Thread by @socialistdogmom

i spent all day trying to write about a terrorist and all i managed to do was give myself a panic attack about the nature of terrorism.

it is unsurprising to have learned that james fields, who committed an act of white supremacist terrorism in charlottesville two years ago, was actively engaged in posting racist, antisemitic content across multiple social media platforms. of course he was. i'm not shocked.

but seeing his slur-laden tweets & racist memes on the monitor in court yesterday, as some of his victims cried softly in the gallery, was a near perfect inverse of the moment i realized the pittsburgh synagogue shooter was someone whose racist posts i'd read before.

the problem with the posts made by fields & bowers (aside from their vile content) is that they aren't unique. it's impossible to look at them & say, here, here's where you can tell he was actually going to do it. here's how he's different from 100 other guys posting racist memes

and still not a day has passed since october that i don't think of those 11 people murdered in their synagogue and wonder why i skimmed through bowers' posts months earlier, saved a few that contained interactions with my frequent harassers, those that mentioned me, and moved on.

i know there's nothing i could have done differently. you can't just phone up the FBI and say 'hey, this guy is threatening to do some genocide!' because they'd likely respond, 'yeah, we've been on 4chan before, they all are.'
you just can't tell who really means it.

in fields' own defense team's sentencing memorandum, in which they asked for mercy, his attorney wrote that he took joy in the engagement he got online by posting increasingly provocative comments. it's a competition to see who can be the edgiest online.

it's spilling out into the real world. the christchurch mosque shooting was livestreamed. the chans lit up with users commenting about his 'high score.' and the video, which i regret watching, really did look like a first person shooter video game.

they're running out of ways to outdo each other online. there are meme groups dedicated solely to holocaust denial memes. the irony poisoning is giving way in some quarters to unironic support for what used to be just the worst thing posters could think of to shock each other.

so who will take the next logical step from fantasizing online about murdering jews, muslims, queer people, women, drag queens, black and brown people, immigrants, and whoever else they blame for their problems? i just can't tell.

one chat i monitor regularly has at least two members whose identities i've been able to confirm who have documented histories of firearm related offenses. will they take it to the next level and shoot someone? will i ever be able to live with myself when they do?

i make a lot of jokes. sometimes you might think the jokes are in poor taste & i apologize for that. there's a lot of compartmentalization & dissociation. it's easier to stay a half step removed from the reality of what i'm looking at.

if i always felt the gravity of the fact that people died & will continue to die & maybe i could prevent a slaughter if i were a better researcher, if i could just figure out some secret language of racist memes and what makes a joke a precursor to murder...

if i sat every day with the knowledge that most of them are joking but certainly at least one of the men posting avidly about his fantasy of raping me to death and killing my dogs actually means it and definitely knows where i live, i'd fall apart.

i fell apart a little today. i saw the thing i worry about every day played out for me in reverse - the carnage having already occurred, then rewinding through the murderer's posts in the months before he became a terrorist.