty thousand new Twitter followers. Hilary Clinton, anointed as the night’s winner in much of the press, scored less than half that total.
But Trump beat them all — his drab and disengaged live commentary on the evening’s events won him more than 95,000 new followers. For good or ill, all those people will now get their news of the world — at least partially — from Donald Trump.
Maybe the democrats, and CNN, are right. Maybe there are still adults in the room. Maybe civility will win out, in the end. Maybe “the American people want a substantive debate about substantive issues.”
But you still can’t flim-flam the zim-zam.