In The New Yorker, Andrew Marantz pens a comically self-righteous piece on Mike Enoch (“Birth of a White Supremacist”). Marantz gloats and gives ample space to convey how Enoch’s progressive parents (his father “lives in an upper-middle-class New Jersey suburb that is often listed among the most progressive towns in the country”, his study containing “contemporary books such as Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me”), have essentially disowned him.
There are sanctimonious passages like this, in which the locals of Mike’s childhood town ‘struggle’ to make sense of his red-pilling:
A few people around town had already heard the news, mostly through Facebook, and some of them were talking about Mike E. as if he had been abducted by a cult, or tied down and injected with a serum of pure hatred. Other people assumed that there must be some key biographical fact—a chemical imbalance, a history of abuse—that would neatly unlock the mystery. But Mike E.’s conversion was more quotidian than that, and therefore more unsettling; somehow, over time, he had fallen into a particularly dark rabbit hole, where some of the most disturbing and discredited ideas in modern history were repackaged as the solution to twenty-first-century malaise.
Marantz charts Enoch’s intellectual journey from Marxism to libertarianism to paleoconservatism to HBD to Alt-Right (a path for many Alt-Righters) yet manages to characterize Enoch’s penchant for logical argumentation to be, clearly, a troubling trait:
Gradually, he learned to insulate himself with jokes and insults. He was clever, and found strength in contrarianism. His ideology shifted over time, but his approach was always the same: exposing and attacking the flaws in commonplace arguments, often without any sense of proportion. Even when he agreed with someone’s opinion, he still loved to engage in rhetorical battle—not to advance any particular agenda, one of his relatives told me, but “to stir up resentment. He strikes me as someone without a core, who only knows how to oppose and who chooses his positions based on what will be most upsetting to people around him.”
The money shot, though, is this:
Then, in January, 2015, Enoch read “The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements,” by Kevin MacDonald, a former psychology professor at California State University, Long Beach. The book—published in 1998, heavily footnoted, and roundly debunked by mainstream social scientists—is a touchstone of contemporary intellectualized anti-Semitism. On “The Daily Shoah,” Enoch called it “important and devastating, something I urge everybody to read,” and then offered even higher praise: “It triggered me so hard.”
KMac’s CoC was the major red pill that qualitatively changed me as well. And, by the way, the book was not ‘roundly debunked’ by critics challenging MacDonald’s theses and sub-theses, but rather received grunts and shrieks from the usual suspects, emotional ad hominem attacks levied against the author.
