Rick didn't think "having a black child" was a bad thing; he simply wanted to note that it was completely untrue, and if anything, sheds some light on the beliefs of his harassers. Having a child of a different race is bad to them.

"The thing they do that's the most harmful is consistently involve my children. They've falsely said ... my daughter has a black child ... my son was 18 when this shit started. My daughter is 22, she just graduated college ... they stalked her at her school, they followed her, they put notes on the door where she used to live. My daughter was the captain of the university ... she's been drug tested ... she's a clean-cut kid ... and they've got people calling the University of Tennessee saying 'Eleanor Wilson's involved in prostitution and drug sales and all this other shit.'"

The alt-right's hate mobs distinctly target women, even when they're ostensibly targeting men. Take Rick Wilson. He insulted them quite goddamn directly, and they harassed him for a while ... but Rick is a calloused veteran politico. He makes attack ads for a living and owns a shitload of guns. He wasn't a "soft target" ... so they went after his daughter.

CNN "But if it's any consolation, we can run a story about all the abuse."

This stuff has real effects on people's lives: "I had written an article for [a publication] ... on the issue before it got picked up on CNN. They refused to run my article because they were afraid it would bring other [trolls] after me." The words they used were, "'uncomfortable with being potentially liable for taking the story national and causing further damage to me.'"

Then, two years later, she took on a volunteer position helping Homeland Security deradicalize young Muslim men. Obviously, she could've phrased that tweet better, but it's clear that she meant "for good" in the sense that it changed the world forever. She did not mean "for the better," and no reasonable person could assume so, since "changed for the good" is caveman speak. Semantics aside, Laila's two-year-old tweet still kicked up a storm.

There is a distinctly anti-female vibe in the alt-right. Meet our next source, Laila Alawa, who tweeted this back in September of 2014:

2 It's Hard To Fight Against A Shifting Mass It's Hard To Fight Against A Shifting Mass

YouTube

Stormfront is probably the largest explicitly white nationalist website on the internet. Nearly 100 murders have been tied to it. Anders Breivik, the guy who killed 69 people at a Norwegian summer camp to save his country from "multiculturalism" and "Muslims," was active on Stormfront.

Stormfront.org

We've gone into detail in the past about their most famous member.

People aren't planning murders on Stormfront; it's just that it provides violent, crazy people with a community that reinforces their worldview. Remember Dylann Roof, from 50 or so shootings ago? He's the guy who killed nine members of a black church in Charleston. Here's what he describes as the seminal moment of his racist puberty:

The Council of Conservative Citizens is a white nationalist organization even larger than Stormfront, but if you stumble upon their website, they look like yet another crudely programmed right-wing news aggregator:

Council of Conservative Citizens

Basically, it's nothing but the eye-rolling parts of your Facebook timeline.

But in addition to hating Hillary Clinton, they also hate stuff like "race-mixing" and "thinking the South were the bad guys in the Civil War." And as the Southern Poverty Law Center pointed out, their headlines about black-on-white crime are actually less sensationalized than Breitbart's ...

Council of Conservative Citizens

Versus:

Breitbart

But at least Breitbart changed their future headlines about the story ... to start including homophobic overtones.

After the SPLC's criticism, they changed their title to something less screamingly insane, but you see what's scary here. The Council of Conservative Citizens and Stormfront measure their regular readers in the tens of thousands, and they are clearly racist websites. Breitbart reaches millions and looks like a normal news site.

Breitbart

Well, almost.

They may inspire thousands of psychopaths to ruin people's lives, but there's almost nothing you can do about it. People have the right to write incendiary crap as long as they don't explicitly call for violence. Implying it is fine and dandy. Once Laila's tweet about 9/11 showed up on The Daily Caller -- again, two years after it was made -- Breitbart picked up the story ... and in came the death threats.

"I mean, I went to the police. I really didn't want to go ... I thought it would die down. And in my head, I was like ... I'm a young Muslim-American woman ... I am visibly Muslim and just so happen to be affiliated with the DHS. I was advised by the DHS ... they said don't respond to tweets, and don't talk to the media ..."

Eventually, Laila called the police. And it didn't do much good: "there's this look on her face like, 'What the hell?' She didn't understand what online harassment meant ... I was showing her the death threats and ... she just kind of waved it off. One of the tweets ... said 'Your death will change the world for good.' She was like, 'Well everyone's going to die eventually ...'"

OcusFocus/iStock

It's hard to get justice when the prevailing opinion on online death threats is "Eh, whatevs."

There is a way websites like Twitter could help, even when the police's hands are tied. Twitter knows who most of those trolls are, and if they don't, it's a simple matter of requiring that info on the signup forms. Sure, Twitter banned Milo Yiannopoulos -- not having to deal with that guy directly is always a good thing, no matter the context -- but Leslie Jones barely got it done, and she's a high-profile celebrity. Not everybody gets that kind of treatment. In one case, the victim of a Twitter harassment campaign contacted the company to complain. One of the harassing tweets even contained a photo that had been stolen from her hacked Dropbox account, so we're talking about an actual crime here. Twitter told her to file a DMCA complaint ... and then mailed the full complaint, which included her home address, to the man harassing her.