Throwaway for what will become obvious reasons. I think the only way I can explain fully is by giving my background. I started engaging politically during Occupy. I was a typical tech nerd type. Walking around with my go pro (they were still pretty new back then) and posting my videos on Youtube or whatever. I wasn't super left-wing, just a liberal really. Thought of myself as an amateur journalist. The people there were cool. The cops were pigs. You know how it is.

Anyway, we were getting the whole "This is an unlawful gathering" treatment one night after dark and this dude came up behind me, spun me around, pulled me close by my shirt, and blasted some horn in my ear. I looked down and my go pro was fucking gone. I'd just been robbed, I thought my hearing was just straight up ruined as it rang, and I was dazed and frozen, terrified. I don't remember anyone stopping, but I do remember what that fuck looked like as he walked away. Khakis, black dress shirt, and a black cap with sunglasses on. It didn't take me long to figure out it was a fucking cop.

So that rattled me. Either it was random or I was being intimidated. I couldn't decide at first and had settled on random harassment when I started to notice the same black SUV parked outside my apartment as I'd leave for work in the morning. Broad daylight, every day for a week, I'd walk outside, and they'd pull away. I was freaking out and they started showing up everywhere I went to avoid going home. I was convinced they were tapping my phone and shit, so I stopped texting people before I showed up at their door. Still, when I came out to leave, black SUV. I felt like I was going crazy and this is the part where you're going to think I was.

I did the tinfoil hat thing. Like, I know that's nuts, but I was pretty strung out and desperate. I knew how crazy it was when I did it. I remember standing in my kitchen, saying out loud "Guess I've lost it. I am about to make a tinfoil hat" and laughing what must have been in a really unhinged way. So I made a tinfoil hat. And I didn't wanna look crazy, so I put a regular hat over it. And then I left to go to a friends' house who I hadn't stayed at over the past couple weeks. I didn't tell anyone. I just went. It was a long walk, too. I begged him to let me sleepover and he said sure, but you could tell he was freaked out.

Next morning, I walked outside. No SUV. Tinfoil hat was still on. But I didn't trust it so I walked around the block. And when I got back, with no SUV in sight, I sat down on my friend's stoop and cried for a solid ten minutes.

The next few years were intense, but long story short, I moved apartments and made my work less political. I kept going to protests, but now as an "actual" journalist. Got hired by some hipster rag to do political coverage (you've probably never heard of it 😉). My Youtube channel even started getting some traction. I'd still get some harassment every now and then as I radicalized and started to go too hard on the left-wing commentary, but whatever that fucking cop/fed/whatever did to my head, the tinfoil hat seems to help. So I cut back on the leftist stuff and tried to do more centrist-y stuff.

I realized that there's no way I'm the only one they've done shit like this to, either. We've all heard the stories of activists being harassed and we've all heard the stories of top-secret tech being hidden from the press. Not hard to put two and two together there. You know that kid in college who was just "the hat guy"? The dude at my college was named "Top Hat" and even his mom called him that. Maybe Top Hat knew more shit than he let on. Either way, I was "the hat guy" now. I even tried switching out a few styles before I settled on something.

The whole experience had me convinced there was no way to build a movement so long as we have stuff like this going on, so the only way we can effectively create conditions for mass support is to speed up the right-wing collapse of society. And every time I pushed back, I'd started getting visits again and believed in accelerationism a little more. My Youtube channel grew a bit as the "skeptic" community grew and fuck it, I'll admit it, I just started grifting. It wasn't much as a small creator, but it helped. I went with the "classical liberal" bullshit. I showed off the drones I'd bought with Patreon money. I took them to the freeze peach protests and both-sides'ed the hell out of the protesters. I started talking about civil war and stoking fears. Gotta tell you, there's plenty of right-wing Youtubers who don't believe any of this shit. They learn the talking points and aspire to be on cable TV someday. They know they're causing "lone wolves" to kill people. They don't care. Well I care. I know exactly what I'm doing and I do it on purpose. The closer we get to revolution, the better. The United States must become ungovernable and when that happens, you libs need to be ready. I'll just be sitting here in my tinfoil hat and my beanie on top.