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kingofdirtandnothing · 4 years ago

Text

@polyfacetious whoops this is four thousand words long

“So Parker was right. This is where you’ve been spending your gardening leave.” Rose Teller has a remarkable gift for looking exhausted, no matter the time of day. Alice has always respected her for it, for not giving in to wearing make up, for not slipping into the loo to touch up lipstick or eyeliner before dealing with a suspect. They played to different roles, and Teller’s role was that of the put upon school marm.

Even here, where she’s followed Peter’s lack of good sense to find Alice where she wasn’t supposed to be.

It was a bit like a bruise, or a bad tooth. Something Alice couldn’t stop probing, feeling the pang that came with sitting here and remembering Henry Madsen, hanging by his fingernails and begging to be saved. He didn’t much like when she asked if Adrian had begged to be saved as well. Or Gabriella. Or Emma, who Alice dug out with her own two hands.

Liar! Her voice had rung out through the big, empty space around them, ricocheting accusingly back down on them both. There were few things in this world that Alice hated more than a liar. But Madsen had given her the information she needed, and Peter Parker, he of the endlessly loyal friend variety, had hung up the phone. Plausible deniability.

Teller was still talking. Alice blinks, dragging her mind up through the depths of the past and into the present, just in time to hear “- have the Madsen verdict. Given the exceptional circumstances, the inquiry have found no grounds for disciplinary action. Which means you’re back...if you want it.”

Alice had thought about it once, very briefly. What it would be like to give up the job. To bin her badge and walk away. Travel the world. Swim with the sharks. Be an honest to God person and not a string of late nights turned second shifts with corpses dancing behind her eyelids every time she dared close them.

“I want it.”

She gets the speech about following orders and being a good girl. Alice makes sure to compliment Teller on the speech. Staying on the boss’s good side was paramount right now. And it’s the thought that fills her head until she’s brought up to the car, and the green eyed little puppy of a Sergeant who was waiting for them. He says welcome back, or whatever.

DS Klaus Hargreeves. Alice shakes his hand. Teller leaves them be. Well, it looked like she’d have a new babysitter. “Do we need to have the talk, DS Hargreeves?” It was like Rose’s exhaustion was contagious. It wasn’t yet nine in the morning and already Alice felt like she was swimming in mud. Hargreeves murmurs a worried little the talk, ma’am and Alice waves that away. “Ma’am is Teller. Boss is fine. The talk is simply...I was unwell.” Liar. “I got better. Nothing more.”

Hargreeves nods along, an eager little puppy. Alice would guess middle child. Only ever managed to get attention by acting out. Now he was trying to do it the “right way”. He tells her that he’s been lobbying to work with her for nine months now. Chasing it up in writing three times a week. Well. The puppy was very stubborn. Some of the ice in her chest thaws. “Tell me about the case.”

Conversation is easy after that. Hargreeves--Klaus hands her the folder and starts towards the scene. “Home invasion.” Alice hides her smile in the manila folder as Klaus swallows a ‘ma’am’. Mommy issues, maybe. He didn’t feel like daddy issues. “Victim is Zoe Luther. Humanitarian lawyer. Found dead in the home. Trauma to the back of the head. Broken neck.”

Alice flips the page over, asks who found her. “The husband. John Luther. Owns a used bookshop. He said he was at the shops, got a call from the wife saying someone was in the home. By the time he made it back, she was dead. Call records do show that Zoe Luther’s phone had a seven minute outbound call to the husband’s phone. 999 call was made an additional four minutes after, from the husband’s phone.”

She bites down on her thumbnail, looking over the words. Alice tries not to let herself make any assumptions this early. She lets the data points wash over her, so that the sediment of them can settle into her mind. “Witnesses?”

Klaus turns onto a quaint little street, lit up by blues and twos splashing their colors along the sides of the houses. There were couples and families huddled on their porches, breathing through the relief of knowing they’d survived something terrible, somehow. “Neighbors saw the husband come home in a rush. Heard screams. One called 999 approximately thirty seconds after the husband did.”

They step out of the car, and Alice is grateful she chose flats today. Heels were for office days, when she needed to cut a particular image when dealing with the suspect. She kept a pair in the bottom drawer of her desk, just for that reason. Alice badges the uniform standing guard in front of all the rubber-neckers with their phones. Klaus holds the caution tape up for her to slip under. What a gentleman.

There are flowers on the front stoop, petals spilling out of the cheap plastic lining. A few have been trampled by CSI, carrying bootprints against soft yellows and pinks. There’s dust on the forced lock, though she doubts they’ll get any fingerprints that belong to someone other than the homeowners.

