By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick
Screenshot by Whirly Fizzle of a 4chan "particle attack" in the virtual world of Second Life.
Five Years Since GamerGate
So apparently it's the five-year anniversary of GamerGate, as we learn from a shiny retrospective article in the New York Times, with distracting, annoying arrow graphics that I guess are supposed to feel like "a game."
The events that started Gamergate began 5 years ago today. We put together a package with a series of pieces from @sarahjeong @BriannaWu @BostonJoan and myself that trace its influence on the internet and politics today. I hope you'll give it a look. https://t.co/oMghdN9Qss
— Charlie Warzel (@cwarzel) August 15, 2019
I read through the pieces and they're all fine, but I should explain why I never got involved on either side of GamerGate.
The immediate reason was that GamerGate more or less started in August 2014, but I was terribly busy then, covering Russia's invasion of Ukraine, a war that had become more graphically tied to Russia in that summer when Russian soldiers' ID had been recently found in the Donbass and the Battle of Ilovaysk was fought with thousands lost -- which ended with Putin promising a safe retreat but then Russian soldiers and Russian-backed combatants shooting at fleeing Ukrainian soldiers.
So social media skirmishes didn't feel that important to me.
And I felt that while I generally took the side of the feminists, those complaining about the culture of political correctness had a point, as well. I think the writer Cathy Young has done an excellent job of covering GamerGate critically in this vein (and Google her other pieces to understand how some of the protagonist "Social Justice Warriors" fueled this fire). I felt I couldn't add to it without a lot of careful work -- and some times in life you need to let issues pass.
But there was more. When I saw the first few rounds of this, I felt like it was deja vu all over again. I had already been blogging about virtually the same issues for years before that in my Second-Life related blog. Because all those hateful, misogynist, racist, vicious assholes that became known to the world in GamerGate were already long since known in the gamers' world, and specifically Second Life, a virtual world that is an open platform and not a game, but which comes out of the culture of Silicon Valley geeks that spawned the GamerGate nihilism.
And I felt that I simply couldn't wade in and try to explain to people that the harassment of feminists and gays by these extremists was not the only story -- nor was it even about the obnoxious political correctness of the SWJ zealots. The extremism was only the most visible part of a story that meant a culture threatening all of us. So much of the press coverage and comment on online harassment takes the form of featuring vulnerable groups who have suffered, and that's fine, but I feel it misses the larger story of how this can engulf any of us or all of us. That realization shouldn't detract from the victims and their vocal struggles but encourage more human solidarity. Sadly, it generally has the opposite effect, and the nihilists have been able to play on that, as I shall explain.
Virtual "Griefing"
I experienced horrific harrassment, known as "griefing" in SL, just like these women, but not because I was a female game developer or a prominent feminist. I'm only a very moderately prominent translator and human rights activist. I actually had a male avatar in SL, although many knew my real identity as a woman because I was a critical blogger and spoke to mainstream media. One of the ways my identity was outed 15 years ago was because I was critical of just this very awful culture -- and doxing was the way people like me were intimidated from continuing to criticize geek culture -- which is the seedbed of GamerGate and much else.
I say "people," because I think this isn't only about feminists or women -- although I'm all for women's rights. I think it goes much farther, and it's frustrating to see GamerGate and other similar topics like Steubenville treated as they are only about feminism -- women shamed or harassed or even raped in real life. When the 8chan and related mass shooters who have been affiliated with this awful culture go out and massacre people in real life, they don't only kill women -- they kill men and children. too. Yes, there have been some useful articles pointing out that misogyny and domestic abuse of partners or family members are often part of the mass shooter's profile. But that's not all of it, and I get tired trying to make this point.
They kill everybody, and their ideology isn't just against women, or racial minorities, or LGBT, but really anybody who gets in their way who is for a civil society or just happens to be a random bystander and not part of them.
Jump, Tor Will Save You
And some of the most sophisticated channers play on the very keen interest in women and gays as victims to lie about their harassment of people for other reasons. I vividly recall the story of the female Tor developer (about whom I wrote in my samizdat book because she was once on staff of Linden Lab, creators of Second Life). There was a man who used a pseudonym on Twitter who was critical of the extremist geeks around Tor who were soft on hackers like Manning and Snowden, indifferent to copyright, and fierce about using DDoS attacks or doxing to harass or out critics of their way of life. He was among the few vocal skeptics about Tor's exaggerated claims for privacy or social change to be achieved by this software that was curiously first incubated and still funded today by the US military.
