How a Viral Hashtag Conned Bret Easton Ellis into Leaving the Democrats

Editor’s Note: The following article was originally written in July 2018 in our digital mag Banter M. Due to the recent release of Bret Easton Ellis’s new nonfiction book, ‘White’, a collection of political essays, we are re-releasing it (with minor updates).

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by Jeremy Fassler

Let me confess a guilty secret: I subscribe to American Psycho and White author Bret Easton Ellis’s podcast on Patreon. Titled “The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast,” it is an extension of his aggrieved gen-X persona that characterizes his most famous novels. While almost every episode features an interview between him and a guest, the first 30-45 minutes consist of a monologue where he rants about the current, “politically correct” culture, lambasting millennial “snowflakes” and “social justice warriors” and complaining that liberals are ruining his dinners with their (to him) irrational hatred of Donald Trump.

Ellis’s politics (or lack thereof, as he didn’t vote in 2016 and claims to be uninterested by them) are antithetical to mine, but I subscribe to his podcast because I’m fascinated by professional naysayers, from H.L. Mencken and Christopher Hitchens to Ellis, who go against the crowd with their minority opinions. And while I disagree with Ellis on most things, he can be a thoughtful critic, as he is in this piece praising rediscovered novelist John Edward Williams. But with his most recent podcast, he goes a step too far by endorsing #WalkAway, an anti-liberal, anti-Democratic Party hashtag with an insidious history.

#WalkAway started in 2017 when Brandon Straka, a New York hairdresser, posted a six-minute video stating why he’s left the Democratic Party. The video, which cuts between a close-up of Straka and images of recent Democratic protests while melodramatic music plays, is heavy-handed but gets its message across.

“Once upon a time, I used to be a liberal,” Straka says, “because I felt I had found a tribe whose values aligned with my own.” He continues:

“I have watched as the left has allowed themselves to become hypnotized by false narratives and conclusions perpetuated by social justice warriors who misconstrue facts and evidence to confirm their own biases that everyone who does not comply with their prejudicial conclusions…is a racist, a bigot, a Nazi, a white supremacist [etc.]…The Left has now decided that its point of view is the only acceptable one, and that suppressing, censoring, and banning open dialogue and debate is virtuous and progressive.”

Straka has become a folk hero on the right, sitting for interviews with Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro, InfoWars’ Alex Jones, and Diamond and Silk, the African-American duo who were paid by the Trump campaign for their right-wing propaganda. By the end of June, the #WalkAway hashtag had exploded, resulting in a series of tweets with engagement rates of 400 to 500%, according to ArcNews’s Caroline O. The movement mainly attracted people already disdain identity politics and the mainstream liberal worldview, like Bret Easton Ellis.

Throughout the first year of the administration, Ellis dismissed Trump and Trumpism, angering his more liberal friends. “I was normalizing him, and that was not acceptable,” he recalls in his podcast. The very mention of Trump’s name made his friends look as if they “had been bitten by a rage zombie…and infected with the ‘rage’ virus…not [because] I supported something Trump had done, but because I simply hadn’t clawed my face off in anguish at something [he] had done.” This description of Democrats sounds nothing like the party I belong to, which currently holds an eight-point advantage over Republicans in the latest midterm polls, and our anger towards the Trump Administration does not come from a left-wing “rage virus,” but from our anger towards their monstrous policies.

Ellis goes on to talk about Straka’s video and the movement he has launched, excoriating “the shrieking antics [of] a party becoming unhinged and sliding into its death throes.” As he calls Kanye West’s pro-Trump tweets “genius,” mocks Terry Crews’ testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee about sexual assault, and lambasts Rachel Maddow for crying over the audio of caged children (but not the Republicans for actually caging them), he repeats to his listeners, “Walk away, walk away.”

Ellis may think he’s sticking it to the liberals and their “sentimental narratives” by endorsing #WalkAway. In reality, however, he inadvertently promoted a campaign used by the Kremlin to influence Americans ahead of the 2018 midterms, and continues to increase the chances that Donald Trump gets re-elected in 2020.

Many of the accounts that have spread the #WalkAway hashtag last June were bots, most of which were taken down. Going off the photo collages of their tweets in Caroline O’s article, they share the traits of bot accounts: their tweets are similarly worded, they have suspicious user handles like @Gary74096760, only a few followers, and no profile photos.

The amount of engagement the tweets received given the relative anonymity of these accounts were another sign of a Russian operation, confirmed by Hamilton 68, who tracked #WalkAway as the number one hashtag between the end of June and the beginning of July. When #WalkAway eventually posted advertisements with testimonies from real people on why they were leaving the Democratic Party, the photographs used were lifted from the website Shutterstock.

As for Brandon Straka, the man behind it all, he remains a mystery. He has a thin paper trail prior to the video, with only a few theater credits and GoFundMe pages for one-man shows to his name. While there’s no evidence that he’s directly involved with the Kremlin, he did appear on RT to promote the campaign, which suggests he is OK with the way they have amplified it. He may not be actively colluding with them, but he is aiding and abetting their tactics. As Mother Jones’ David Corn said in our interview:

“Imagine that you’re standing in front of a bank where there’s a robbery, but you’re told that there’s no robbery going on. If people walking by you ask what’s going on, and you tell them that there’s no robbery, you are aiding and abetting the bank robbers even if you haven’t conspired to do that with them.”

By endorsing #WalkAway, Ellis not only plays into Russia’s hands, but also into the rebranding campaign that the fringe right uses to make themselves a “hip” alternative to the left. So-called pundits like Milo Yiannopoulos (whom Ellis favorably retweeted before he was banned from Twitter) got their media platforms not because they had a coherent worldview, but because they portrayed themselves as the cool kids who cut class to smoke cigarettes. Their trendy nihilism and disdain towards identity politics tells people that by becoming a right-winger, you’re rebelling against “The Man” who tells you what you can and can’t say. Come with them and you can say whatever you want, no matter how offensive.

Despite his hatred for what he calls “victim culture,” Ellis loves to portray himself as victim whenever liberals refute his points or disagree with him. This makes him the perfect target for #WalkAway, which justifies his victim narrative by giving him someone to blame. Now he can hang with the cool kids and mock the liberals who fight Trump and the Republicans every day. In misreading the tea leaves of this fraught political moment, he does not realize that his stance only hastens his irrelevancy as the culture leaves him behind.

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