The living room is a picture of normalcy. A glass of wine on the coffee table, the TV turned low and the news playing on in the background. It was only stepping into the kitchen that the truth of the night unfolded. Alice stays there, just inside of the doorway and lets all of it wash over her.

A broken glass, a broken dish. A photo frame knocked over onto the floor. Scratches on the parquette from the kitchen table being forcefully pushed back. And Zoe Luther. A cold heap on the floor, looking like a discarded doll with her halo of dark curls and her wool socks. “Cutlery isn’t silver. The coffee machine is nice, expensive enough to pawn.”

Klaus steps up behind her, and clever boy, he picks up the thread of her thought and keeps going. “Nothing was taken, according to the husband.” There it is. The heavy stone growing in the pit of her stomach. A feeling of going against the grain, beneath her skin.

“So we have a home invasion. Obvious signs of rage.” Alice gestures idly towards the broken pantry door. “No sexual abuse. Nothing stolen. Does any of this sound right to you, DS Hargreeves?”

She likes Hargreeves all the more for the fact that he doesn’t answer immediately. He looks the room over, looks the body over. “No. Nothing about this seems right.”

“Because it’s not.”

-------------------

They stop off on the way back to the station to get real coffee, and Alice gets a muffin that she picks at during the drive. She bins the bottom half of it when they walk into the precinct. Teller is already waiting. The husband is in the interview room. Hargreeves mutters christ, that’s a big lad and Alice has to agree.

John Luther nearly fills the side of the screen where he’s slumped in the interview chair, wearing one of the paper suits they give to suspects and pick ups who come in covered in blood. Uniforms that responded to the call wrote in the file that he was cradling his wife’s body when they made it to the scene. Which means he spent at least ten or fifteen minutes in the back of a patrol car with his wife’s brain matter stuck to his shirt.

Teller gives her a look. Alice stops by her desk. She touches up her red lipstick and pulls the pair of black patent leather pumps from her bottom drawer and replaces her sensible flats with those. Hargreeves steals a look, and then looks away. Good boy.

Alice knows how it changes her. Her demeanor, her gait. Her posture. She plucks the folder from the desk and strides into the interview room, so that she can get her first real impression of John Luther.

“Mr. Luther. I’m DCI Alice Morgan. I’m the senior investigating officer on the case. Do you mind if I sit?” His eyes flit briefly to her legs, and then skip away. A normal response. And given the day he’s had, it may well be the sound of them drawing his attention. Luther nods, big hands curled into loose fists on the table in front of him.

On first whiff, nothing about him rings any alarm bells. A big lad, as Hargreeves phrased it, but Luther wasn’t weaponizing it. His slouch didn’t feel calculated. It felt tired. She asks him as much, gets a gravelly ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been this tired’ in response. Alice touches the corner of her mouth with her thumb, and comes away with a smudge of red.

“I know everything must seem bleak right now, Mr. Luther.” Alice has given this speech so many times that she could do it in her sleep. She’s learned to make her voice soft, her eyes soft. No matter what she’s really thinking, families of victims needed to feel empathized with. “But I promise you, I will do everything in my power to find who did this, and bring them to justice.”

Alice reaches across the table, finger hovering over the button for the recorder. Luther nods before she has the chance to ask. The sound of the recorder spinning up carries in the quiet. “Unfortunately, John-” A calculated risk. He doesn’t seem upset by it. Alice pushes on. “I’ll need to ask you some very uncomfortable questions. Can you think of anyone who might have held a grudge against your wife? You don’t need proof or excuses, it can simply be a feeling of unease.”

Like the one sitting at the base of her skull that Alice couldn’t banish, no matter the evidence laid out in front of her. The primal part of her mind, the dark corners who existed solely to keep her alive, they were ringing hard bells. This man was a killer. She didn’t know how, but she knew.

Luther scrubs a hand over his mouth. His voice shakes when he tells her that he can’t think of anyone, that Zoe was a good woman, a gracious woman that used her time to help people, that he couldn’t think of anyone who would want to hurt her-

His voice breaks, and the emotion in it is genuine. Just like the emotion in his dark eyes.

“Alright. Take a breath for me now. It’s alright.” It feels like rote sometimes, coming in here and saying these things. Alice’s strengths were in the field, it was in reading the minds of the corrupt and the cruel. She wasn’t made for dealing with bereaved loved ones. “Now I have to ask. Were there any marital problems? Were you two working on things? Zoe didn’t have her wedding ring on.”

John’s head tilts there, just a fraction of an inch. Alice thinks gotcha gleefully to herself. “We had a trial separation. We tried it, we didn’t like it. Zoe told me to come home. So I did.” There. There, there, there, each warning clang of a church bell in the back of her skull was watching some of that grief get burned away. By anger. (No mention of the ring. He knew it was gone. Bastard.)