So this man who was just a blogger made a sarcastic crack to this Tor dev -- the kind they might make themselves. When she posted something about going up in the Washington Monument, he wrote something like that she "should jump off and open Tor, it would break her fall". Everybody who had watched him criticize Tor -- the program and the elitist hacker culture around it -- and her angry responses knew that this was just a sarcastic joke. It wasn't urging her to really jump off a real building. It was an attack against her Tor evangelism, not her womanhood. You know, it was virtual, the way hackers always say everything online is?
But seeing an opportunity to exploit Twitter sentiment, this Tor queen relentlessly tracked him down, and used various hacker tricks to delve into his photos posted, which is one way to geolocate a person or find more about them. Eventually she discovered his real identity -- he was a pharmacist in New Jersey, not "one of them" -- not in the world of corporate- or government-funded coding and even hacking for fun or profit to "make a better world". So she contacted his employer and claimed falsely he had written a sexist, violent thing on line. She rallied all the feminists to gang up on him. It cost him his job.
Tor's Jacob Appelbaum
I know what that was like because the way I first found out about Jacob Appelbaum, the aggressive and popular Tor evangelist for many years, was when I simply questioned his claim on Twitter that the infamous Apache video, which supposedly portrayed callous American soldiers gleefully killing people and even deliberately shooting and wounding children in a van in Iraq. I said -- actually, much as the New Yorker implied only it was more cool for them to do so -- that the video presentation was tendentious and misleading -- and in fact the soldiers mistook the journalists for combatants because they travelled with armed men, and they had no idea there were children in a van (later helped by a US soldier as it happened) because they could not see into it. (Look at the video. You cannot see into it. If soldiers later said it was a terrible idea to bring your children to a battlefield (it was) and pick up wounded combatants (it was), that doesn't mean they could see into the van -- they commented after the fact.)
For my sins, I was deluged with 20,000 hate posts on Twitter that came in incredibly fast, from real people in Jake's posse and botnets that he wrangled. My blog site was bombarded and I began to get all those nuisance phone calls in RL. I was amazed at the deluge. This is how they did it. They used force to drive people offline who disagreed with them. This was very familiar to me from SL. Now it was in RL.
Ultimately, years later, it came as no surprise to me that the board of Tor fired Jake after multiple #MeToo stories involving his sexual harassment, shaming and even rape of women and men. There were dozens of cases. The Tor dev on Twitter who had ruined the life of the young pharmacist over his "misogyny" wasn't among those who called out Jake. That's the irony.
To me, it made sense that someone who used force, and massive harassment and shaming online in a debate could carry this into real life into bullying work colleagues and even sexually harassing them. Why is this so hard to understand? No, it doesn't mean everybody who crashes your blog server is a rapist, but some are and it goes together. It's the culture. Pay attention. And when I tried to get this across -- that Jacob Appelbaum, helper of the felon and fugitive Snowden, as not only a misogynist but a threat to anyone and to civil society as well, it didn't fit. #MeToo is how this can be understood now, and only that way.
Why the Griefers Went After Me
In the virtual world, I became a target not for feminism, although as I said, I support women's rights. The reason they decided to go after me is because first, I expressed enormous revulsion at what some of them had built in Second Life on their sim -- or simulator, a representation of an island or contiguous mainland where you can put buildings or trees or furniture or animated objects like cats or moving vehicles. They made a replica of the World Trade Center on 9/11 with people falling and dying and put slogans like "I'm falling for you" which outraged and saddened many people on the SL forums. The developers of SL did not remove this objectionable content -- they felt there should be free expression -- like Twitter or Facebook -- and they didn't think even if it offended families who lost their loved ones or just any caring person it didn't matter.
When I said Linden Lab shouldn't allow the incitement of violence -- which in my view for a private company need not hew to a strict First Amendment jurisprudence but include the glorification of terrorism and nihilism about violence -- I was singled out for attacks.
So some 14 years ago, when I made a 4th of July picnic open to the public on a sim where I had a "Coney Island" style build with a boardwalk and picnic tables, these griefers - day-old alt accounts with names like "Mohammed" who were hardly Muslim -- flew airplanes around the site and then hurled bombs on the location with scattered a lot of fire prims, i.e. objects looking like fire which then crashed the sim.
