By David French
Friday, October 21, 2016
I distinctly remember the first time I saw a picture of
my then-seven-year-old daughter’s face in a gas chamber. It was the evening of
September 17, 2015. I had just posted a short item to the Corner calling out
notorious Trump ally Ann Coulter for aping the white-nationalist language and
rhetoric of the so-called alt-right. Within minutes, the tweets came flooding
in. My youngest daughter is African American, adopted from Ethiopia, and in
alt-right circles that’s an unforgivable sin. It’s called “race-cucking” or
“raising the enemy.”
I saw images of my daughter’s face in gas chambers, with
a smiling Trump in a Nazi uniform preparing to press a button and kill her. I
saw her face photo-shopped into images of slaves. She was called a “niglet” and
a “dindu.” The alt-right unleashed on my wife, Nancy, claiming that she had
slept with black men while I was deployed to Iraq, and that I loved to watch
while she had sex with “black bucks.” People sent her pornographic images of
black men having sex with white women, with someone photoshopped to look like
me, watching.
When we both publicized some of the racist attacks — I in
National Review and Nancy in the Washington Post — things took a far more
ominous turn. Late the next evening — while Nancy was, fortunately, offline
attending a veterans’ charity event in D.C. — the darker quarters of the
alt-right found her Patheos blog.
Several different accounts began posting images and GIFs of extreme violence in
her comments section.
Click on a post and scroll down and you’ll see pictures
of black men shooting other black men, close-up images of suicides, GIFs of
grisly executions — the kinds of psyche-scarring things that one can’t “unsee.”
Had I not deployed to Iraq and witnessed death up close, the images would have
shocked me. I quickly got on the phone with Nancy, told her not to look at her
website, and got busy deleting comments and blocking IP addresses, but in the
meantime a few friends and neighbors had seen the posts.
The next Sunday, friends from church approached,
expressing concern not just for our safety but for theirs as well. We live in a
community where most of the streets have similar names, and it’s common for UPS
drivers, FedEx deliveries, and friends to end up at the wrong house. They
interpreted the images as threats, and they didn’t want anyone to drive into
our neighborhood, looking for the Frenches, intent on turning image into
reality.
It took days — and hundreds of IP blocks and Twitter
reports — but things finally calmed down. The racist images slowed from a flood
to a trickle, I relaxed a bit at night, and life returned, I thought, to
normal. I was wrong. Our “normal” had changed. This wasn’t the beginning of the
end of our troubles, but rather the end of the beginning.
I share my family’s story not because we are unique or
because our experience is all that extraordinary, but rather because it is
depressingly, disturbingly ordinary this campaign season. The formula is
simple: Criticize Trump — especially his connection to the alt-right — and the
backlash will come.
Erick Erickson experienced his own ordeal more than a
month before we did. After Erickson dis-invited Trump from his Red State
gathering, angry Trump supporters showed up at his house. A grown man yelled at
his children at a store, condemning their father for opposing Trump. Erickson
wrote in the New York Times that his
son is still fearful that Trump supporters will come back to their home.
In March, writer Bethany Mandel related her own
experience. After tweeting about Trump’s anti-Semitic followers, she was called
“slimy Jewess” and told that she “deserves the oven.” It got worse:
Not only was the anti-Semitic
deluge scary and graphic, it got personal. Trump fans began to “dox” me — a
term for adversaries’ attempt to ferret out private or identifying information
online with malicious intent. My conversion to Judaism was used as a weapon
against me, and I received death threats in my private Facebook mailbox,
prompting me to file a police report.
The phenomenon got some attention in the spring, when the
Daily Beast reported not just on
Mandel’s experience but also on Erickson’s, Rick Wilson’s, and others’. It’s
showing no signs of slowing down, either: Big names, small names, any names —
if you attack Trump, no matter who you are, your life might just change.
Earlier this month, Mi-Ai Parrish, president of the Arizona Republic, wrote a powerful
response to the deluge of threats and bullying prompted by the paper’s
endorsement of Hillary Clinton. An Anti-Defamation League report identified 800
journalists who’ve been targeted with anti-Semitic tweets, ten journalists
(including NR’s own Jonah Goldberg) who’ve borne the brunt of the attacks, and
one — my friend Ben Shapiro — who’s received a staggering amount of hate:
Why Shapiro? Because he represents the worst of all
possible anti-Trumpers — he’s a Jewish man who turned on the twin pillars of
the alt-right, Trump and Breitbart.com. Shapiro famously resigned from
Breitbart when it refused to support reporter Michelle Fields after then–Trump
campaign manager Corey Lewandowski grabbed and pulled Fields in the press scrum
at a Trump event.