“The thing is John, this is a very singular crime. There was no sign of robbery, and I’m very sorry for having to say these things... no sign of sexual assault.” Alice watches for a flinch, for some kind of reaction. Nothing. Just dark, clever eyes focused on her. But his hands were perfectly still on the table. Not fists. “Crimes like this aren’t random, they’re never without motive. And you can see why our first thought would be here, with you.”

He breaks then, looking away for a moment as the tears well and he blinks them back. Well. No time like the present. Alice puts on a big yawn, covering her mouth with the back of her hand. “I’m very sorry. It’s been an exhausting day, as I’m sure it has been for you.” John watches her with watery eyes. He speaks gently, tells her he understands. “How about a coffee?” He asks for tea. It’s the perfect chance to step out.

Alice strides back over to the desk where Teller, Hargreeves and Parker have ringed around Alice’s computer, watching the video footage straight from the interview room. “He killed her.” Alice gestures at the screen. “Peter, am I wrong?”

Peter Parker, perennially single and married to his work all at once, nods. The words are given into his cup of coffee, but she hears them all the same. “You’re not wrong.”

“He didn’t yawn.” Peter is rolling his eyes, and Hargreeves is watching her like she’s mad. “Yawning is contagious.” Teller yawns, because she’s nothing if not suggestible. Hargreeves is looking a little green around the gills, but he works up the nerve to speak up. Ma’am, that research has been debunked- Alice waves the sentence away, though she does appreciate the puppy being brave enough to speak up.

“It’s not about empathy or the brain or anything like that. He’s working so hard to put on that grieving husband facade that he didn’t have time to realize he should have reacted. By the time he did. It was too late. He’s our killer.”

Teller is pleased, but Alice can see the ultimatum coming. We have nothing. Timeline alone is enough to get this laughed out. I need proof. Solid proof. All we have right now is - “Absence.” It smacks her right in the bloody face. “The absence of proof. The door screams crime of passion, but everything else is meticulous. Why stay at the scene if he could have alibi’ed himself at the shops and been done with all of this?”

Little Hargreeves, already worth his weight in silver, if not gold, lifts his hand like this is primary school. Peter laughs so hard he inhales coffee and has to turn away to cough. “I spoke to the neighbors. They said that Zoe has been having a gentleman caller. That Luther hasn’t been home in months. Found the bloke’s name, it’s Mark North. He was at work the entire time, airtight alibi. But he says the only person who didn’t know the separation was final was John.”

That was it, then. Alice can feel her heart racing. “That’s what it is. He’s a narcissist. Acting on compulsion. Everything we found out, it’s because he wanted us to find it. He wanted us to know that his wife was being unfaithful. He wants to punish her, that’s why he took the ring. He wants the media to crow that the loving husband did no wrong, that it’s the wife who went astray and paid for it.” The next words out of Teller’s mouth are the ones Alice doesn’t want to hear.

Find me the ring, then. Or we have to cut him loose.

Tea, first. Alice makes them both a cup, and just like John Luther, she cuts the bullshit when she walks back into the room, sliding him over a cup. Asks if he’s comfortable. The mask is firmly back in place now, the exhausted, grieving husband who tells her that it’s fine, really.

“Sometimes.” Alice was hitting the ground running, now. No room left in her brain for Henry Madsen or her empty flat. Just the chase. “We like to make one of the legs shorter than the other, you know. It keeps the suspect off balance. It makes it so that they can never get comfortable.” It’s only because she’s watching near his elbow that Alice sees the nearly imperceptible bunch of muscle at his hip. Testing out the chair.

“We also use the right police officers for the job. Take me, for instance.” Alice gestures to herself, and takes a sip of her tea. She’ll blame that wave of warmth on weak, too hot tea and not on the feel of those eyes moving over her. “I’ll be sent in to deal with men who are narcissists. Men who are women beaters, who are rapists. Who think they’re better than a woman. It makes them angry, to have to deal with someone they see as beneath them.”

There isn’t so much as a flicker of anger across John Luther’s expressive face. But there is something there, tucked into the corners of his eyes. Curiosity.

“Have you ever heard of Occam’s razor?” John nods, watching her when she stands from her seat and paces over to lean against the wall, hands tucked behind her. It keeps them from fluttering. John rumbles back the definition. But he’s waiting for something. “The only person known to have been at the house was you, John.”

John scoffs a little at her. “Absence of evidence doesn’t necessarily mean evidence of absence.” He’s got Alice’s attention now. And it seems to be mutual. Luther leans forward, tapping his temple. “I see what you’re doing there. A leap.” Alice answers without thinking. A hop, really. “But you’re wrong. Was my marriage strained? Yes. Was my wife sleeping around? Yes. Did I kill her? No.”

