A Passage from "The Secret Life of an Alt-Right Operative"
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The following passage is from Nowicki’s soon to be released memoir, The Secret Life of an Alt-Right 'Operative.'
In this section, set during the fall of 1990, the narrator (i.e., Nowicki), a college student who is a secret recruit to a powerful group known simply as “the organization,” is summoned to take part in a “crisis actor” event, where he is to play the role of a spree shooter.
In the midst of a lecture about the French New Wave genre in my Film Studies class—though an English major, I had grown more and more interested in the motion picture art form— a man conspicuous for his age entered the room, walked to the row where I was sitting, handed me a slip of paper, then exited through the same door that he had entered.
I put the note aside at first, and attempted to put it out of my mind. But presently I realized that I needed to look at it, whether I wished to or not. The words inscribed on the page simply read, “See me after class.”
The note-bearer, a professorially-attired gentleman who looked to be in his mid-sixties, was waiting at the exit. He summoned me to follow him, and together we walked through the parking lot to his car. He silently drove me to Everybody’s, a popular spot in Emory village next door to the Lullwater Tavern, where my high school chums and I had convened on that fateful day during my senior year.
Not a word was exchanged between us, and I was determined to wait him out as long as necessary. But of course since it was implied that he—or rather the bottomless coffers of the organization, would be funding our meal—as had been the case several years before in the “American Dream” diner with Alfonzo—so now I ordered something expensive: a “full” barbeque chicken pizza (I would only have a couple slices now, then get a doggy bag for the rest).
As with Alfonzo, this man broke the silence after our entrees were served (he had ordered a chef’s salad). “Andy, how much aggression are you feeling right now?”
I was taken aback at this opener, but being sufficiently disassociated by this point due to all that I had been made to endure within the organization so far, I was able to sustain my poker face, and told him that on a scale of one to ten, with ten being the most aggressive, I was about at a solid seven presently.
After a moment, I added: “No, strike that. Make it an eight.”
The next thing he said was utterly without inflection: “Recent charted activity of your behavior suggests that your overall score may be higher, perhaps significantly higher, than you are currently admitting.”
I shrugged. “Best to be humble.”
Now he reached into his pocket and pulled out a newspaper clipping. Still employing an utter absence of affect or emphasis, he read the story about the recent disturbing assault on Theater Emory artistic director Vincent Murphy in the parking garage which had taken place one night several weeks prior.
“Oh yeah, I heard what happened to Vinny, real shame,” I said. “Good thing he’s gonna be okay. Hope they find the sick freak who beat him up like that…”
The professorially-attired man, who had yet to identify himself, and wouldn’t identify himself for the remainder of our time together, told me:
“You must understand that the organization isn’t angry with you. Merely disappointed. We expected better from a bright young man like yourself. We didn’t think you would have gone off and done what you did the other night. Still, we are a forgiving tribe, and we look after our own.”
“I don’t want your forgiveness, and I didn’t ask for your help,” I declared.
He spread his arms, smiled indulgently, then continued as if he hadn’t even heard me: “But now you are in debt to us, and we must collect our debt, in order for things to be squared away again.”
“Is that how this works?” I asked.
“Given that you’re feeling violent, it probably won’t even be that much of a sacrifice for you,” he said. “In fact, you’ll probably enjoy it.”
*************************************************
That evening, the Professor and I boarded a passenger plane, first class. Each of us was dressed in a natty business suit; our cover story was that we were a father and son from a wealthy banking family. Our flight was bound for Kansas City, where the planned event was to take place. Following takeoff, having downed a couple of drinks, the Professor lapsed into a meditatively loquacious mood.
“The Soviet Union has fallen, can you believe it?” he declared, sounding almost melancholy. “I personally didn’t think it would happen so soon. The end of the Cold War changes everything. With Russian Communism as the enemy to be feared and loathed, there was a cause to rally around, an enemy upon which to focus our collective wrath, a task to keep us needfully occupied. For the last four decades, we in the organization have done our best to convince Americans of the need to stay united against a common foe.
“But now! Everything has changed… For the bulk of the 90s, with no clear enemy, our strategy must shift. Instead of promoting unity and showing support for churchgoing, wholesome, family-focused Middle Americans, we are going to need to start promoting division. Not peace, but a sword, as our Lord himself said.
“The same Middle American demographic that we endlessly fetishized in commercials and movies and TV shows, they’re going to now meet with endless abuse, mockery, and calumny. The very literary canon that we helped to promote is the same one we’re now going to deride: : ‘Hey, ho, Western Civ has got to go!’.
