about his motorcycle or his family. In
that way, these men are vulnerable,
because they have to put themselves
out there. The internet is their bull-
horn, the best way they have to
reach their disciples.
When she first started doing this,
she did it in person. Once, a man
caught her taking pictures at a gath-
ering of white supremacists. She
played it off, but her nerves were
fried. Another time, she was jotting
down some notes when a well-known
extremist sat down right next to her.
She remembers her heart beating so
hard she could feel it in her finger-
tips. She slowly closed her notebook,
terrified. What did he see?
Others in her field have been
doxed, making them vulnerable to
violence. One of her friends, who
works in a similar job, told me shehad to move after extremists fire-
bombed a car in front of her house
and ran her kids off the road. K does
sometimes worry about the safety of
her family. “Given the opportunity,”
she says, “I’m sure they would come
after me.”
So yeah, working from a computer
has made her life easier. It’s also
made it impossibly hard. When your
territory is the internet, there’s a lot
to sift through. Some words mean
nothing; others mean people are
about to die. And it isn’t always easy
to find the words in the first place—
the ones that belong to the person
who will do the thing.
She points at a man on her screen
who is so desperate for a DylannK goes to
her computer—
the same one she uses to search for
weeknight chicken recipes and
advice on how to cut bangs. Sud-
denly, I’m looking at a picture of an
arm tattoo in which Donald Trump is
positioned doggie-style behind Hill-
ary Clinton, his body thrusting,
while she appears wide-eyed and ter-
rified. It’s inked in black, permanent.
I see a riled-up thread in which
men are arguing against women’s
right to vote. A streaming video in
which a man is flipping a switch-
blade. An illustration of a nude
woman straddling a wood beam with
her feet weighed down, alongside a
quote that says “[Christine Blasey]
Ford needs to be curbstomped...
torcher [sic] the pig”; a picture of a
blindfolded naked woman with
three men in masks standing behind
her; posts about how sexually
assaulting women should be legal;
and posts like these:
“I #believewomen. I believe firmly
they should shut the fuck up, quit
wearing pants like a man, and GET
THE FUCK BACK IN THE KITCHEN
WHERE THEY BELONG.”
“I am 100% against hitting women
I’ve never hit one myself. But a liberal
feminist Dyke it’s not a woman and
they have been green-lighted....”
“Men can’t wait for women to come
around. Nature doesn’t work that
w ay. We , a s me n , mu s t r e g a i n ou r
culture and take control.”
K is currently keeping close tabs
on mor e t h a n 1 ,0 0 0 me n. She c a l l s
them her List. They’re right here on a
spreadsheet, pages and pages of
faces, light eyes and jelly-pocket
cheeks, dark eyes and deeply sunken
dimples, old skin and new.
One guy lives less than a mile from
her. “I know their screen names,
their real names, their fake names,
when they change their names,” she
says. Private accounts, alias
accounts, multiple accounts—she
knows. I can’t reveal her exact meth-
ods, but let’s just say anyone who is
vocal online about his hate for
women has likely chatted her up
Roof–style bowl cut that he’s photo-
shopped the round blond chop onto
his own picture. “He really worries
me,” she says. But for now, she’s hold-
ing off on reporting him, because he
seems to lack the means to carry out
a serious attack—he doesn’t yet own
weapons. She stares at his page for
another beat before clicking off.
Indeed, the line between bad and
really bad is so thin that I can’t see it.
K doesn’t always see it either. It’s
more that she feels it. She explains:
“You know that feeling you get when
you’re about to get on an elevator and
you get a sense that you shouldn’t
because as the doors open, the per-
son standing there gives you a bad
vibe? Most people ignore that feeling
and get on the elevator anyway. Me?
I’ll wait for the next one.”
She’s tried to train others to do
what she does. But she
can’t “because when it
comes to this feeling that
I get when I just know
this person is going to do
something really terri-
ble, I’m always like, Huh,
how do I know that?”
She got the feeling last
ye a r f r om D a ko t a Re e d ,
20, of Washington state, an alt-
righter who had posted a picture of
himself in a mask pointing an
assault rifle at the camera. “I started
tracking him and found multiple
Facebook profiles where he was
using different names and posting
images of weapons,” says K. Law
enforcement ultimately seized a
cache of weapons. He’s currently
serving a one-year sentence.
When I ask Oren Segal, the director
of the ADL’s Center on Extremism,
if there are other people like K, he
tells me there are other people who
do what she does but no one like her.
Because it’s not just her intuition—Continued on page 142“Given the
opportunity, I’m
sure they would
co me after me.”
123
Cosmopolitan September 2019