John’s entire affect has changed now. No hint of tears at the eyes, no downturned mouth. He’s watching Alice like she’s the only thing in the world and it’s making her feel a little dizzy as she asks can you prove that? John laughs. He actually laughs. It’s faint and over in an instant, but it’s a laugh. “Can’t prove a negative, that means the burden of proof is on you, DCI Morgan. If you think I did this, then you need to demonstrate how and when.”

They were so deeply beyond is he the killer that Alice has circled back around to how can I prove that he’s the killer? No doubt in her mind. “But I won’t be able to do that, now will I?” The audio on the camera, even the recorder won’t have picked it up. But Alice hears that you can try as if it were whispered against her ear. She has goosebumps. “Because you, John, you don’t interact with the world in the way it assumes you will. It makes you hard to understand. And it’s your absence that’s more telling than your speech.”

“Is that a compliment?” There is something predatory in the way his curls those words over his tongue, eyes like a shark and long, powerful body like a crouched panther. Alice doesn’t know why she says it. But ‘yes’ slips past her lips like a confession. Bloody hell.

John leans back in the chair, a pleased little ‘ah’ slipping past his lips. Just like that, his demeanor has softened. Gone was the hunter. “Are you trying to beguile me?”

They’re sparring now. Alice crosses her legs so that she doesn’t have the urge to bounce her knee. “No, John. I wouldn’t be so foolish.” He was a narcissist. The best thing she could do was play to his ego. (It wasn’t a lie.) “But.” She lifts a careful, manicured finger there. “You can be sure that I will find the proof I need. And you will go down. Criminals are never as clever as they think they are.”

“That must get monotonous, for someone as brilliant as you, Alice.” Her name feels illicit where it sits on the tip of his tongue. Alice closes the folder and gathers it in hands that she keeps still and straight with sheer force of will. Out in the hall, she has to take a deep breath before she can face the peanut gallery again.

Time was up. They couldn’t hold him any longer, and no amount of possible ideas to hold him from Hargreeves (good boy) was enough to stop the inevitable. It didn’t matter that it was obvious, that anyone with eyes could see that Luther was excited by them knowing. (She doesn’t say them, Alice says he’s excited that I know and she ignores the look from Peter it gets her.) Teller gives the call to cut him loose. Peter, protective in his own silly way, offers to be the one to let him know. Alice wonders if her cheeks are as pink as they feel.

On his way out, John Luther, used book salesman and murderer, stops by Alice’s desk. “I did enjoy our little chat. You’re very interesting.” He pats the edge of her folder and walks away. Alice has never wanted to break a chair over someone’s back so fiercely in all her life.

------------------------

Her apartment is chilly and uninviting, even with a light left on in every room, an old habit left over from her time in University that she’s never been able to shake. Alice kicks off her ridiculous heels and her overcoat, and pads to the kitchen on bare feet. The curry in the styrofoam box in her refrigerator still smells passable.

She eats it right there in the kitchen, because her table is overflowing with cold case files and the kind of photographs that would put anyone off of their dinner. Alice’s mind wanders while she eats, replaying the crime scene over in her mind’s eye with startling clarity. There was something she was missing. Something that wasn’t right.

Stomach full but no more satisfied, Alice sits on the side of the tub and draws herself a bath. While it’s running, she cleans the lipstick away, spending a moment staring at the red smear on the cloth wipe.

Once the tub is full and dusted with soft smelling bubbles, Alice strips down, leaving her work clothes in a heap outside of the bathroom door, like maybe she can hide from all of it if she just shuts the door behind her.

The water is deliciously hot, and it eases the ache building in her arches from wearing those heels for the rest of the afternoon. Alice pins her hair up off of her nape with a pen balanced on the notepad she kept next to the sink, and slips down into the water, her eyes falling closed.

It’s been a long time since Alice made an attempt at a life. Bertrand had been wonderful in his own way, full of fire and intellect. But the challenge of arguments lost their luster when they always came back to the same thing. Her job. You spend more time with the dead than you do with me, Alice. By the time he moved out, she was more angry than hurt.

Without any direct input from her mind, her thoughts trail back to the morning. To John Luther, cut from marble even in the paltry paper suit that sat too short on his forearms and his calves, because of his size. With his bright, clever eyes and his lovely, long fingered hands…

It’s only because she hasn’t been on a date in a few years. That’s why her fingers trace down the inside of her thigh, with the thought of John’s careful mask slipping away dancing behind her closed eyelids.

She thinks of what it would be like to put herself across his lap. In this ridiculous fantasy, she’s wearing a skirt. They’re never practical for work, but there’s nothing practical about fingering yourself while thinking about a murderer.

