If you are not a regular National Review reader, you can be forgiven for not recognizing the name David French. He is an Iraq war veteran, a lawyer, and has written for NR for about ten years.
His fleeting brush with fame occurred in May of this year, when some “Never Trump” people floated his name as a possible third party challenger to Trump. Mr. French thought about it for about a week and decided he wasn’t interested.
French, his wife and his youngest child have been targets of online harassment and death threats which began over a year ago in response to a piece he wrote critical of Trump shill Ann Coulter.
As he describes in his piece published today:
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.
The fact that French is the adoptive father of a black child and is a never-Trumper could explain the special rage directed toward him from the white supremacists who inhabit the alt-right, pro Trump sewers.
In today’s article French explains that he is no stranger to online trolling. He has been writing about controversial topics for a decade, and he knows the drill. But what he — and many other writers — have experienced this election year is very different from the normal comment section hate fest.
He goes on to highlight what a variety of commentators from across the political spectrum have experienced:
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.
He continues with more examples.
This article is well worth the time it takes to read and I recommend it highly.
I like to make jokes about Trump, just like many of us do. But there is nothing funny about this. Trump bellows at his rallies, “It’s not about me, it’s about you! We are a movement!” I fear he may be right.
Win or (much more likely) lose, Trump may have energized a movement that will outlast him. And not in a good way.