archive.is/mH046 washingtonian.com/2019/05/05/what-happen.. when my son Sam,* who was then 14, asked me to take him to the Mother of All Rallies on the Mall in September 2017, I said no. The pro-Trump event was billed as a demonstration to preserve “traditional American culture,” and white supremacists were expected to show up in force. Not only was this not how I wanted to spend a Saturday—like almost everyone I knew, I’d been devastated by the 2016 election results—but I had serious concerns about safety. At Charlottesville’s Unite the Right rally only a month earlier, a neo-Nazi had killed counterprotester Heather Heyer. I couldn’t shake off the shock of her violent murder, or of watching men with tiki torches shout racist slogans across the University of Virginia grounds. Police there were unable to protect citizens; I couldn’t reasonably expect this gathering in DC to be any different. The problems had started when Sam was 13, barely a month into eighth grade. In the taxonomy of our local public school, his close group of friends was tagged edgy and liberal: One of them came out as gay during a class presentation; another identified as trans for a while. Their group-text chain pulsed 24-7 with observations about alternative music and the robotic conformity of other classmates. Standard stuff for sensitive middle-schoolers. 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.” At a meeting two days later with my husband, Sam, and me, the administrator piled more accusations on top of the harassment charge—even implying, with undisguised hostility, that Sam and his friend were gay. He waved in front of us a statement from the girl at the table and insisted that Sam would need to defend himself against her claims if he wanted to prove his innocence. But the administrator refused to reveal the particulars of the complaint (he had also blacked out identifying details, FBI-style) and then hid the paperwork under a book. He declared that it was his primary duty, as a school official and as a father of daughters, to believe and to protect the girls under his care. Sam agreed, reluctantly, to write a letter of apology to the girl who’d reported him so that the debacle would come to an end. But no hoped-for resolution materialized. Instead, Sam’s sweet earnestness, his teenage overconfidence, even his tremulous determination in the face of unjust authority drained away, replaced by . . . nothing. He lost all affect. He stopped eating and sleeping, complained of headaches, and regressed in disturbing ways. He couldn’t concentrate, turned in no homework, and didn’t even pick up a pen when it was time to take a test. One of his extracurricular instructors—a woman who had recently lost a student to suicide—overheard him talking to friends and called me to express concern. He didn’t say much to us, but it seemed obvious enough that he felt betrayed by the adults he’d trusted. But the transfer, midyear, to a new school—after he’d been wrongly accused, unfairly treated, then unceremoniously dropped by his friends—shattered Sam. He felt totally alone. I counseled patience, naively unprepared for what came next: when he found people to talk to on Reddit, HLTV and 4chan. Those online pals were happy to explain that all girls lie—especially about rape. And they had lots more knowledge to impart. They told Sam that Islam is an inherently violent religion and that Jews run global financial networks. (We’re Jewish and don’t know anyone who runs anything, but I guess the evidence was convincing.) They insisted that the wage gap is a fallacy, that feminazis are destroying families, that people need guns to protect themselves from government incursions onto private property. They declared that women who abort their babies should be jailed. Sam launched a campaign to sway us to his new views. In his mind, he was now an intrepid truth-teller disseminating critical information that mainstream society was invested in keeping under wraps. Challenges to this narrative were to be expected—indeed, they were built into the narrative. I trained myself to freeze my facial expression into something neutral so that when I countered Sam’s remarks—“Feminists keep divorced dads from seeing their kids” was a favorite—it would seem as if I’d actually considered his perspective. I tried to tell myself that at least he was talking to me. And at least he cared about something again; he was animated and engaged. These moments where Sam and I found common ground became increasingly rare, though. Although he had legitimate reasons to feel aggrieved, it was impossible for him to make sense of his situation or to trust that time would heal the hurt. The chasm between us grew. Head down, eyes averted, he trudged straight to his room after school, responded that he wasn’t hungry when I called him down for dinner, and went to bed without saying goodnight. Soon Sam stopped trying to convince me to join his brave new world. He was so active on his favorite subreddit that the other group leaders, unaware that he was 13, appointed him a moderator. Among his new online besties, this was a huge honor and a boost to his cratered self-esteem. He loved Reddit and its unceasing conversations about the nuances of memes—he seemed in love with the whole enterprise, as if it were an adolescent crush. But as Sam became a courtier among Reddit royalty, it became clear that meme-world was subject to a hierarchy as rigid and byzantine as England’s class system. If users didn’t follow the rules, they got humiliated publicly. The worst offenders were people who posted “normie” memes—pictures with upper-case slogans across the top and bottom. My husband and I started to hear a lot about normies, “normie culture,” and how normies were ruining the internet and destroying what they (meme insiders?) worked so hard to achieve. Sam and his fellow Redditors used language that was often violently hostile: Not only did normies have no right to dare participate in meme-world; they had no right to live. Literally. Still, the mods invited Sam to a local Meetup—and because I’d read somewhere that your child’s internet