The White Supremacist On The Bus
Jan. 17th, 2020 01:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsLast night, a white supremacist sat next to me on the bus.
He looked like a tech-bro. I mean, he wore every single cliche you could imagine, from his late-20s age to his scruffy, middling beard, his tech-brand emblazoned beanie to his equally branded backpack. Something about him screamed Facebook rather than Amazon, but it could have been either.
I didn’t engage with him, but as I sat there, he pulled out his phone and proceeded to watch a pre-selected playlist of Youtube videos. At first I was somewhat amused and happy; it looked like he was watching The Matrix. But no, it wasn’t that; he was watching Stephen Molyneux, or however you spell it, and Stephen was going on and on about “red-pilling” his audience.
In the 35 minutes the bus takes to get from downtown to the transit center, while I pounded away at my coding project he took in a series of videos, some blatantly more concerned with “the great replacement” than others. When he got off the bus, he had last been watching a confrontation between some Alabama politician and some, I assume, progressive protesters, all narrated and chyroned by someone at Infowars, Alex Jones’ sad little project.
I miss the old Alex Jones, the one who worried that the moneyed powers were engaged in a project to uplift themselves out of the muck and mire of humanity and make a transhuman world, the one who worried more about those of us who would be left behind.
I was also disappointed, but not surprised, by the young man. I know men like him exist in every corner of the world, including our own Seattle. Men like him were raw material for my Nanowrimo project, after all. It was just disappointing to see one in the wild.
He looked like a tech-bro. I mean, he wore every single cliche you could imagine, from his late-20s age to his scruffy, middling beard, his tech-brand emblazoned beanie to his equally branded backpack. Something about him screamed Facebook rather than Amazon, but it could have been either.
I didn’t engage with him, but as I sat there, he pulled out his phone and proceeded to watch a pre-selected playlist of Youtube videos. At first I was somewhat amused and happy; it looked like he was watching The Matrix. But no, it wasn’t that; he was watching Stephen Molyneux, or however you spell it, and Stephen was going on and on about “red-pilling” his audience.
In the 35 minutes the bus takes to get from downtown to the transit center, while I pounded away at my coding project he took in a series of videos, some blatantly more concerned with “the great replacement” than others. When he got off the bus, he had last been watching a confrontation between some Alabama politician and some, I assume, progressive protesters, all narrated and chyroned by someone at Infowars, Alex Jones’ sad little project.
I miss the old Alex Jones, the one who worried that the moneyed powers were engaged in a project to uplift themselves out of the muck and mire of humanity and make a transhuman world, the one who worried more about those of us who would be left behind.
I was also disappointed, but not surprised, by the young man. I know men like him exist in every corner of the world, including our own Seattle. Men like him were raw material for my Nanowrimo project, after all. It was just disappointing to see one in the wild.