In her fantasy, he’s in trousers she can work the zipper down. And he’s running his big palms up from her knee to her hip, her skin lit up like streelights following the dusk beneath his touch. His eyes never leave hers, clever and sure of what he’s doing to her.

In her fantasy, he catches a finger at the hip of her knickers and pulls, the flimsy fabric rending like wet paper beneath the strength of his hands. Alice moans, both in the place in her mind and the place in her tub.

In her fantasy, John balls up the fabric and shoves it into his pocket. A trophy to keep. A reminder of what he was doing.

In her bathroom, Alice sits bolt upright in her bath, hands catching on the sides and sending water sloshing onto the floor with loud slaps.

“The ring!”

#ch: alice #polyfacetious #polyfacetious | luther #v: dci morgan #boy did this ever get away from me #my brain is tired now #queued

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96thdayofrage · 7 years ago

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Ever since I began investigating the extremist groups lining up behind Trump last spring, several of their leaders have made big claims to me about an alt-right following in Silicon Valley and across the broader tech industry. “The average alt-right-ist is probably a 28-year-old tech-savvy guy working in IT,” white nationalist Richard Spencer insisted when I interviewed him a few weeks before the election. “I have seen so many people like that.” Andrew Anglin, the publisher of the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer, told me he gets donations from Silicon Valley, and that Santa Clara County, home to Apple and Intel, is his site’s largest traffic source. Chuck Johnson, the publisher of the conspiracy-mongering site Got News, said he gets lots of page views from the San Francisco Bay Area.

“If you even try to posit that racism and sexism aren’t why women and minorities aren’t making it, that it’s some combination of talent and values, people’s heads just explode.”

After Peinovich was outed, he also insisted to me that many techies secretly identify with the alt-right, which he attributed to a backlash against the “corporate feminist and diversity agenda” of tech companies. “The fact that speaking up about this virtually guarantees career and social suicide, as in my case, shows why so many white males in tech would be attracted to the alt-right.”

None of these alt-right figures would provide any data to support their claims. As I’ve reported, some alt-right sites have wildly overstated their reach. Moreover, the tech industry is renowned for its globalist outlook: Public-opinion surveys conducted by a Stanford political economist have found that rank-and-file workers in Silicon Valley exhibit less racial resentment and more favorable views toward most forms of immigration than average Americans.

Nonetheless, “alt-techies,” as Spencer and others call them, do appear to play a role in a movement that first incubated in the backwaters of the internet and eventually spread online with the rise of Trump. Some heroes of the far right are associated with tech: They include former Breitbart News “tech editor” Milo Yiannopoulos; the infamous neo-Nazi hacker Andrew Auernheimer (a.k.a. Weev); and the video gaming vlogger Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg, whose “Pewdiepie” YouTube channel featuring Nazi-themed jokes has 54 million subscribers. (Last month Kjellberg apologized for the jokes and said he is not a Nazi.)

There are also successful figures in the tech industry who appeal to and have commingled with the alt-right: The DeploraBall, a gathering of far-right activists and conspiracy theorists during Trump’s inauguration, was co-organized by software investor Jeff Giesea and attended by tech billionaire and Trump backer Peter Thiel.San Francisco-based tech entrepreneur Curtis Yarvin is known for launching the pro-authoritarian “neoreactionary” movement and reportedly has been in contact with Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon. (Yarvin denies this.) Giesea and Yarvin, both of whom I interviewed, reject the “alt-right” label for its associations with white nationalism, yet they share the movement’s disdain for the race and gender politics of the left. (Thiel’s media representative did not respond to a request for comment from him.)

To further gauge the influence of the alt-right in tech, I interviewed seven people in the industry who embrace aspects of the movement. They included current or former employees of Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and Twitter, some of whom responded to me after I reached out to them through their Facebook pages. They asked that I not publish their names, citing concerns about their jobs. I also interviewed two techies associated with the Daily Stormer; one declined to disclose his identity to me but has a posting history on the site indicative of working in tech in the Bay Area.

Three of the alt-techies I interviewed said explicitly that they were white nationalists. The others did not identify that way, but they emphasized their belief in racial or gender differences in IQ or social behavior, and strongly rejected identity politics, affirmative action, and what they see as toxic political correctness. Their views shed light on how the alt-right has found a receptive audience on the margins, at least, of the tech world.

A former product manager for a top tech company who now consults for Twitter told me that white and Asian male domination in the tech sector has more to do with innate abilities and culture than discrimination. “If you even try to posit that racism and sexism aren’t why women and minorities aren’t making it, that it’s some combination of talent and values, people’s heads just explode,” he says. “They just refuse to even float the idea.”

“I’m not necessarily saying any one race is bad,” says “Mark,” a former software developer for Yahoo and Facebook. “But we should at least agree that statistically, race and sex genes do make us differ enough on average to make things uneven in certain areas.”

