Michael Brutsch

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.