activity is constructive if online connections cross over into IRL pals, I was actually happy for him. Friend-making at the new school was slow going; Sam never had plans on the weekend. So this Reddit thing was borderline obsessive and some of the people seemed deeply disturbed, but maybe it would turn out okay after all? Predictably, other problems stacked up. The top moderators aimed to approve 100 posts a day, and Sam took it as seriously as a paying job. (The ever-present fear of being called out serves the internet culture well.) His grades suffered, he sacrificed sleep, and stress blackened his mood. When he did talk to us, he fixated on topics like hacking and doxxing. On top of all this, Sam’s far-right views threatened to alienate teachers and classmates at his new school. But when I begged him to keep his politics to himself so people could get to know him, he accused me of trying to censor him. Over time, my husband and I started to suspect that Sam’s musings on doxxing and other dark arts might not be theoretical. One weekend morning as we were folding laundry in our room, Sam sat on the edge of our bed and instructed us on how to behave if the FBI ever appeared at our door. When we did confront Sam—say, if we caught a glimpse of a vile meme on his phone—he assured us that it was meant to be funny and that we didn’t get it. It was either “post-ironic” or referenced multiple other events that created a maze-like series of in-jokes impossible for us to follow. Eventually, Sam had to give up moderating for the most practical of reasons: Eighth grade ended and he was packing for sleep-away camp. He would be offline for a month and would need other mods to cover for him. To ask for help, he had to out himself as a kid. Sam and I both laughed about the absurdity of the situation, though he admitted he was nervous he’d be exiled from moderating. I asked him to read me the responses to his message. They were all of the “Dude, you’ve got to be kidding me” variety—one of their most sophisticated and reliable colleagues was a middle-schooler heading off to Jewish summer camp! Later, it was my turn to be surprised: They all contributed to a going-away gift for Sam and mailed an emoji-themed fidget-spinner to his bunk address. My husband and I hoped the digital detox would dampen Sam’s passions, but after that summer his bromance with the alt-right heated up again. He consumed Reddit/4chan/YouTube content even more voraciously. We’d hear about someone who was a cuck (as Sam’s friends understood it, a liberal man with sexual and other inadequacies). Or an SJW (social-justice warrior, sneering tone of voice implied). Or a Kek (someone associated with Kekistan, a fake country of right-wing and libertarian citizens who battle liberals, though the term has a much more complicated origin and its definition has morphed over time). A new lexicon was to be learned if we wanted to engage with our son, and it was transforming as fast as the trolls could type—because once the normies caught on, the alt-right torched its terms and rolled out something new. So when Sam asked—not just once but over and over—to go to the Mother of All Rallies, I eventually relented. After the catastrophe in Charlottesville, I certainly wasn’t going to let him go alone. Anyway, it was a chance to spend the day together. It had been ages since we’d done that. The morning of the rally, Sam and I arrived at the Washington Monument around 8:30—more than an hour early because Sam has always been anxious about getting to places on time. We sat on a marble bench and people-watched as rally-goers gradually filled in the plaza. When a black-clad protester with a black bandanna tied under his eyes slinked past, Sam whispered, “Look, it’s Antifa!”—as if he’d spotted a rare species in the wild. He hurried over to ask if the man would talk for a minute, but the Antifa guy spit out a gruff no and turned away. All of a sudden, a dozen or so reporters and camera operators noticed a man marching around with a huge Nazi flag that trailed behind him, aloft, like a cape. They started running—actually running—after him. The guy with the Nazi flag kept walking but slowed his pace to let them catch up, then turned around to face the cameras at exactly the moment they were upon him. For the next ten minutes or so, the reporters filmed the Nazi. When they finally turned away from each other, each side seemed happy, shaking hands, nodding enthusiastically, and smiling their thanks. It was the most nakedly symbiotic transaction I’d ever witnessed. The reporters and the Nazi needed each other. There was no meaning—no job—for one without the other. As we made our way to the makeshift stage for speakers—adjacent to the portable booths of hawkers promoting their ideologies alongside their hats, patches, and posters—Sam decided he wanted to interview as many people as he could. During the next hour and a half, he approached anti-fascist demonstrators, heavily accessorized neo-Nazis, a man draped in the green Kek banner, and a guy who claimed to work for a Republican senator. He recorded the conversations with his phone while I stood a few feet away. He usually asked one question—“Why are you here today?”—and let the person speak until he (they were all men) was finished. As for the Kek patriot—well, because Kekistan is an imaginary place, the fact that an adult had created a uniform and a flag for a fake state, then marched around in the dust like a toy soldier, seemed to Sam a ridiculous waste of time. After all, he knew what actual fatigues looked like, thanks to our family’s active-duty military friends. He knew that real service members shipped off to lengthy deployments where they faced serious enemies and life-threatening risks. So here they were, the star players from Reddit and 4chan, reconstituted in human form on the Mall, and none were as convincing, witty, or transgressive as they had presented themselves online. Even Sam’s biggest Reddit hero—an African American Nazi who posed with him for a selfie—wasn’t as personable as he’d expected. 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.”