“The history of nearly every field of science and engineering was driven by white Europeans,” declares a 45-year-old computer chip designer who says he lives in Berkeley, California, and who posts under the name “White Morpheus” on the Daily Stormer. “Nobody will say their real feelings [about the alt-right] because a mob of fat blue-hair complainers will drive you away from your career forever. Peter Thiel coming out [for Trump] was a joy to us all, because he could show his support for the Trump train where we could not.”

In 1990, Ku Klux Klan “Grand Dragon” Don Black created Stormfront as a dial-up computer bulletin board for former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke’s campaign for Louisiana governor. By 1995 it had evolved into the first major public website dedicated to promoting white supremacy, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups. But online hate speech mostly remained confined to its traditional base of neo-Nazis and Klansmen until the launch in 2003 of 4chan. Originally conceived as an anonymous message board for discussing Japanese anime and manga, 4chan attracted a cult following among techies at around the same time that its political discussion board, now known as /pol/ (short for “politically incorrect”), became a hotbed for racist jokes and ironically intended Hitler memes.

The political glue binding the predominately young, male 4chan community is essentially anti-leftist: a disdain for identity politics and so-called “social justice warriors.” This attitude thrives amid a culture of anonymity, in which status ostensibly comes from page views rather than one’s gender, ethnic, or social background. “Larry,” a software engineer for Google and an alt-right fan, points to the infamous 4chan post, “There Are No Girls on the Internet,” where one 4channer profanely lectures another about how online life is a meritocracy in which gender should play no role.

Yet, hostility toward women and people of color thrives on 4chan and on Reddit, the social sharing site whose political and gaming forums /r/the_donald and /r/kotakuinaction are popular with the alt-right. In 2014, 4chan and Reddit users launched an elaborate campaign of rape and death threats against female video game developers that became known as Gamergate. They found champions in Yiannopoulos, who argued that the true victims were the men whose gaming culture was being destroyed by “feminist bullies” and the “achingly politically correct” tech press, and in Mike Cernovich, a blogger who has trumpeted the neuroticism and other alleged weaknesses of women as well as what he claims to be the criminal proclivities of certain ethnic groups. When former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao last year banned five “harassing subreddits,” including one called ShitNiggersSay, the move unleashed weeks of bigoted trolling (a.k.a. “shitposting”) and digital vandalism on the site—and a migration to a Reddit copycat site, Voat. (More recently, similar migrations took place after Reddit banned /r/altright and discussion of the fake-news scandal #PizzaGate.)

The anonymity of 4chan and Reddit makes it impossible to tell the extent to which they are dominated by tech workers, though an abiding interest from the tech presssuggests considerable overlap. “It’s definitely geek culture,” says McGill University cultural anthropologist Gabriella Coleman, who has studied how 4chan gave rise to the hactivist group Anonymous. “Clint,” a Valley cybersecurity startup founder and longtime visitor to the site, told me that the majority of active users on 4chan/pol/ are in tech, though typically in lower-level system administrator and tech support jobs that come with a lot of downtime during the workday. Dale Beran, who recently wrote about the political history of 4chan, argues that techies have become less dominant as 4chan and similar sites have expanded, though they still play a role: “We can define [4chan users] by their retreat into the computer, which means a lot of them have computer skills—whether that’s networking or coding or whatever—but to some it may have simply been World of Warcraft.”

“Most contributions that built the internet came from white people,” declares one notorious hacker.

Before Gamergate, Larry, the Google software engineer, was “a standard Democrat straight-voting person,” as he puts it. But reading about the movement in the tech press and on pro-Gamergate websites “did highlight some of the inconsistencies and hypocrisies with positions on the left,” he says. A comment in a Gamergate thread led Larry to the Unz Review, a website run by Palo Alto tech entrepreneur and former GOP gubernatorial candidate Ron Unz. There, Larry says he was exposed to treatises on “human biological diversity” expounding on the supposed cognitive differences between intellectually superior and inferior races.

Human biological diversity has also gained currency in the Valley through computer scientist Curtis Yarvin, who writes under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug. Starting in 2007, in series of blog posts often cited by alt-right followers, Yarvin laid out a political philosophy known as neoreaction or the “Dark Enlightenment.” Combining a technocratic sensibility with reactionary political thought, neoreaction rejects Enlightenment concepts—such as democracy and equality of the races and sexes—and instead advocates something much closer to authoritarianism. Yarvin believes government would work much better if run like a tech company and helmed by an all-powerful CEO president. He spoke admiringly of Napoleon, whom he considers to be “kind of the Steve Jobs of France.”

