As a college professor, I teach creative writing to some 50 students a semester at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, a town of 30,000 about an hour north of Savannah. Outside of class, most of my time is spent either chasing tenure or working on my novels. By trade I write fiction, but this past year I’ve begun wading into political writing as a side gig, a practice that finds me, on debate and primary nights, hunkered down at my laptop with a beer and knocking out a few pages of musings and prognostications for Atticus Review, an online literary magazine.

This is how, last Tuesday, I found myself driving five hours to Greensboro, North Carolina, to report on a Donald Trump rally and live-tweet the proceedings to all 1,400 of my followers.

Tailgating in parking lots. Vendors selling Hillary Sucks But Not Like Monica shirts. General awfulness. — Jared Yates Sexton (@JYSexton) June 14, 2016

Afterward, having finally escaped the madness, I pulled into a bar-and-grill for some barbecue pork and a much-needed drink. I checked my phone. There were texts from more than a dozen friends letting me know I was trending on Twitter and that my tweets had been liked and retweeted by the hundreds. I’d gained thousands of followers in a matter of hours, and I sat there watching my totals increase.



I’d never expected my coverage to go viral, and the success left me conflicted. The casual racism and not-so-casual misogyny and homophobia I’d witnessed in the Greensboro Coliseum had left me sick in the stomach. After days of mourning with my friends in the LGBTQ community over the massacre in Orlando, it felt sordid to benefit from overhearing a Trump supporter shout, “The gays had it coming!”

My friends reassured me. I was doing good by exposing the ugly side of the Trump phenomenon; I was serving my country. And so I embraced it. Not that I had much choice: by the time I woke up the next morning my coverage had been aggregated by Mother Jones, The Week, Daily Kos, and others. I gave an interview to the Huffington Post, and agreed to write a dispatch for the New Republic, which gave it the headline “American Horror Story.” The story itself went viral, and my Twitter followers climbed into the tens of thousands before the harassment, and ultimately the death threats, began.