And then they never let up for years and years -- about seven, I reckon -- where they harassed me, put giant caricatures of my RL self on sims and feigned obscene acts -- even showing dead versions of my RL self with broken glasses nearby, like Piggy in Lord of the Flies.
They bombarded the sims where I had built a community with people who shared the cost of the sim by paying rent, spewing particles with pictures of sadistic acts, anti-semitic slogans and memes, racist images, abortions, and so on. They mocked Bill Cosby and his Jello ads (long before his own sexual abuse was prosecuted); they mocked Jews by the Wailing Wall; they claimed AIDS was spreading. Early on, I was the first to make a community where LGBT were welcome, and where people with organizations opposing violence against women and helping victims could have free storefronts. These areas were deluged with "grief prims" -- objects on physics that scattered all around and crashed the sim, forcing people to move out.
So they attacked not just those in certain readily-identifiable vulnerable groups, but those who abuse-reported such acts, or who criticized them and demanded action to stop them.
The Enemy of Society
Because I was vocal about publicizing these attacks -- which had little reaction from Linden Lab at the time (and later I found out even involved some of their staff and friends of their staff in those early days), other victims of attacks told me they experienced the same thing but they feared talking about it. There were designers with dress stores who were bombarded with fire prims and had their items copied ("copybotted" as the expression went); there were Christians in Bible studies; there were people who happened to make a Middle American style house with a white picket fence. They didn't know what hit them. I found some people who were middle-aged and were experiencing the "wonders" of online gamer culture for the very first time and were outraged and bewildered about how to stop it.
Soon I realized that likely I had come to their attention even before the 9/11 incident. Once when I had seen a bunch of people goofing around on some land for sale by Anshe Chung, one of SL's "land barons," putting up giant penises and the usual litter and slogans ranging from obnoxious to racist or anti-gay, I abuse-reported it. Anshe would leave "autoreturn" turned off on her land because she wanted to enable prospective customers to measure their houses before buying. But this amenity only lead to griefers -- who are always looking for holes in the system like this to abuse - to put out junk.
These griefers drove customers away -- although the amounts of loss were measured in dimes and half dollars. But they also drove away friends and blogging colleagues who disagreed that publicizing this was the right way to go. And they drove away people who used to come to a regular discussion group I ran every Friday, both people I knew and members of the public who just responded to a notice.
So while they were the ones who should have become the outcasts for cynically making falling 9/11 buildings or harassing a wide range of people from born-again Christians to gays to fashion merchants, they made me the outcast because I "didn't know how to have fun" and "took myself too seriously".
Why?
The New Totalitarians
Because they want to run the Internet their way, and discourage even violently anyone who views the uses of it differently. So those truly advocating free speech and free association for any purpose, whether religious or commercial or sexual (i.e. not just for "sandboxing" and "creativity" and extremist hate speech), were enemies of the people. This is why I call them totalitarians. They are ruthless.
That is, people who tried to create and sell items, or engage in commerce even at this small level, or who had public discussions increasing knowledge and participation were all anethema to the worldview of these creeps. They thought everything on the Internet should be free and never sold and happily stole copyrighted items (which is often the only way they ever got expelled from the world, only to re-spawn again on alts and get banned again). They zealously believed that people who tried to do serious things in this virtual world -- "srius biznez" they sneered -- anything from Bible Study or self-help groups for the disabled or political discussions -- should be stopped so they wouldn't take themselves seriously. The Internet should only be for anarchic, riotous fun, and if the servers got crashed or an artist's livelihood was stolen -- so what? The Internet had to be made free...BY FORCE.
I got this insight from a long-time writer about SL whose avatar name was Urizenus Sklar -- in real life a linguistics philosopher named Peter Ludlow who is now disgraced with a campus sexual abuse case which bore many signs of a witch hunt with the usual lack of due process. He was not a friend, and I used to argue vehemently about various virtuality issues -- he tended to be forgiving of the griefers and even provide them haven under the theory that they were "innovative" and "interesting to study". But he did grasp that they were about Bolshevik-like control -- achieved by blocking others from a whole range of activity they didn't like, through force.
The Enablers
And that attitude among scholars -- I would call them "the griefer professors" was all too common. They would fawn over these vandals -- the company should have really pursued prosecution of them for all the real income they lost -- and call them "transgressive" or berate their critics who wouldn't let them "poke fun" and "took themselves too seriously". A hallmark of these goons was what Uri called "word salad," i.e. gabbling distractive nonsense or outright lying about their real deeds. They would insist that they were only poor minority students in a commuter college who were engaged in "study" and accuse people who abuse-reported them of being "racist" -- but they were all white boys, the children of wealthy parents in many cases, some even wealthy themselves. Some went on to get high-paying tech jobs in places like Intel.