More victims are coming forward. In a painful, vulnerable
post, commentator Mickey White writes about how the alt-right came after her
and her family, triggering a mental-health crisis. In the face of the abuse,
she sought help, but help was slow to come:
I reached out to people I thought I
could trust and to this day I’m not sure if that was the right thing to do. At
the time I was desperate though, as the trolling had increased from mere
tweets, to DMs from very random famous accounts. Then e-mails went out to
people suggesting that I might harm myself, even though I’d indicated nothing
of the sort. Anyone who responded to me would also be shamed or harassed. I was
advised that I was about to be swatted. I contacted my local sheriff and
eventually the FBI. As all of this was happening, the people behind these
accounts made an ominous threat towards a family member. My sister. The single
most important person to me in the world.
The fuse was lit.
The abuse is so common that I’ve lost count of other
reporters and writers who’ve told me, often in confidence, of troubling
late-night incidents at their homes, or of Tweets and other messages that went
far beyond garden-variety Twitter trolling into disturbing threats and
sometimes-horrifying images.
And it never seems to stop. It certainly hasn’t stopped
for us. This summer, my name leaked to the press after I spoke with Bill
Kristol about the possibility of mounting an independent run for the White
House. As expected, Trump fans reacted — this time with an assist from the
mainstream media. Politico reporter
Kevin Robillard tweeted an excerpt from an interview about my deployment to
Iraq, making it seem (wrongly) as if I had prohibited my wife from emailing or
speaking with other men while I was downrange.
Online Trump world took that tweet and transformed it
into a campaign of harassment directed against me and my wife that continues to
this day — all of it sexually charged, all of it disturbing. My wife is a tough
woman. She’s a survivor of sexual abuse and assault. The notion that she can no
longer open her Twitter timeline without seeing men boasting about having sex
with her while I was gone — or even while I’m home — is intolerable. It’s
relentless, and it often gets under even her very thick skin.
Of course, no story would be complete without a truly
ominous threat. The moment we landed back at home after I declined to run for
president, she turned on her phone to see an e-mail from a Trump fan, a veteran
who informed her that he knew the business end of a gun and told her directly
that she should shut her mouth or he’d take action.
We contacted law enforcement, she got her handgun-carry
permit, and life returned to the new normal of daily Twitter harassment, until
the day this month when an angry voice actually broke into a phone conversation between my wife and her elderly
father, screaming about Trump and spewing profanities. My wife was on her
iPhone. Her father was on a landline. That launched a brief, anxious search
inside my father-in-law’s home for a potential intruder and yet another call to
law enforcement.
Online hate has become so common that it’s almost a point
of perverse pride among some pundits. If you don’t get hateful messages, you
must not matter. If you let the hate bother you, then you must be weak. Indeed,
in a world where “feeding” the trolls only makes them stronger, admitting that
they’ve hurt you at all represents a
victory for the worst of the worst. They relish your pain, and you don’t want
them to relish anything.
But I’ll be honest: It’s miserable. There is nothing at
all rewarding, enjoyable, or satisfying about seeing your beautiful young
daughter called a “niglet.” There is nothing at all rewarding, enjoyable, or
satisfying about seeing man after man after man brag in graphic terms that he
has slept with your wife. It’s unsettling to have a phone call interrupted,
watch images of murder flicker across your screen, and read threatening
e-mails. It’s sobering to take your teenage kids out to the farm to make sure
they’re both proficient with handguns in case an intruder comes when they’re
home alone.
The misery is compounded when longtime friends and allies
dismiss my experiences and the experiences of my colleagues as nothing more
than the normal cost of public advocacy. It’s not. I have contributed to National Review for more than ten years
now, and have been deeply involved in many of America’s most emotional
culture-war battles for more than 20. I’ve never experienced anything like this
before.
I have to laugh when people accuse me of opposing Trump
because it somehow makes me rich, or because I’m currying favors with guests at
the “elite” cocktail parties that I never actually attend. I oppose Trump not
just because he’s an ignorant demagogue and a naked political opportunist, but
also because bigotry and intimidation cling to his campaign. Every campaign
attracts its share of fools, cranks, and crazies. But Trump’s candidacy has
weaponized them. Every harassing tweet and every violent threat is like a voice
whispering in my ear, telling me to do all that I can to oppose a movement that
breeds and exploits such reckless hate.
Two weeks ago Nancy and I were enjoying lunch with
friends after church. My son’s football coach asked if “things had calmed down”
after the tumult of the summer. I grabbed my phone, said “let’s see,” and
opened my Twitter mentions. I laughed at the first one, a standard profane rant
calling me a traitor for opposing Trump, but when my wife looked, her face
twisted up in shock. There they were, just below, more tweets from more men,
aimed directly at her. She burst into tears.
So, no, things have not “calmed down,” and I’m always
amused when people tell me that I belong to Never Trump because it makes me
feel good about myself. There’s nothing that gives me pleasure about this
election season. But if I can do anything to expose and oppose this latest debasement
of our politics and culture, and to defend my wife and daughter, then at least
I will have purpose.
No comments:
Post a Comment