An anonymous essay written by a mother and her 13-year old son, pseudonym Sam, describes how one person, Sam, was sucked into the propaganda cesspit called the alt-right. Sam was able to recover his sanity after a brief, pure chance encounter with an anti-alt-right protester at an alt-right rally.
Washingtonian magazine published the essay on May 5 and followed it up a week later with some comments from the mother about the essay and public reaction to it.
Not surprisingly, some of the alt-right denies the essay is real. They consider it fabricated propaganda. That's now the standard tactic for most alt-right nationalists and racists, pro-Trump populists (probably about 98%) and most republicans (probably about 90%) when faced with facts, information and/or reasoning they dislike and cannot handle.
The descent into the propaganda cesspit: According to the essay, the son was a decent, normal kid until one day at school (8th grade) the kid was falsely accused of sexually harassing a girl: “One morning during first period, a male friend of Sam’s mentioned a meme whose suggestive name was an inside joke between the two of them. Sam laughed. A girl at the table overheard their private conversation, misconstrued it as a sexual reference, and reported it as sexual harassment. Sam’s guidance counselor pulled him out of his next class and accused him of “breaking the law.” Before long, he was in the office of a male administrator who informed him that the exchange was “illegal,” hinted that the police were coming, and delivered him into the custody of the school’s resource officer. At the administrator’s instruction, that man ushered Sam into an empty room, handed him a blank sheet of paper, and instructed him to write a “statement of guilt.”
No one called me as this unfolded, even though Sam cried for about six hours straight as staff members parked him in vacant offices to keep him away from other students. When he stepped off the bus that afternoon and I asked why his eyes were so swollen, he informed me that he would probably be suspended, but possibly also expelled and arrested.
If Kafka were a middle-schooler today, this is the nightmare novel he would have written.”
That and other traumas the school inflicted, e.g., “the administrator piled more accusations on top of the harassment charge—even implying, with undisguised hostility, that Sam and his friend were gay”, triggered Sam's descent. He found the alt-right at Reddit, 4chan and YouTube. The darkness mindlessly but happily sucked the traumatized boy in. Sam commented: “I liked them because they were adults and they thought I was an adult. I was one of them. I was participating in a conversation. They took me seriously. No one ever took me seriously—not you [Sam's mother], not my teachers, no one….They treated me like a rational human being, and they never laughed at me.”
Propaganda power: The essay comments: “I began to see how white supremacists have been benefiting from what the writer Carole Cadwalladr has called the ‘circular knowledge economy’—how search algorithms feed an internet so ravenous for content that facts are optional. But worse, I discovered how expertly extremists have leveraged the web to prey on young people who are depressed. Search for the term ‘depression’ on YouTube, and the professional-looking white supremacists lecturing on self-empowerment might have you nodding in agreement, too.”
A chance encounter and recovery: As Sam and his mom were leaving the alt-right's ‘Mother of All Rallies’ on the mall in Washington DC, they were walking past a counterprotestor:
Toward the end of our walk down the Mall, I spotted a middle-aged man wearing a T-shirt that proclaimed NO TRUMP. NO KKK. NO FASCIST USA. He stood alone on the grass, holding a small poster that featured a picture of a smiling Heather Heyer, the demonstrator murdered in Charlottesville. He’d magic-markered the words A TRUE AMERICAN PATRIOT and c-ville under her photo, above a hand-drawn heart. I asked if I could take his picture, but it was hard to choke out the words because I started crying.
I called Sam over and told him, in front of the man, that standing up for your beliefs among such a large, unfriendly crowd is the definition of courage. Sam seemed to understand. I could tell by the way he shook hands with the man—slowly and deliberately, as if they were each transferring something to the other.
As we walked to the Metro, I thanked Sam for convincing me to go to the rally so I could be reminded what real bravery looks like. “I never would have believed someone could have the guts to stand alone like that, here of all places,” I told him. “I’m so glad I saw it for myself.”
“That’s what you always tell me to do,” Sam said.
In the months that followed, Sam very gradually began to act like the kid he had been before he was falsely accused of sexual harassment. He texted more with classmates than with online strangers, and every few weekends I drove him to sleepovers with other kids. I noticed that when his new group of friends said goodbye to each other, even the boys hugged.
Thankfully, Sam moved on. By the fall of tenth grade, he seemed at peace for the first time since he’d stepped off the bus almost two years earlier, face puffy from crying, to inform me he’d broken the law.
That’s why my fears came roaring back when Sam and I heard on the radio one day that another Mother of All Rallies was taking place on the Mall that very weekend—and Sam asked if we could go. Together.
My breath caught. He must have seen my face change.
“As counterprotesters?” he asked, eyes gleaming.
B&B orig: 7/1/19
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