It wasn't about scholarship -- although they dragged the Higher Chronicle of Education into their insane false narrative and many other blogs by sociologists or articles in mainstream news by journalists who should know better.
That's why when I see a video like this coming from CNN today, I wonder where CNN was 15 years ago, when they thought this was merely funny. This shouting Nazi slogans and spewing anti-women and anti-gay slogans and memes wasn't really "srius" -- it was just meta. So meta that it wasn't real.
I felt that as with human rights work, the best thing to do in these cases was to investigate and document the actions, abuse report them and get other victims to AR them, and then ignore them. Logging off when they descend on you is the best way to break their attention. But I also think -- unlike others who mouth the slogan "don't feed the trolls" -- that documenting and publicizing to keep the record is valuable just as with human rights violations or acts of terrorism. Because that prevents them from lying about what they do.
Steubenville
That's really important because they do lie strenuously about what they do -- just as with Steubenville, Anonymous claimed they were there to champion the rights of a victim of rape by football team members. In reality, they prevented a just prosecution, ended up outing the victim's name, and ruined the lives of people like the coach or town officials with false accusations. I and a few other bloggers tried to point out that the denizens of 4chan in Anonymous, who spent time on horribly misogynist forums trading dreadful pictures, were hardly the folks to be championing rape victims' rights. (Yes, Lee Stranahan in that era of 2013 while at Breitbart did a good job on this story, although nowadays his conspiracy shtick is a horror and he even works for Sputnik). Yes, people love to tell you how random Anonymous is -- and then how precisely different Anonymous is from 4chan or lulsec or whatever. Unimpressed -- too many virtual and real experiences where I see they are the same people.
I saw instantly this was about disrupting the justice system -- just because. And the real effects just weren't acknowledged. As Frank Bruzzese, an assistant prosecutor for Jefferson County, Ohio who assisted in the early stage of the investigation, said:
“The internet lynch mob did damage to their own stated goal of helping the victim by putting her in an international spotlight that only served to humiliate her. Anonymous claimed to want justice but their threats had the opposite effect; by calling for the scalps of eyewitnesses and other completely innocent people, the result was a hampered prosecution where people were afraid to testify and where the judge was forced to grant three witnesses immunity.”
It was a scam -- taking a popular issue that got many people angry and running with it to produce chaos and disruption far beyond the supposed original cause of the girl. Twitter amplified and metastasized this insanity beyond belief. (Steubenville was an early example of how these online terrorists seized on the rampant interest and sensitivity about "bullying" to accuse anyone who criticized them of "being a bully".) Ultimately, one of the Anonymous actors around Steubenville was caught and jailed for two years for hacking and exposing private information (and later violated the terms of his release) - but as you can see from the Rolling Stone coverage of the story, he is still portrayed as a tragically-misunderstood hero who "got more time than the rapists". Yes, arguably the rapists should get "more time" and nothing exonerates them. But why is it ok to hack and crash web sites, hack into the coach's phone, or the web-master's site and accuse him of child molestation falsely and ruin his life? For the hacker, the entire town of Steubenville was guilty of creating football glory culture that lead to the drunken parties and the abuse of the young girl? But that's not justice. Threatening involved eyewitnesses so that they have to be granted immunity is not justice. Using Internet incitement to parachute in mobs of goons in masks from all over to a small town isn't "justice". At one point the Anonymous hacker (his real name was Deric Lostutter) tweeted, " “Hey I’m running your whole town from the comfort of my toilet,” he tweeted, “How’s that feel?”
Would you want that to be the way justice is always run in America? Well, then.
P.S. William Rhinaman, the IT director for the Steubenville schools, was sentenced for tampering with and destroying evidence in the case, so it's not as if this small town justice system, consumed with f0otball culture or no, is incapable of prosecuting those guilty of obstructing justice in a rape case, even in the face of outrage from his colleagues. They do not need hackers to help them do this.
It's nearly impossible to get across how wrong Anonymous and its spin-offs were throughout Steubenville because neither social media or mass media covered their real actions or thought about their implications, and if you were the slightest bit critical of their Bolshevik methods, you were seen as excusing rapists and bro culture.
