Noise Pollution

There were more than just the usual politicos and newscasters on hand at the Democratic National Convention late last month; a menagerie of desperate right-wing misfits and career grifters also descended on Chicago, hoping to sow discord and confusion. Serial scammer James O’Keefe, known for founding the fraudulent “investigative” organization Project Veritas, decked himself out in Kamala Harris gear as he went “undercover” inside the convention, hoping to dig up (or fabricate) a scandal. MyPillow CEO and Donald Trump lackey Mike Lindell announced that he would be shaving his beloved mustache in an attempt to infiltrate the event as well—and invited viewers to pay two dollars to watch him livestream it. He set up shop near the entrance, only to immediately break character by antagonizing CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan. Rudy Giuliani, meanwhile, inserted himself wherever he could, hoping to witness the “pure communist” goings on.

It wasn’t just the right’s media class that felt compelled to lay siege to the Windy City. There were more obscure figures lurking around, hoping, perhaps, for a viral turn, like the purple-haired woman with a penchant for throwing up Roman salutes, who managed to parlay her brief virality as a racist instigator into an interview with Giuliani himself. And there were her friends, including a former Ohio National Guardsman who was discharged for his participation in violent neo-Nazi groups, and a man dressed like an anime femboy who waved a National Bolshevism, or Nazbol, flag while advocating for “homonationalism.” There was, in other words, a diverse group of fascists and right-wingers in town, all briefly united by their hatred of the Democratic Party and the Palestinian cause. But the symmetry of their contempt obscures ideological discord.

On the first day, I found far-right provocateur Jack Posobiec trying to go incognito at the March on the DNC rally, which had been organized by a broad coalition of progressive organizations to call for an end of U.S. military aid to Israel. Posobiec got his start amplifying Pizzagate, the baseless conspiracy theory that children were being sex trafficked inside the basement of Comet Ping Pong in Washington, D.C. At the rally, he wore dark sunglasses and had hidden half of his face under a keffiyeh as he tried to conduct scandalous interviews with unsuspecting attendees, but several people had already recognized him—perhaps because he is well known, or maybe because Human Events was posting videos with captions like “Jack Posobiec goes undercover at the DNC protest.”

I was eager to talk. On the last day of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in July, my media credentials had been confiscated, ostensibly because of an article I wrote for The Intercept placing a delegate and other RNC guests at a rally in June for Nick Fuentes, an antisemitic livestreamer who, in November 2022, dined with Donald Trump and Kanye West. Posobiec saw an opportunity to poke fun and quote tweeted a post of mine saying that I was at the Turning Point USA bar inside the convention. After I was escorted out, Posobiec came to the table I had been sitting at, taking my place at the table of journalists who had just watched my eviction.

At the rally in Chicago, I was with Anarchy Princess, or AP, a livestreamer who tracks and often heckles conservative influencers and grifters at MAGA events. We marched over to Posobiec, who cheerfully greeted us, no doubt thinking we would provide great content for his viewers on Real America’s Voice, where he hosts a show for Human Events, a right-wing news website that publishes reactionary drivel in between advertisements for simple tricks to cure tinnitus. “This is a right-wing fascist,” AP announced to everyone around us.

“How many abortions have you had? How many abortions have you had today?” Posobiec demanded of AP.

AP leaned toward the microphone, staring directly into the camera. “I’m getting paid by George Soros to have an abortion on the stage. With no drugs.” Her joke was a reference to a claim by Islamophobic conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer that a black trans doctor would be performing an abortion live on stage inside the convention center. The suggestion had gone viral, with people across the political spectrum mocking it.

Posobiec doubled down, asking AP to clarify what kind of abortion.

“What kind of abortions are there, Jack?”

“There’s, there’s pills, there’s tools, there’s a number of ways,” he stammered.

“So it’s gonna be on stage,” AP replied, “So a normal person would think that they would use tools, right? And vacuum it out, and do all of that. Like if I took a pill, that takes several days and nothing happens, you won’t see anything. You should probably study how female anatomy works.”

Once the cameras stopped rolling, Posobiec relaxed, letting the mask slip—but the minute he thought he might be able to score content again, he leaned back into his combative line of questioning about abortions. Despite the patent absurdity of the exchange, Posobiec’s Human Events team must have thought it went well for him, as they shared the clip on X. Posobiec also posted it, with a caption calling us “abortion demons.”

Whether as credulous marks or opportunists who saw a chance to stoke outrage for profit, prominent representatives of the GOP were quick to chime in. RNC national committeewoman Amy Kremer said it was “sick” and that AP needed “counseling & mental treatment.” Georgia GOP district chair and failed gubernatorial candidate Kandiss Taylor was similarly aghast, calling AP a “hired assassin.” Loomer, who operates under the belief that she is some kind of respectable journalist, announced that she was vindicated, even though the live abortion obviously never occurred.

It doesn’t really matter if the abortion happened; for many, the feeling of outrage, spurred by the idea that it might happen, more than suffices. That fury is the basis for selling overpriced conference tickets, getting retweets, and driving the so-called discourse. Weeks on from the convention’s end, no one cares that there wasn’t an abortion, just as they did not care that there were not really litter boxes in schools for students who identified as cats. But they do remember the libidinal sense of satisfaction. Prime-time abortions will soon be replaced by some new controversy, each a thread in the vast tapestry of rage that pushes the emotional narrative that the left is demonic.

