The church was going to host a couple of drag events. Penny had a ton of armament in his car and residence. Ina manifesto, he explained how proud he was of the attack. He believed he was doing "God's work." He told the FBI that he would have felt better if the Molotov cocktails he used had burned the entire church to the ground. Prosecutors said that Penny's manifesto was "full of twisted and false historical narratives, calls for war and violence, justifications for his actions, and the spewing of transphobic and anti-Semitic hatred."
Here's what I find chilling. Penny is twenty years old. Authorities say that Penny appeared to have been "increasingly radicalized via online actions since at least 2017."
So, he's been working toward this since he was 13 or 14 years old. Online.
Sure, we've always had a certain amount of this. I've taught more than a few people who grew up to commit felonies, including murders, and I'm not sure what could have aimed their lives in a better direction.
But the seduction of young men by radical violent bullshit on line is one of our growing plagues. The automated downward spiral of the YouTube algorithm is well-documented. "What to do if you think your child is becoming radicalized online" is now a whole genre or writing (see here and here). This is a thing that scares me now as the parent of two young boys in ways it didn't when I was the parent of young children thirty years ago.
There are so many directions to point fingers. Techno corporations that take no responsibility for spewing crap into the cultural atmosphere. Grown-ups who crank up all this rage and paranoia and racist sexist violent rhetoric as a cynical tool for gathering power with no regard for the effects on young people who take it seriously. People who are incapable of grasping that diversity is part of what makes humanity robust and strong.
As I said, we could point fingers all day. But maybe while doing so, we can just remember that teaching media literacy is important, because thirty years in, we've still got human beings who believe "I saw it on the internet so it must be true" is a legitimate thought. It's not just that we have a culture steeped in lying and bullshit for matters large and small, but that we keep that a secret from our children instead of teaching useful lessons like "Much of what you will see from the adult world is a lie, so we need to equip you to sort out the bullshit from the truth."
It is not particularly useful to suggest, as some choicers do, that the solution to all of this is to simply separate everyone into their own silos, where they never meet any of those Others and never hear anything to contradict what they hear in their special hermetically sealed snowflake cage. The solution to conflict and disagreement is not to make everyone who disagrees with you shut up, go away, or die.
And history. History is complicated and hard, and we really need to teach that. Teaching the conversation is good preparation for weighing the many voices, including the ones that are not participating in good faith or who are just ignoring parts they don't like or who are just making shit up. The folks who insist that there is just one true answer for questions of history and only that one true answer should be taught--these are people who, out of fear or anger or desire for power, are trying to sell a lie that is toxic and corrosive. It damages society, it damages the culture, and men like Penny are just the curdled rotting edge of that blight.
History, real history, needs to be taught not just because of some philosophical stance or moral imperative, but because a society riddled with these pockets of toxic lies is a more dangerous society, more dangerous to its own people and to the world that surrounds it. Penny's sad, wasted youth is just one more reminder.
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