1.
There’s a guy called Weev. His Christian name is Andrew, but we’ll call him Weev, which is what all my sources call him (though some mention various internet handles he’s used over the past decade). You might have heard of Weev; his legend is being patched together.
Weev is rightly understood as the most charming internet troll in history. When asked by NY Times’ Mattathias Schwartz if he might be the hacker messiah, he said no, he’d have received a sign by now. That was in 2007. Since then, he’s entered Jerusalem on the donkey. He wrangled with AT&T and the FBI, was indicted and then convicted of identity fraud and conspiracy to access a computer without authorization, and then got his conviction overturned. He’s conducted a lot of interviews. And the internet is a veritable archive of his ministry (in 2009, he was calling his video posts sermons).
What I’ve learned about Weev from his waxing gospel—aside from all the mainstream buzz about his hacking and his case and his involvement with Anonymous and the Occupy movement—that is: what I’ve learned about the spiritual and intellectual Weev, broadly speaking, are these:
First: Weev is a great admirer of Jesus; he frequently quotes the Christian gospels, especially the Gospel of Luke. He has called himself a Mormon. He thinks and talks about historical personalities like Giorgio Bruno and Brigham Young. Weev frames many of his positions—on diverse topics such as gun ownership, drugs, finance, and family—within a religious paradigm. He is (appropriately so, for a man of his intelligence and hunger) a mystic.
And second: Weev hates Jews. And while I want to agree with everything Weev says about freedom and social justice and even most of his weird biblical exegeses, I can’t unpin them from this critical hang up of his. He holds Jews accountable for all crimes against humanity, in the classic antisemitic tradition. And yes, he is from a sub-hacker culture whose trolldom is defined by deliberate political incorrectness, and yes he is part of a group called the Gay Nigger Association of America, and yes his antisemitism is perhaps part of a posture of provocation, an antic disposition. But many of his discourses come back to the topic of Jews—their large-scale cultural guilt—with a neurotic frequency that bespeaks conviction; at the least, his monomania suggests that a joke initially designed to offend has been taken to the point of no return—that paranoid aggression toward the malicious Jew stereotype has become, for Weev, a working model.
2.
None of this is to say that antisemitism or interpretive Christianity or guns or drugs occupy most of Weev’s time, or that they constitute the bulk of his oral output. The man’s true calling is information technology. If he has an ethical or philosophical program, it arose from the context of his day-to-day milieu: computers and the internet.
I watched his presentation at ToorCon 2006 hoping to catch some cyberpunk rhetoric on eschatology or hallucinogenics or the nature of god (I’d read that he’d been on acid when he delivered this speech), but almost all of it was tech. Gear talk. An expert to an audience of experts. He is a professional IT guy, a hacker. The toll identity is his persona: Weev, gray hat of the internet, demagogue, a character.
But the myth springs up around the character not the man. It’s impossible to understand a man, especially when the man is an expert at something, and when the man has a family life and a complex psychological history, and when the formative influences of the man’s life are so common to so many men of his generation that differentiation between the man and men like him is almost futile. But the character—not the person but the persona, not the man but the myth, not Jesus but the Christ—is palatable. Comprehensible. Charming. In short: someone worth writing about, and not just on the internet.
3.
The gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—are the heart of the Christ myth. Weev rejects the letters of Paul, and Paul in general, whom he calls a trust fund Jew who bought his way into Christianity. He says the gospels are by people who “really knew Jesus.”
Is he right? It depends on if you’re a literalist or a historicist. According to the latter, all four books were written decades after Jesus’ life. And each has a different audience, a different intent, a different Jesus. Mark, for example, is the ground-level gospel. Composed earliest, it presents a prototypical (though still miraculous) Jesus, one who is never called “God” and who keeps his messianic secret. By contrast the latest gospel, John, presents a wholly divine Christ, a numinous eternal incarnation of God, the self-proclaimed sole salvation of mankind.
The Gospel According to Luke is a synoptic gospel, which means it is a synthesis of at least two different sources. It is understood to be the first of a two-volume work (the second being the Acts of the Apostles). It’s got your classic Christmas story; it’s got the two thieves on their adjacent crosses; it’s got “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” Overall, it’s a pretty magisterial story of Christ.
For Weev, Luke is a rhetorical go-to. In a 2009 sermon on misconceptions about Christianity, Weev cherry-picks Luke to support gun ownership and to demonstrate that Jesus was not a Jew. He quoted Luke again, five years later, to HuffPost Live’s Ricky Camilleri, in relation to his federal conviction: “Blessed are ye when they shall hate you, and separate you from their company, and reproach you, and cast out your name as evil.”
After watching a bunch of Weev’s interviews and early sermons, I just had to go back and re-read Luke. Did he really tell his disciples, as Weev relates, to sell their cloaks and use the money to buy swords? He did. Did he really say we can’t be his disciples if we don’t hate our families and our lives? He did. Luke’s Jesus is a strange cat. He knows from a young age that he is the savior, and despite the indisputable humanitarianism of his Sermon on the Mount, he’s a pretty arrogant guy. He flashes sometimes. He blesses lepers and eats with sinners, but at one point he asks, “You faithless and perverse generation, how long must I be with you and bear with you?” His rage is not confined to the pompous and the hypocritical. He is harshest with his own disciples.