Yarvin’s blog combines dorky programmer lingo with dense references to obscure, proto-fascist political texts. “When I started blogging 10 years ago, the availability of completely unorthodox written content [online] was mostly confined to the pre-1923 corpus, which Google did such a nice job scanning,” Yarvin told me in an email. He believes that software programmers are attracted to his writings because they “are always looking for something to do with their restless, fidgety brains. Especially if it’s weird and doesn’t involve dealing with physical humans.”

Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, who reportedly gave Trump more than $1 million during the campaign and was an adviser on Trump’s transition team, has circled neoreactionary ideas. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he wrote on the Cato Institute’s blog in 2009, adding that women and “welfare beneficiaries” have through their voting habits “rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron” (He clarified two weeks later that he supports women’s suffrage and redirected blame for the supposed demise of democracy on “unelected technocratic agencies.”)

Thiel is reportedly an investor in Yarvin’s cloud computing company, though Yarvin told me that he and Thiel have never discussed neoreaction. Michael Anissimov, another well-known neoreactionary blogger, was formerly the media director of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, which has received funding from the Thiel Foundation.

While a student at Stanford University in 1987, Thiel founded the conservative Stanford Review to inspire campus debate by “presenting alternative viewpoints.” In the 1995 book The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus, Thiel and former Stanford Review editor-in-chief David O. Sacks argued that multiculturalism at colleges was hurting education. In one bizarre passage, they speculated that some college date-rape cases were actually “seductions that are later regretted”—a comment for which Thiel apologized last October, telling Forbes, “Rape in all forms is a crime. I regret writing passages that have been taken to suggest otherwise.”

DeploraBall co-sponsor Jeff Giesea, also a former Stanford Review editor, worked for Thiel Capital Management in the late 1990s. Last year, Giesea partnered with far-right blogger Mike Cernovich on MAGA3X, a digital operation dedicated to waging meme warfare on behalf of Trump’s campaign. Enlisting a network of pro-Trump Twitter influencers such as former BuzzFeed employee Anthime Gionet (a.k.a. Baked Alaska) and right-wing troll Jack Posobiec, the group spread Breitbart News contentand memes based on conspiracy theories such as #SpiritCooking and #Pizzagate. The DeploraBall stirred controversy among the alt-right when Giesea and Cernovich decided to remove Gionet from their “featured guests” list after he posted several anti-Semitic tweets. But Giesea told me that he generally agrees with the views of alt-right fellow travelers such as Yiannopoulous. In January, he told BuzzFeed, “I see Trumpism as the only practical and moral path to save Western civilization from itself.”

In 2014, Jesse Jackson began pushing Silicon Valley tech companies to disclose statistics about the racial and gender composition of their workforces. By the following summer, he had pressured Google, Facebook, Apple, and many other major tech companies to reveal their paucity of black, Hispanic, and female employees and commit to making improvements. But when he appeared on Reddit that summer to answer questions about diversity in tech, he faced a virulent backlash. By far the most up-voted question began, “You are an immoral, hate-filled race baiter that has figured out how to manipulate the political system for your own gain.”

The comment came from an anonymous account that was later deleted; few people in Silicon Valley are willing to question the value of diversity out in the open. “If there was [opposition to diversity policy], it’s probably something someone says to themselves in the car on the way home or on the bus on the way back to San Francisco,” says Reed Galen, a GOP consultant who advises tech companies and has been trolled online by the alt-right over his criticism of Trump.

Chuck Johnson, who runs the pro-Trump site Got News from his home in Fresno, California, and claims to have received funding offers from wealthy tech investors, points to an obvious outlet for closeted alt-techies: “A lot of these people see a sort of ostracism takes place [after they question the value of diversity], and they either rebel against it internally or they go online and they have a different identity and they shitpost on Reddit.”

Several alt-techies I interviewed said they were fans of A Troublesome Inheritance, a national bestseller published in 2014 by former New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade that makes a case for the existence of differences in average IQ and behavior between races. The book and others like it have been widely criticized by geneticists as misleading, overly speculative, and not based on scientific consensus, but the alt-techies claim such critiques are just political correctness. “Nobody wants to touch it or admit it for fear of being branded alt-right,” Mark, the Facebook engineer, told me.

“Tomorrow, being a Hispanic, Black, Muslim or woman in the USA is going to be very scary,” the Latino founder of a Silicon Valley startup wrote on Facebook on election night.

White supremacists see the historical dominance of Silicon Valley by white males as a reflection of the world’s natural order. “The reality is that for the vast majority of all human civilization, the majority of makers have been white,” insists Andrew Auernheimer, a.k.a. Weev, a notorious troll and hacker who says he does tech support for the Daily Stormer and The Right Stuff. “Most contributions that built the internet came from white people,” he says, but now “our contributions are essentially being stolen from us.”