“‘Dead white males,’ is what we shall now label those same worthy men who we deemed, not long ago, to be eminently worthy of reverence. It must be so, unfortunately, because it is necessary to keep people occupied and agitated. If they can’t be agitated against an outside force, like Communism, then they’ll have to be agitated against one another. Women against men, blacks against whites, gays against straights, and we’ll just multiply it from there. Pretty soon it’ll gather a life of its own, just like the hatred against Russia did.”
He sighed.
“It is, of course, regrettable that we have to foment these hate campaigns, but we mustn’t ever tolerate a population that is complacent or at peace with themselves or with one another. We are, after all, leading them to walk our crooked path towards enlightenment, and we cannot neglect our obligation to properly shepherd those whom our Lord has put into our charge.”
I sat there and let his thoughts continue to maunder, certain that there was some implicit message I was meant to receive. Presently I asked why he kept referring to “our Lord,” was he trying to pander to my interests, since he knew I was sympathetic to Christianity?
“Oh, we are nothing if not ecumenical,” he answered candidly. “We have within our ranks people of all faiths, and of no faith. But even those of us most irreligious, most agnostic, most unchurched among us know the necessity of acknowledging a North Star by which we must take direction. Call that North Star what you like, call it even a “fallen star,” regardless, that divinity, in whatever form it manifests itself in the minds of men, provides the scaffolding upon which we hang our doctrine.”
“And what doctrine would that be?” I was bold to ask.
And he answered: “Eternal progression. Order out of chaos. We proceed through one spate of chaos after another, until we at last achieve true order, the sort of order that needn’t be imposed, because it has reached the point at which things naturally stop by themselves: the exhaustion of inertia, the evaporation of entropy, the reaching of the still point of the turning world… And when history is moving too slowly for our liking, it is sometimes our job to give it a push, a prod, a helpful nudge.”
*************************************************
Often these “nudges” took the form of staged events; that is, as street theater that is meant to be perceived as real.
Having done quite a bit of stage theater work, and owing a “debt” to the organization, after my inebriated antics of late, I was selected for the role of a “spree shooter.” Once we touched down in Kansas City, I was given a machine gun, and assigned the role of a psychotic, homicidal maniac. The gun wasn’t real, but the bullet noises it emitted, and the screams of my “victims,” were authentic-sounding enough, and the strategically-placed blood packets that spattered upon my victims’ bodies, were convincing enough to fool every onlooker unfortunate enough to witness to the bloody rampage when it happened.
At the appointed time, I burst into the plush lobby of a downtown hotel screaming hysterical gibberish, and “shooting” people left and right. My victims fell, apparently bled, and seemingly died. Presently I ran out of ammo, and was restrained by “cops,” thrown into a “police car” and driven away. Afterwards, the fake cops dispatched me at a given rendezvous point, a warehouse in a remote spot outside of town, where me and my fellow actors, the “victims” and the “cops,” had a cheerful reunion.
This get-together had all of the fun and frivolity of a cast party following the final night of a play’s run; if anything, there was a cathartic joy that all we crisis actors shared, as the “killer,” his “victims,” and the “cops” all laughed and chatted, enjoying a catered banquet of finger foods and abundant coolers filled with beers and sodas. Most of the victims still wore their (fake)blood-stained garments, and I laughingly asked them things like “I got you good, didn’t I!” and they reciprocated with comments like, “Man, you were terrifying! Utterly convincing…”
Meanwhile, local media were given a photograph of a young man who somewhat resembled me wearing an orange jumpsuit, and reporters were steered towards interviews with certain “witnesses” (most of whom, needless to say, weren’t even at the scene) who breathlessly reported the awful carnage with exactly the right emphasis, drawing attention to precisely those details which were deemed most crucial to feed to newspaper readers and TV and radio news-consumers.
After the killer was identified as such-and-such from so-and-so with the requisite “troubled history,” he pled guilty, was sentenced, and soon enough the whole story was largely forgotten, buried under an avalanche of new events, some real, others constructed from whole cloth, and still others partly true and partly fabricated.
*************************************************
What exactly was the point of staging public displays like these, which traumatized the public so egregiously? Mine was not to question; I was but a humble performer, playing my appointed role, just like all of my colleagues.
But from what I can gather from recalling the meditations that my mysterious mentor had shared on the flight, events like these were never about any one issue in isolation from others; rather, the overarching goal was the furthering of the polarization of the populace, whether with regard to gun control or the management of mental heath or innumerable other “hot-button” issues.
Events like the Kansas City Marriott lobby massacre were designed to be divisive in all of the desirable ways, enabling the organization to give the culture a “helpful nudge” in what was deemed to be the proper direction: creating chaos out of order, then order out of chaos, and so on, and so forth, along the path of “eternal progression.”
Read more about Andy Nowicki's shocking new memoir, The Secret Life of an Alt-Right 'Operative' here