Being a man of constant sorrow will do that. This is a guy who gets kicked out of town for casting out demons, a guy who has foreseen his own betrayal and denial by his closest friends, his crucifixion before his own people. Human beings are ignorant and faithless, and this can wear down a savior; in the words of Weev, “I feel utterly base and saddened by the state of things.” Human beings will betray even their benefactor out of cowardice, if not just for money.
For these moral shortcomings, both Luke and Weev choose to blame the Jews.
Luke’s deferral of blame for Jesus’ execution from the Romans to the Jews sets the stage for Christian notions of Jews as god-killers. The author goes out of his way to present a Pontius Pilate who is convinced of Jesus’ innocence, and who releases him to the Jewish mob for crucifixion as a sort of Passover festival spectacle. Luke’s Jesus admonishes the Jews for a historical pattern of betrayal, and he warns them that their time is up. He tells them Jerusalem will be trampled by the Gentiles. “Every tree that does not produce good fruit,” he says, “will be cut down and thrown into the fire.”
This sort of righteous condemnation is a hallmark of zealots, and of angry young men assuming the zealot role. Luke’s Jesus, aware of himself as God, has no need to ingratiate himself with anyone. He calls out his disciples; he calls out the institution of family, the principle of ownership; and he he calls out the Pharisees—members of an educated, liberal, Jewish elite, commonly misunderstood as a privileged and moneyed class of hypocrites who fed, leech-like, on the general population (i.e. the prototype of the antisemitic Jewish stereotype).[1]
4.
When I told June that Weev seems to have gone through “a messianic phase” around 2009, she said, “Who goes through a messianic phase?” Maybe it’s a guy thing. I can think of a lot of people who have gone through messianic phases; not just men—history’s got its occasional Joan of Arc or Anne Hutchinson—but in general the pull of the archetype (message, mission, martyrdom) seems most strongly exerted on disappointed young men.
Being a messiah (and a martyr) is a hedge against obsolescence. The masses come and go, and they are despicable in their mediocrity and acceptance of the status quo. But some men change history. Some men are remembered not only by their family but by their whole culture, and not just for the stuff they built or the children they spawned but for the way they re-engineered human existence.
This is of course crimethink, the arrogance of Raskolnikov—all the more appealing for one who perceives the sickness in human society. And if actual social change is the grand goal of political insurgency, the apotheosis of the martyr is the runner-up prize. These are, and have always been, the end times: Wars and rumors of wars. Great signs and wonders. Wailing and gnashing of teeth. You cannot be an intelligent spiritual person without sensing the impending failure of mankind, the collapse of our world. And the only way to defer the weight of guilt—your own implication in the crimes of humanity—is to separate yourself from the faithless and the perverse. It helps to have someone to blame.
Weev is one mouthpiece of a society of programming insiders who are disgusted by the transformation of the internet from a network of specialists in dialogue to a public forum for intellectual mediocrity. This bias takes many forms: antiblogging, operating bot-nets, offending and repulsing users through trolling, doxxing, etc. During his ToorCon speech, he said, “We need to get back to that point where the internet was an elitist place where only intelligent people that are capable of ruining shit can communicate.” There’s a romance to this sort of nostalgia across the political spectrum: it dovetails neatly with Jew-hating, immigration anxiety, and anti-imperialist insurgency. We are talking about the identification of the other—the responsible party—and the outing, branding, and liquidation of said pariah.
5.
Over the course of Luke, Jesus’ parables get weirder and more obscure, as though Jesus has been up the whole time and is starting to fray at the edges. He tells us, “Salt is good, but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored?” He prophesies vanishing kitchen staff and field hands, stories that have since been interpreted as a promise of eschatological bodily Rapture. He relates the convoluted “parable of the minas,” which can alternately be interpreted as a condemnation of avarice, a condemnation of thrift, or a muddled revenge-rant, which concludes deliciously with: “But as for those enemies of mine who did not want me to be king over them—bring them here and slaughter them in my presence.” I imagine an exclamation point. I see Jesus red-eyed and scary, shouting, getting carried away, losing his sense of narrative remove.
That’s Weev in 2009: with Jesus’ beard and a pistol in his hand, holding a bottle of what he intimates is a tincture of mescaline. The messianic phase. Talking about meeting evil lizards in the street and striking them down for Jesus’ sake.
But the character dissipates. As he grows, he morphs into new forms, unexpected and decidedly non-reductive. Jesus was crucified and fixed in type in his early thirties; if not, who knows what manner of non-myth we’d have come to know (and forget). Weev is, as of this writing, on the cusp of his thirtieth birthday. Already, he’s started an LLC and a hedge fund. He’s been in and out of jail. He’s claimed at least partial Jewish heritage. He’s on CNBC in a tie (albeit a plaid one). We are witnessing the dissipation of Weev as troll caricature. He is turning, before the media’s eyes, into Weev the social activist, Weev the cultural commentator. He’s turning into Andrew Auernheimer.
