Thread by @HoneyBeeRock

To those who wonder why I engage heavily in 1) interfaith work, 2) fighting antisemitism, 3) fighting white supremacy:

Short answer: It's the right thing to do.

Long answer: My younger brother was the closest person to me on earth. We shared the same personality, the same quirks, the same traumas. We fought constantly but were also each others biggest confidants.

When he was 12, he started playing online games.

It was innocuous at first. In fact, my mother encouraged his computer time and moved a computer into his room. It was 2004/5, and she believed that it would give him the skills to be a future programmer or engineer. She bought him books to simultaneously learn C++.

He spent all of his early teen years playing games with other people whilst teaching himself new computer languages and picking up Russian. We were proud of his developing skills since he had always otherwise had trouble succeeding in school due to extreme anger & ADHD.

He started to channel that anger into the gaming. Halo, World of Warcraft, League of Legends. His friends would come over, and they would play games, then dress up in military gear and pretend to be survivalists in the backyard. We thought it was good exercise for him.

He started spending more time in chat rooms when he was about 14 learning about warfare, and he became more interested in military history and weapons. My mother bought him a WWI Russian rifle for his birthday, and he started an antique sword collection.

His gaming was increasing at the same time. He was failing all of his classes and flunked out of his first year of high school. My mother allowed him to drop out and get his GED rather than continue with the next 3 years.

He got a part time job and applied to ITT Tech for computer programming, becoming their youngest ever student as well as getting the highest score on their entry exam in the institution's history. My mother was proud and let him spend all the time he wanted on the computer.

After all, the time he spent on the computer "was for school". It was to learn all of the programs that he needed to know to succeed. But he was still gaming. He was on 4chan and 8chan. He was on other sites that we didn't know about.

His obsession with military gear and weapons collections had only increased. By 17, he had collected more swords, guns, knives, etc. He had a stockpile of survival gear. All he wore were camo pants and military boots. He was 6'7", always angry, and always armed.

He would walk to his friend's house down the rail road tracks, carrying his WWI Russian rifle and military gear, and someone called the police. He was arrested as a public threat and then sent home once the police realized he was a kid.

It wasn't his first arrest. He had been arrested for beating up kids in middle school. He had tried to kill me when we had been teenagers even though we had still be incredibly close. It was his extreme anger that he had never been able to control. I was lucky I could outrun him.

I was away at college when I got a phone call that he had taken a machete and attacked all of the trees in our yard, hacking hundreds of times into them so severely in a fit of rage that they weren't expected to survive.

I got home for break and stared out over the ancient trees with my step-father, and all he could do was shake his head and mumble, "What makes a person so angry? Why is it so deep inside of him?"

We had tried counselling from the age of 6. We had tried medication for ADHD, depression, bipolar. We had tried no medication. We had tried grounding him. We had tried absolute freedom. Nothing seemed to work.

One day, my mother found his stash of survival gear in his closet. She knew that he had a stash, but what she hadn't expected was to find hundreds and hundreds of dollars worth of military grade gear that had been bought with her money.

She found the receipts still attached and realized that he was planning something, but she didn't know what. When he returned from work that day, she made him immediately return all of it. Then she told him to call our dad and tell him to set up a room. He was being kicked out.

A few weeks later, my mother gave my brother her car, he packed it up with his belongings, and my dad helped him drive down to Florida to live with him and finish his degree at the ITT Tech in Miami.

While there, he was left largely unsupervised but without the cash flow that my mother had provided. He couldn't buy the weapons and military gear that he used to, but he had unlimited access to the chat rooms and gaming of before.

The people in those gaming sites and chat rooms fed into his anger. They supported his hatred of his family--particularly of my parents. They supported his hatred of his ethnically diverse neighbors. They told him that he was right and everyone else was wrong.

My brother had been on this path since the age of 12, but as an 18 year old, he was now fully supported by a large group of white supremacists who agreed with everything he did. He grew from puppet to leader as he became a handsome, blond, blue eyed, 6'7", muscled, young man.

I was 2000 miles away in college as my brother become a poster child of the early alt-right. Our conversations over Skype were still so jovial. I remember writing in my diary in 2011 that he was one of my best friends. He lived 2 distinct lives.

But those lives crossed over. His wife, whom he met online, was in the movement, and signs began to appear--on Facebook, in conversations. He would say things that were strangely anti-feminist. He would seek to offend. He would post racist memes. The little became bigger.

In 2012, we had a massive fight. Admittedly, I was responsible for it because I had poked fun at him over something on Facebook, but I hadn't expected him to go the lengths he did. He blocked me from his life entirely. It took years to regain any form of contact with him.

When he finally spoke to me in bits and pieces years later, I didn't recognize the person I saw. He was cold. He had always been hot headed and angry, but now that anger was something different. It was calculated, sharp, and directed.

When I had access to his Facebook again after 3 years, I was shocked. It was covered in alt-right memes and posts. Racist, homophobic, transphobic, antisemitic, antimuslim, misogynistic. Coded symbols that I now know refer to nazis and nazi sympathizers.

He lived with his wife in California by this point, away from the rest of the family on purpose, and he would fight with us over Facebook. He'd post something egregiously racist, we would call him out, and then he would fight us, unfriend, and block until no family was left.

He stopped calling the few family members he had liked. He stopped returning phone calls--even the ones about deaths or near-deaths in the family. It would take an average of 8 months to reach him. We had to ask him if we were invited to his wedding.

He purposefully didn't show up to my wedding at all because it was a Muslim wedding. I honestly didn't want him there anyway. By this point, I knew that he stockpiled so many weapons that I was afraid he may try to attack us at the masjid or reception.

Closer to the wedding date, I purposefully did not give him the information about the time/place of the masjid wedding in case he changed his mind to show up or sent someone else in his stead. It was actually a relief that he said his plane got cancelled so that he couldn't come.

Every time that I hear about a shooting in southern California, I look for a name about the shooter, wondering if it's my brother. Every time one of my family members gets a call from the Feds about his student loans going unpaid, we wonder if it's really about that.

My brother became someone I don't want to know. Someone who adds a net negative to this world in what he does online and possibly in his community. And this is something I have to think about every time I see his photo in my parent's home. Every time I think about our childhood.

So why do I care about interfaith work? About fighting antisemitism and white supremacy and taking down nazis and calling it out? Because I have seen what it does to a family. I have seen radicalization happen, slowly and sufficatingly over years.

I have seen the absolute heartbreak of a mother and grandfather who lost their son, their favorite grandson. I have gone through night terrors for years brought on by simply having a conversation about him. I have seen the hurt and suffering that he has caused.

And when someone that close to you becomes the worst of us, then you want to do everything in your power to stop the cycle. You want to right any wrongs possible an become the antithesis to their being.

That is why I fight.