Posobiec was far from the only instigator at the March on the DNC rally. Another was Rachel Siegel who wore a purple wig and carried a cardboard sign covered with slurs and incendiary slogans. In an interview with the journalist Ford Fischer, Siegel proudly announced, “I’m a fascist” and that she did not care about the Palestinian cause. “I don’t represent anyone,” she added. But throughout the week, Siegel became a focal point of right-wing extremism—not quite a ringleader, but someone who was able to draw attention and thereby help to get out the message, to the extent that a coherent one even existed. A woman, willing to show her face and publicly espouse any slur or ideology without care—a unicorn.

On Tuesday, Siegel attended a “Make it Great Like ’68” rally organized outside the Israeli consulate to “shut down the DNC for Gaza.” Unlike the other rallies, the messaging for this one indicated the possibility of violence, and when I arrived thirty minutes before the planned start, the block was already full of cops. No protesters had arrived yet, but Siegel was there with a small crew, clutching a White Lives Matter banner. WLM is more than a slogan; it’s a neo-Nazi group, and the banner Siegel was holding was definitely one of theirs. (On social media, however, WLM denied that Siegel is part of their group, posting that “WLM events are pro-White, legal & anonymous. You will never see a jew throwing a roman salute at a legit WLM event. We have no clue who Rachel Siegel is, nor have we ever engaged in comms with her.”) The group was not well received. One pro-Palestine protester threw rotten food at them. Another took a piece of chalk and wrote, “ALL you fascist bound to lose” on the ground, with an arrow pointing at Siegel and her banner.

That night, there were a number of violent arrests—including of journalists. Cops kettled the protesters and journalists together, at one point causing a crowd crush. I lost track of Siegel, but quickly found her once it was over, throwing up Sieg Heils and yelling slurs. One of her friends told me he was a “groyper,” the word used to describe fans of Fuentes. After the news cameras turned off, the groyper pulled out a tiny bong and lit up, admiring the riot cops still lining the streets.

For Shandon Simpson, a discharged Ohio National Guardsman, the DNC was the perfect opportunity to show off his flag collection. Simpson’s public history of white nationalism includes marching at Unite the Right in 2017, but far worse is his participation in the RapeWaffen Division Telegram channel, which embraces neo-Nazi satanism and encourages the rape of women. When Simpson was revealed to be a member in 2020, he was discharged from the National Guard. That same year, fellow member Ethan Mezler was charged with providing information about his U.S. Army unit to the extremist group Order of Nine Angles in an effort to coordinate a “mass casualty” event among his own unit in Turkey. He is currently serving forty-five years in prison.

During the convention, Simpson carried around a swastika flag for a while but ultimately decided on a Hezbollah flag for most of his DNC performance. He wore all black clothing with a white belt, clutching a tiny dog in one hand and his flag in the other as he paraded around the DNC entrance and the outskirts of pro-Palestine protests. “I support Hezbollah, I support Hamas, I support North Korea,” he told anyone who asked, including curious DNC attendees and reporters. When one attendee told him she supported Palestine but that Hezbollah is a terrorist group, he told her, “You’re a fascist. [Hezbollah] kills Americans in countries they shouldn’t be in, so fuck America and fuck you, faggot.”

Not all of the right-wingers who saw the DNC as their personal stage got along though; there are true ideological differences between a number of groups. Members of the neofascist organization New Frontier, for instance, are less concerned with Israel than they are with advancing a nationalist agenda. They claim to reject the two-party system, but also believe that supporting Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump is a good way to achieve their goals. They spent the week parading their Betsy Ross and American flags around, obviously trying to instigate the pro-Palestine protesters. Neo-Nazi Lucas Gage, the former chairman of white nationalist hate group National Youth Front, was an original member of New Frontier, which was originally known as American Third Position. The organization has recently adopted new leadership, who tell me that “New Frontier isn’t a neo-Nazi group it never had any elements of that only the stars of the organization were tied to that.”

Yet New Frontier still pushes Third Position, a set of ideologies that “seeks to overthrow existing governments and replace them with monocultural nation states built around the idea of supremacist racial nationalism and/or supremacist religious nationalism,” as Chip Berlet writes. The group regularly posts videos that encourage followers to make their talking points more “edible” instead of constantly complaining about the Jews being in power and black crime rates. In a since deleted post on X, they wrote that a tour of Auschwitz sounded like “a profound experience indeed. The kind that makes you want to ‘hit the showers’ when you’re done.”

On Monday night, following the March on the DNC rally, members of the group hung around Union Park, where pro-Palestine protesters had assembled amid a heavy police presence. They walked around the rows of cops, waving their flags and yelling “America First” into their megaphones. They finally gave up when they realized the protesters were disinterested in their provocations. (A representative from New Frontier told me they would happily protest both pro-Palestine and pro-Israel rallies because their concern is spending American money on foreign military aid.)

During the day, many of these would-be influencers and fascist groups staked out positions just beyond the main entrance of the convention center to harass Democrats or else try to draw the attention of the news cameras. I often saw both New Frontier and the anime fascists there, as well as members of the Westboro Baptist Church. One afternoon, Siegler’s anime army waved their flags and chanted what sounded like “gay sex” or maybe “low stakes” (it turned out they were saying “thug shake”). New Frontier may have had the advantage of a megaphone to amplify their chants of “America First,” but Westboro drowned them all out, yelling about Hamas raping everyone.

It was chaos, a kind of auditory torture. Had it been by design, it would have been clever.