We have so many new people at work! Someone started today. Someone else is starting in a few weeks, and another someone else is also starting in a few weeks! We are trying to hire at least four more people by the end of the year! (DO YOU KNOW ANYONE WHO WANTS A JOB!?!?!?)

What this means for me is that I will get to hand off my duties dealing with the children of the alt-right. There are not a lot of them, but they are just so disappointing. They seem to fall into a few categories.

  1. Some of them probably aren’t even from the alt-right. They are just garden-variety racists who don’t realize that they are being unacceptably racist. In a few years they will probably know enough to keep these thoughts to themselves and will do the sorts of subtle discrimination that come out in those various social science studies where researchers send out a bunch of identical resumes and find that “Chip” gets more call-backs than “Jamal” does. The future version of these students will really believe their excuses about why they didn’t reply to “Jamal.” Disappointing.

  2. A very small number of the children have actual horrific views and are quite vocal about it. Not tolerated.

  3. The ones that are most annoying to me are the ones whose online profiles are strewn with the symbology of the alt-right but who are trying to avoid explicitly violating any rules. Of course there is that stupid frog avatar. There are various code words and special numbers. References to some of the terrible things found on the terrible parts of Reddit. But they are not actually saying the terrible things. How much do they believe these things? I expect that they spend most of their time in online echo-chambers, so I don’t think they hear many contrary views. They probably wouldn’t go to a march, but if they ended up working at a large tech company that had employee affinity groups, they might very well end up eating lunch with people who are trying to peddle racism and sexism as “the truth.”

  4. Most chilling to me: the historical Nazis. It has really been only a very small number of years since the symbols of white supremacy have gotten a lot of play in the popular media and on the mainstream parts of the internet. When I search the database for users who are connected to certain words, phrases, numbers, or symbols that have gotten a lot of press lately, there are some users who haven’t logged in in over a decade that come up in the results.