gawker

Some weeks you just want to burn down the whole Internet, and—well, until yesterday's torrent of hilarious post-debate memes, anyway—this has undoubtedly been one of those weeks.

Last Friday afternoon, as you might have heard, or read, or absorbed via social-media osmosis, Gawker's Adrian Chen posted a long, suspenseful post that unmasked a guy named Michael Brutsch, a 49-year-old Texan who for years has been one of Reddit's most prolific and most disturbing contributors. Known online as ViolentAcrez, Brutsch created "subreddits," or forums, with titles like "Incest," "Chokeabitch," "Rapebait," and "PicsofDeadJailbait," and oh so many more, and was one of the main curators of the lately notorious "Creepshots" forums, in which dudes post photos of women taken surreptitiously in public, in order to perv out on both the photos themselves and their nonconsensual provenance.

This isn't a Douchebag Decree about Michael Brutsch, however.

Oh Gawker. Lindy West's Jezebel post on Hipster Racism is blowing up certain parts of the Internet today. In it, West goes over four main points of "hipster racism"—where folks justify racism by poorly hiding behind irony (Sarah Silverman—we see you!). On Racialicious, Carmen Van Kerckhove dubbed hipster racism one of 2006's top race and pop culture trends, which means that hipster or "ironic" racism has been a topic of conversation by writers of color and others in the social justice sphere for literally years. You won't find any links or acknowledgments of these earlier discussions in West's Jezebel post, but hey, at least a whole new audience of people will be that much closer to knowing how to talk about stuff like Lesley Arfin's insensitive, "ironic" tweet last week.

One dude definitely didn't read the post though.