[MarchHare]

Originally Posted by MarchHare

Live tweeting from a Trump rally in Greensboro, NC. Good lord this is beyond the pale.

https://storify.com/case_face/a-trum...-here-is-palpa

Quoting myself because there's a follow-up: the writer of those tweets has since been the subject of an online (and RL!) harassment campaign by white supremacists and some of Trump's other ardent supporters.

https://newrepublic.com/article/1345...hreatened-life

There were the True Believers: Trump supporters who have bought into the campaign’s narrative that the media can’t be trusted and is obsessed with smearing their candidate. Convinced I’d fabricated the entire story, they wanted to know How come you don’t have any videos? No photos? Where’s your proof? They demanded to know where I’d stood in the crowd. What I was wearing. Eventually, they wanted to know how much Hillary Clinton and George Soros had paid me to write my account, a question I considered answering with a snapshot of my monthly bank statement.

The self-identified Men’s Rights Advocates just seemed eager to lay into someone they perceived as a liberal “value-signaler.” They targeted my masculinity and sexual orientation, labeling me a “####” and a “libfag.” Before I knew it, I was receiving multiple email notices that I’d been signed up for a variety of hardcore gay pornography services.

By Saturday, the new cause online was a concentrated effort to try and cost me my job at Georgia Southern. The trolls planned a deluge of calls and emails to my college’s dean and Georgia’s Board of Regents. Though they were obviously unaware of the protections of academic freedom, and that a few complaints couldn’t strip me of my professorship, they said to “make things up” because “there are no rules with the left.”

Trailing not far behind were the white supremacists.

The first death threat came on Sunday from a Twitter user named “Warrior Queen,” whose handle is @SupaGoy88 and avatar is a meme of a small girl sporting a goat’s head. “National Socialist,” the bio read. “One more #### for the tree,” this person tweeted, and because I was still trying to learn about these subcultures, I asked SupaGoy88 what “the tree” meant, and received the answer:

Over the next hour there were two more, including an assessment from “Marijan,” a “European culture & heritage enthusiast” who had added me to his list “Traitorous whites (purge).” He wrote that I was “a real oven-worthy ######.” Minutes later, @Khazer_Soze (whose Twitter page has since been deleted), told me how fun it would be when “we finally get our boots on your neck.”

[...]

There’s only so much you can do about online harassment. You can block them on Twitter and Facebook, and report them in the hopes they’ll get banned. There is no absolute solution, no one thing that keeps you from living with extra vigilance or keeping an eye peeled for suspicious people. Just last night, sitting at my desk and working on a draft of this very essay, I watched an unfamiliar car circle my house a half dozen times, stopping each lap to idle at the edge of my driveway, before u-turning down the street and pulling into neighbors’ driveways and doing it all over again.

I called the police and installed a top-of-the-line security system. A week ago this would’ve seemed absurd.