I Still Can’t Get Over How Everyone Just Posted Their Crimes
My mother warned me that posting is always a Bad Idea
Coming of age in the golden age of MySpace and Facebook meant that my mother and every single Baby Boomer adult around me urgently insisted that posting anything personal online was a Bad Idea™. Holding a drink at a party? Bad idea. Posing in a bikini on the beach? Bad idea. A status where I wrote “fuck”? BAD IDEA. The reasoning was simple: The internet is forever, which would allow employers to one day find my digital footprint and deem me an unprofessional, unhireable mess.
You can then imagine my surprise when pro-Trump insurrectionists did some pretty bad crimes at the U.S. Capitol and just posted about it on Facebook! Did they have no adults in their lives who warned them about the dangers of oversharing online? Were they living under rocks? It’s flabbergasting!
To be clear, their idiocy doesn’t take away from the danger they are to American democracy. If anything, their actions in real life and online prove how Trump’s culture of impunity over the past five years has taken hold on them, allowing them to believe that their whiteness and their loyalty to the cause means that they are above the law. But of course they are not, which is why they’ve been arrested and charged.
