I distinctly remember the first time I saw a picture of my then-seven-year-old daughter’s face in a gas chamber. It was the evening of September 17, 2015. I had just posted a short item to the Corner calling out notorious Trump ally Ann Coulter for aping the white-nationalist language and rhetoric of the so-called alt-right. Within minutes, the tweets came flooding in. My youngest daughter is African American, adopted from Ethiopia, and in alt-right circles that’s an unforgivable sin. It’s called “race-cucking” or “raising the enemy.”
I saw images of my daughter’s face in gas chambers, with a smiling Trump in a Nazi uniform preparing to press a button and kill her. I saw her face photo-shopped into images of slaves. She was called a “niglet” and a “dindu.” The alt-right unleashed on my wife, Nancy, claiming that she had slept with black men while I was deployed to Iraq, and that I loved to watch while she had sex with “black bucks.” People sent her ***** images of black men having sex with white women, with someone photoshopped to look like me, watching.
When we both publicized some of the racist attacks — I in National Review and Nancy in the Washington Post — things took a far more ominous turn. Late the next evening — while Nancy was, fortunately, offline attending a veterans’ charity event in D.C. — the darker quarters of the alt-right found her Patheos blog. Several different accounts began posting images and GIFs of extreme violence in her comments section.
Click on a post and scroll down and you’ll see pictures of black men shooting other black men, close-up images of suicides, GIFs of grisly executions — the kinds of psyche-scarring things that one can’t “unsee.” Had I not deployed to Iraq and witnessed death up close, the images would have shocked me. I quickly got on the phone with Nancy, told her not to look at her website, and got busy deleting comments and blocking IP addresses, but in the meantime a few friends and neighbors had seen the posts.
The next Sunday, friends from church approached, expressing concern not just for our safety but for theirs as well. We live in a community where most of the streets have similar names, and it’s common for UPS drivers, FedEx deliveries, and friends to end up at the wrong house. They interpreted the images as threats, and they didn’t want anyone to drive into our neighborhood, looking for the Frenches, intent on turning image into reality.
It took days — and hundreds of IP blocks and Twitter reports — but things finally calmed down. The racist images slowed from a flood to a trickle, I relaxed a bit at night, and life returned, I thought, to normal. I was wrong. Our “normal” had changed. This wasn’t the beginning of the end of our troubles, but rather the end of the beginning.
I share my family’s story not because we are unique or because our experience is all that extraordinary, but rather because it is depressingly, disturbingly ordinary this campaign season. The formula is simple: Criticize Trump — especially his connection to the alt-right — and the backlash will come.
Erick Erickson experienced his own ordeal more than a month before we did. After Erickson dis-invited Trump from his Red State gathering, angry Trump supporters showed up at his house. A grown man yelled at his children at a store, condemning their father for opposing Trump. Erickson wrote in the New York Times that his son is still fearful that Trump supporters will come back to their home.
In March, writer Bethany Mandel related her own experience. After tweeting about Trump’s anti-Semitic followers, she was called “slimy Jewess” and told that she “deserves the oven.” It got worse:
Not only was the anti-Semitic deluge scary and graphic, it got personal. Trump fans began to “dox” me — a term for adversaries’ attempt to ferret out private or identifying information online with malicious intent. My conversion to Judaism was used as a weapon against me, and I received death threats in my private Facebook mailbox, prompting me to file a police report.
The phenomenon got some attention in the spring, when the Daily Beast reported not just on Mandel’s experience but also on Erickson’s, Rick Wilson’s, and others’. It’s showing no signs of slowing down, either: Big names, small names, any names — if you attack Trump, no matter who you are, your life might just change.
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The abuse is so common that I’ve lost count of other reporters and writers who’ve told me, often in confidence, of troubling late-night incidents at their homes, or of Tweets and other messages that went far beyond garden-variety Twitter trolling into disturbing threats and sometimes-horrifying images.
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Online hate has become so common that it’s almost a point of perverse pride among some pundits. If you don’t get hateful messages, you must not matter. If you let the hate bother you, then you must be weak. Indeed, in a world where “feeding” the trolls only makes them stronger, admitting that they’ve hurt you at all represents a victory for the worst of the worst. They relish your pain, and you don’t want them to relish anything.
But I’ll be honest: It’s miserable. There is nothing at all rewarding, enjoyable, or satisfying about seeing your beautiful young daughter called a “niglet.” There is nothing at all rewarding, enjoyable, or satisfying about seeing man after man after man brag in graphic terms that he has slept with your wife. It’s unsettling to have a phone call interrupted, watch images of murder flicker across your screen, and read threatening e-mails. It’s sobering to take your teenage kids out to the farm to make sure they’re both proficient with handguns in case an intruder comes when they’re home alone.
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Two weeks ago Nancy and I were enjoying lunch with friends after church. My son’s football coach asked if “things had calmed down” after the tumult of the summer. I grabbed my phone, said “let’s see,” and opened my Twitter mentions. I laughed at the first one, a standard profane rant calling me a traitor for opposing Trump, but when my wife looked, her face twisted up in shock. There they were, just below, more tweets from more men, aimed directly at her. She burst into tears.
So, no, things have not “calmed down,” and I’m always amused when people tell me that I belong to Never Trump because it makes me feel good about myself. There’s nothing that gives me pleasure about this election season. But if I can do anything to expose and oppose this latest debasement of our politics and culture, and to defend my wife and daughter, then at least I will have purpose. — David French is an attorney, and a staff writer at National Review.
of the "civilized Republicans" (an oxy-moron): 
about their 
and I sure hope there is no Civil War, but the effect may be that dramatic.
; #respect for being able to handle that kind of g-force. I mean he could have just talked to Megyn Kelly 
. Hold on to that tinfoil hat. 
