Proud my town is hosting this guy at Montclair Public Library today. He really does his research into the unsavory parts of the Internet and connects the dots between their rise and important concepts like the Overton window; the confusion between “good” as in popular, profit-generating and “good” as in important, well done. He examines the shifting lines between alt right, alt light, nihilism and white supremacy, and how people wind up traveling the road from questioning normal standards of decency all the way to Charlottesville. He also talks about the road back, what that requires both for individuals and for our larger culture. Sometimes I felt like I was watching him shine a flashlight into dark corners and watching cockroaches scurry around, but he he doesn’t simply give way to skepticism and despair. Maybe the most important takeaway idea for me was that Trump is so good at manipulating social media because he’s always going for “high arousal” content, the stuff that makes people click on reactions.