Feminists praised Anonymous and still do to this day over Steubenville, although that is terribly misguided. Fake concern for the girl was only the hook for mayhem extremist attention-seeking -- and they bought into it and helped perpetuate it. I suffered some of the worst abuse of my life -- with Anonymous making one of those eerie videos on YouTube against me, and deluging me with hate posts on Twitter, some of which I noticed were coming from Russians (and this was in 2012, long before the presence of disruptive Russians in the 2016 elections was acknowledged). These were either live people or bots, as I saw the Russian mistakes they made in their English or actual words in Cyrillic. So a key reason I didn't get involved in GamerGate is that I really wore myself out trying to explain a nuanced point of view that both supported the victim and condemned the small-town football culture that enabled it but also objected to justice being served this way by Anonymous.
This is why the DNC hack felt like old hat to me -- remember the enormous hatred and skepticism that anyone who believed Russia was involved suffered in the early days? This came mainly from hackers who supported Snowden. With Steubenville, I had goons calling my mother-in-law and sending pizzas that weren't paid for and all the rest. Months and months of it -- yet I had no feminists standing up for me because they were too busy applauding what they thought were these wonderful crusading hackers saving a young girl terribly harmed by the football players for life (although several of them were sentenced to jail for a year and lost college opportunities).
Steubenville keeps spawning tragedy - when justice is disrupted and vigilantism takes its place to the applause of feminists, it only causes feelings of unjustice to build and spawns more tragedy, which is arguably rooted in the historical injustice of racism long before the Internet.
Women's organizations and the burgeoning use of social media could have fought the injustice of a football team rape fairly -- anonymous men in masks who caused mayhem and harm to numerous people in their supposed zeal to advocate for the victim were actually not needed and got in the way.
When I tried to explain even long before Steubenville that these Anonymous and 4chan griefers were "like" terrorists, I was ridiculed even by the journalist who interviewed me for a cover story in Wired about this phenomenon 11 years ago. I remember this journalist told me to get a much bigger and baggier blouse on -- I went and found a maternity smock, although my children were in grade school already. He then photographed many pictures with my son who happened to be there, but then snapped one where I was in the kitchen, with my back to the camera, as if I wanted to be anonymous. (Ridiculous, since I had agreed to give an interview with my own name.) This creep even photographed me looking through the chain of my locked door. He made all these photos with a kind of distractive patter so I didn't realize at first that I was merely being set up to look stupid -- like some middle-aged soccer mom online who was afraid of kids who said bad words. In the end, only the picture of me in a huge blouse with my back to the camera was used -- and that picture became a meme literally served up to me millions of times in hate posts, particle attacks, and griefer objects of every kind. I would log on to find giant versions of it; people would poke it in my face on a sign at meetings.
I was supposed to laugh this off, of course. But they would also text me photos of my real-life doorway, they called me at home and played the Soviet national anthem, they hounded me with social media posts that they could see me with an umbrella in the rain on an actual street where I lived when it was raining. (They picked up the Soviet theme because of my Russian work and because I compared them to Bolsheviks.)
Believe me, I know the difference between virtual characters online using terrorist-like methods, and the real terrorists who massacred my neighbours on 9/11, or the Bolsheviks who tortured my children's grandfather and uncle to death in the Gulag. I don't need help on this, truly.
I said "like" because the dynamics are the same, the culture of nihilism is the same; the "end justifies the means" is the same; the defiance of the rule of law is the same; the glorification of violence and meaningless are the same. And so on. I wrote reams on this because I thought it had to be studied. I thought it would spread beyond the game and virtual world realms. I saw Second Life as a kind of incubator or petri dish of this awful phenomenon. And I worried about what would happen when it spread and go off-line.
And it did.
The Culture of Silicon Valley Geekdom
I don't mean that it spread from Second Life, which was an exoticism with perhaps only a million sign-ups and a 100,000 concurrency and returning users in its heyday. But some of the best tech minds in the Valley came through SL (many of them can now be found at Facebook or Google or Tor or any number of other geek berths) because the problem of streaming virtuality, compression, intellectual property, governance -- these were all available to work on and study -- and still are -- in this unique setting. The devs and their favoured friends tolerated and even coddled the griefers because they were only somewhat more extreme versions of themselves. When people talk of the awful culture of GamerGate or more broadly of gamers who turn violent, they seldom contemplate the culture of the devs - which is the same culture that produced social media and all its woes. So the patterns there are like what you can see elsewhere -- with precursors to many phenomena we saw later, such as the WikiLeaks and Snowden hacks, the issues of customer privacy, how to balance hate speech prosecution with allowing freedom of expression, and so on.
