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Women, LGBT folks, and people of color have been talking for years about how “online hate” is the same thing as “real hate”. We’ve been telling you that the ultra-right are being taught to *enjoy* harming others in online spaces, and that it was breeding real world violence.
The Internet is not some walled-off, consequence free space. Whether someone is the target of a harassment/stalking campaign, being doxxed, being “swatted”, or being gunned down...the goal is the same: sadistic pleasure in harming marginalized people to feel powerful.
It’s time to confront the fact that right-wing political rhetoric is one of the roots of this problem. Cis straight white men have been indoctrinated to believe that they *belong* at the top, that anything less is discrimination, and any change is a direct assault on them.
Unfortunately for them, even despite their absurd social privilege, the vast majority of them face the same economic stagnation as the rest of us, and faced with the contrast of what they’ve been told all their lives that they *deserve*, they feel slighted and emasculated.
It’s especially uncomfortable because feeling powerless is entirely foreign to them. It’s profound cognitive dissonance, and right wing rhetoric provides them with readily accessible, vulnerable scapegoats for their “plight”: people of color, immigrants, LGBT folks, and women.
Run-away, late stage capitalism and the right-wing rhetoric that fuels it has basically harnessed the rage of straight white men with the dopamine-soaked salve of doing violence to feel powerful.