How will this transformation affect his Jew-hating? Here’s Weev in 2012, in an interview with Gawker’s Adrian Chen: “I do think Jews have power in this country and I fight powerful people.” That’s the rhetoric of someone who has shifted his public persona from electric shaman to social transformer, and the Jew-hating is appropriately dialed back. That’s why I think it’s real, and not just a put on. If he’d just been doing it for the lulz, he’d have gotten bored with it. Instead, he’s established a rationale.
6.
2006: Weev asks the ToorCon audience, “Who’s familiar with the Eleatic School?” Weev explains that Parmenides believed “the whole world was one connected place; there’s no I, there’s no individual, we’re all one system.” He’s talking about the internet, but it works with historical man-at-large. Our individual passions and biases are really components (or reflections) of a larger psychic process.
So why is man-at-large so obsessed with Jews, and with the expulsion of Jewish influence? Why does everyone want to resent the Jews, to break with the Jews, to exile and ostracize the Jews and, tellingly, to eliminate the Jews? Why did the proto-Catholic church choose to retain as their Old Testament the massive corpus of ancient Jewish history and law and prophesy, and then spend a thousand-plus years promulgating anti-Jewish rhetoric and programs? Why are some of history’s most notorious antisemites men who know or suspect or fear some Jewishness in their own ancestry? What is the problem here?
It’s not just that they’re a minority, either. Don’t even act like it’s the same thing with African Americans or Pakistani Brits or Arab Frenchmen. Sure, the West hates and fears non-Europeans, but it hates and fears Jews more because classical Judaism is the rock on which the religious culture of Europe is, at least nominally, founded. Abraham is all of our father, and he’s a weird father to have: a guy who would sacrifice his son, and who could never settle down, and who reminds us of an atavistic Mesopotamian past that smells of goats.
And if you conceive of the Jewish patriarchetype as a somewhat larger incarnation—as the big guy YHWH himself—you trade your embarrassing father for a terrifying, jealous, merciless, and (as of late, at least) rather uncommunicative one.
So maybe this is arrested development, for the West. We’re stuck in our Oedipal phase, still looking to castrate the Jewish father, unable to move on and form our own mature identity. And, infuriatingly, these metaphysical obsessions—our struggle with psychological types at the service of self-actualization—have real-world consequences: human beings, each with their own small selves and personal biases, are killed by realizations of psychic violence: pogroms, inquisitions, wars, mass murders. A living person is killed because he reminds us of an idea we had when we were a kid. And this is called history, and it is said to advance or at least accumulate.
7.
Okay, I get it: Weev has identified Jews with the 1%, with the economic elite, with the ruthless robber barons of late capitalism. One could even make the argument that he doesn’t really mean Jews per se, but just uses the term as a signifier for a perceived puppet-master demographic—he could just as easily say the new world order or reptilian humanoids. But he chooses Jews. Either because it suits his religio-historic sensibilities or because he was raised on the internet and has internalized the conspiracy theories that proliferate there.
I want to respect the revolutionary fervor of the progressive anarchist Weev: the one who supports liberty and self-determination and acts against the oppression of global capitalism. But all revolutionaries cast an ominous Napoleonic shadow. And I wonder how a guy who purports solidarity with the working poor can fall into a dogma like antisemitism, which has killed so many regular old working poor folk and done nothing to adjust the balance of power and money in our world.
Like all of us, he patched a theory together from various sources (though Luke’s own Jesus warns us not to patch new clothes with old cloth).
8.
Sources—documentary fragments, artifacts, ostracons—are not peremptory evidence of anything. I read that Weev said this or Weev did that on all sorts of surfaces: The New York Times, The Huffington Post, on Wikipedia, in the comment section of YouTube. This is the 21st century equivalent of the oral tradition. And besides, we’re dealing with a Promethean trickster, an impersonator, a guy who claims and then denies responsibility for various actions. He’s just one Guy Fawkes mask in a chorus of thousands. But according to the documentary hypothesis, the sources will all get synthesized into a comprehensible whole, and somewhere down the road some fundamentalist will be saying of Weev, “It says so right there.”
People will take it all at face value. The 99% are by definition not the elite. Though populous, we have never demonstrated sophisticated discernment on a mass scale. When Weev tells us he hates Jews, we will believe him. We have believed before, even before the internet; and now the internet is crammed with people looking for explanations.
The internet is our creation, and so it is us: the hackers, the trolls, the newbs, the bloggers, the dot-coms, the ninety-nine- and the one-percenters. We are a faithless and perverse generation. But we are the generation of YHWH, of the Henosis, of the mind-at-large. If it hates us, it hates itself. The prophets will despise us, and we will kill them. Let anyone with ears to hear listen.
_________________________________
Summer, 2014
Image: detail from The Arrest of Christ, from The Book of Kells
Notes:
1^: Lest I be as misunderstood as the gospels on this point, it is worth noting that most of Jesus’ ire is actually reserved for the scribes and temple authorities, who in Jesus’ time are securely in the pocket of the Roman authority; while Pharisees do catch a lashing here or there, the retrofitting of the term Pharisee to denote a hypocritical ignoramus is more a function of antisemitism than a matter of historical record.