Alt-techies are scornful of South Asians working in Silicon Valley under H-1B visas. White Morpheus, the Daily Stormer reader, told me that he became a white supremacist after working with “unqualified subcontinentals who were brought in by visa fraud to drive down American engineering wages” and who “produce subpar work product.” (Before I contacted him, White Morpheus had posted on Daily Stormer about forming a neo-Nazi meetup group in Silicon Valley and using programming tools to create more video games “like Angry Goy.”)

The H-1B visa program, which Trump has vowed to reform, is unpopular among many tech workers due to concerns about its effect on wages and job security. Studies have shown that the largest recipients of H-1B visas are outsourcing firms, and that H-1B workers get paid less money than their American counterparts for the same work. But hardcore racists see an opening to turn the H-1B debate into a recruitment tool in the Valley. “A bill is being introduced in the House of Representatives that will neutralize the economic advantages these anti-American companies get from gaming the H1-b visa system,” a contributor to the Daily Stormer wrote recently. “If the cucks in Congress don’t block it, the not-so-humanitarian motives of big business in browning and third-worldizing America will be revealed.”

“Tomorrow, being a Hispanic, Black, Muslim or woman in the USA is going to be very scary,” the Latino founder of a Silicon Valley startup wrote on Facebook on election night. The post elicited an outpouring of solidarity from many Bay Area techies—but not from Andrew Torba, an alum of the Y-Combinator tech incubator, who tweeted a screenshot of the post with the line “Build the wall.”

When other Y-Combinator graduates began criticizing Torba on Facebook, he waded into the fray: “All of you: Fuck off,” he wrote. “Take your morally superior, elitist, virtue signaling bullshit and shove it.” Using an alt-right term meant to demean mainstream conservatives, he added, “I call it like I see it, and I helped meme a president into office, cucks.”

Y-Combinator soon banned Torba from its alumni network for “speaking in a threatening, harassing way towards other YC founders,” in violation of its ethics policy. Torba denied threatening or harassing YC founders and called the ban “a quintessential example of Silicon Valley censorship in action.” He later turned down my request to speak with him about the incident by posting parts of my email to him on social media with the comment “We don’t interview with fake news sites.”

Picking fights online may have helped Torba’s startup Gab, a social-media network that quickly positioned itself as a haven for alt-right-ers banned from Twitter. Gab’s frog logo is reminiscent of the alt-right mascot Pepe the Frog, and Torba has posted on Gab what could be construed as riffs on the Pepe hand signal and the alt-right’s red-pill meme. (A Gab spokesman said Torba does not identify as part of the alt-right.) Trump’s victory seemed to encourage other alt-techies to speak up, albeit pseudonymously.

“What if some cultures are better?” a commenter wrote a few days later on Y-Combinator’s popular social forum, Hacker News. “Why should we respect foreign cultures if they don’t respect our own? Why should you lose your job if you make a joke in public that some people deem offensive? Why is racism against whites and sexism against men acceptable?”

Another commenter on the thread chimed in: “Based on the tone of the comments around here lately, I’m getting a sense that HN has been populated by closeted alt-right for a while now.” (A few weeks later, Hacker News announced a “political detox week” in which political stories and threads were banned.)

A similar controversy has played out in recent months on Reddit—another young, male techie-dominated site—as r/The_Donald has risen to become one of the site’s most active subreddits. Its participants are notorious for trolling other Reddit communities and attacking people based on their religion, race, gender, and sexual identity, as Gizmodo‘s Bryan Menegus has documented. Citing two former Trump campaign officials, Politico‘s Ben Schreckinger recently reported that Trump’s campaign team privately communicated last fall with r/The_Donald’s most active users to seed new trends and feed catchy memes from the site back to Trump social-media director Dan Scavino.

The gaming vlogger Pewdiepie, whose YouTube channel is the world’s largest, made rape jokes early in his career and sometimes uses the word “slut” as an insult. Since August, he has made nine videos featuring Nazi imagery or anti-Semitic humor, according to an investigation by the Wall Street Journal. (He later apologized but also said the Journal took the remarks out of context.) In a vlog posted in January that has been viewed more than 7 million times, he jokes about getting banned from Fiverr, a website where freelancers offer their services for $5, after hiring people to make a video of themselves holding a sign that said, “DEATH TO ALL JEWS”—drawing kudos from neo-Nazis. In February, Disney’s Maker Studios said it would no longer run PewDiePie’s network and YouTube canceled the release of the second season of his reality show, Scare PewDiePie.

The alt-techies I spoke with remain aware of the risks of emerging further from the shadows. “If I posted publicly about what I told you, I’d get fired,” says Larry, the Google software engineer. “Even with Trump, there is huge cultural inertia.”

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