The story of Lane Davis, a GamerGater turned alt-right-troll turned murderer -- of his own father, no less -- is unbelievable. Which is to say living under Trumpolini,
in many ways perfectly predictable:
"Last October, a conservative blogger discovered a local news story about Chuck Davis’s killing [Lane's father]. He spread the word on Twitter, including another shocking detail: Before stabbing his father to death, Lane had loudly accused his parents of being 'leftist pedophiles.'
There’s a whole universe in those two words, one that Americans unfamiliar with the rhetoric of the internet culture wars might not recognize.
The right-wing media has long tried to discredit identity politics by claiming the concept is a slippery slope that ends in the recognition of inherently ridiculous groups. A few years ago, though, a new class of social media bomb-throwers started to seize on pedophilia as a particularly inflammatory identity. On Twitter and in places like 4chan's /pol/ board, they began to claim that acceptance of pedophilia was the true, secret goal of liberal politics, the hellish endpoint to Black Lives Matter and transgender bathroom laws. This line of attack became frighteningly literal in 2016, when a man with a gun showed up at a Washington, DC, pizza parlor that online conspiracy theorists claimed was the hub of a massive pedophilia ring — run by Democratic Party officials. A month later, another man showed up at a nearby pizzeria claiming he was there to 'save the kids' and 'finish what the other guy didn't.'
That’s the language Lane reportedly summoned as he was about to stab his father. A spate of articles quickly followed, thick with a 'murder by internet' subtext."
How do we deal with a significant number of young, conservative, angry men who are content to live within their own hideous fantasy worlds of racism and ressentiment?
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