And whether people want to hear it or not, that culture comes from the people who make tech and engineered their culture into the tech, who first scorned copyright and browbeat those who wanted to protect it, then scorned privacy by tolerating doxing and careless maintenance and only claimed to be "doing something" when Congress and law-enforcement came calling, and who scorned the virtual violence of griefing or crashing servers or deluging users with bots and wrung their hands over 8chan saying they couldn't act because of Section 230 or the First Amendment.
I suppose the series Silicon Valley, which I've been watching (I rarely watch movies and don't have a TV) is helpful in conveying some of the violent, nihilist, misogynist, hateful culture of the bros and the VCs who fund them, committing fraud and felony along the way.
Online Goes Offline
I was very struck by a human rights training I once went to by a colleague from ADL who described how a certain percentage of the anti-Semites online go offline into real life and commit vandalism and even assaults of Jews. (Note to various insane Wikipedia editors and offshoots and the shady companies who put "real" background files on line: I have never worked for ADL -- I only attended one of their trainings while working at the International League for Human Rights, and I never worked as an IT specialist, although I often did network troubleshooting in our small office because we couldn't afford expensive IT help).
So it was no surprise to me at all that 4chan devolved into 8chan and some of these people actually committed mass shootings. Does that mean that everybody who steals content or hacks somebody's account or crashes their server "is" a terrorist or mass murderer? That mass shooters "start with" illegal music downloads and anonymous sexist harassment and graduate to terrorism? Of course not. But some of them do. And the cultural milieu is there, and causes a range of worrisome damages that stem from the same ideology of nihilism and extremist tech anarchy.
And here we all are. And that's why I don't want to be afraid to study violent games as a cause of this culture; or the tolerance for hate speech and violence on social media; or to demand that platforms lose their Section 230 safe haven as part of the complicated path to curbing this hateful culture. Curbing it, providing alternatives to it -- that's the best that can be done, as it is too late to stop it. It is in all tech; it is in the culture of all technologists, whether they manifest the extreme variants of it or not. This needs more critical study -- and not by griefer professors or feminist authors who defend the female devs of GamerGate but praise Anonymous in Steubenville -- it needs more than the lawyers for Facebook or the lobbyists for Google deciding what is permissible or not about it.
You see, people are still seeing the phenomenon of mass shootings as "white supremacism" or Nazism only, and blaming Trump (who does deserve blame in my view, especially for the massacre of the Jews in the Pittsburgh synagogue over the issue of refugees). But I believe this is wider and deeper and threatens us all because it is about technologists who made themselves like machines to get computers to work, and then make all of us machines to a small or larger extent. As the saying goes, the fear of the future isn't so much that robots will become humans and take over, but that humans will become robots and take over.
Human Solidarity
The best way of combating the violent culture of anarchic nihilism is human solidarity. Believing someone when they say they are wronged and standing by them, instead of telling them that they take themselves too seriously or should "get a life". (But also respecting that a victim's story is not always enough evidence to deny a confirmation or sentence a suspect; facts and corroboration are needed). The women in GamerGate sure had to "get a life" -- hiding in fear of serious death threats and having to completely alter their routines, living spaces, and even jobs. So many people in minority and transgender communities in particular have suffered terribly from these extremists. The Internet should remain free and not be ceded to these goons. They are the new totalitarians.
I can't say it enough although I don't have an audience to hear this -- GamerGate or 8chan or similar cultural manifestations you can find in Anonymous or groups like the Proud Boys are not just about white supremacy or misogyny or anti-gay harassment although those are very terrible and the most obvious manifestations of their being. They are against civil society under the rule of law, which means they hurt all of us. This isn't to dilute the very salient features of this awful phenomena related to very real fascism and Nazism that 10 years ago we were told was "meta". They are Nazis and it's more than fine to focus on this.
But if you think that if they're just white supremacists and you're white or straight and it doesn't concern you, you're wrong. Because they are against all of the humanness of humanity and the cure -- human solidarity and caring -- gives you a real idea of that terrible disease. They will come for you, and not only because you're in the target groups or you stand up for the target groups but because you're not a member of their posse. How to break up and stop the posses before they engulf us is the challenge of the Internet which is now thoroughly embedded in real life.
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