One of the most irritating/horrifying things about monitoring these Nazi accelerationist terror chats is how common this shit is.

The groups that talked about actually doing shit? White teenage boys, overwhelmingly https://twitter.com/ArmyOfMeat/status/1343239354987081728

That's why I roll my eyes when people get outraged by a kid getting reality checked, like in that N-word video story.

Teens need to get checked for doing extremely racist shit, and hard.

That is *how* teen racists learn it matters in real life that you're a racist, actually.

That kid's mom could have said, okay Adolf, let's see how it feels to be a Nazi without a computer or a phone full of digital eggers-on.

See how it works for you when you don't have a bunch of people to LARP the Third Reich with.

But no, now her son is getting indicted on a terror plot, because she (and a her co-parent(s) if they exist either didn't have the will or didn't have the knowledge they needed to intervene and create consequences when there was still room for intervention.

Minors aren't grown enough to face adult-level consequences, but they still need real world consequences to teach them that this shit is real.

Adults in the room need to intervene and lay those down when that racism pops up, making sure consequences are age-appropriate but deep.

A swastika on a teen's notebook could mean they're just testing you with ignorant edgelordery, or it could be the tip of an iceberg like this shitshow.

Either way, it's a point of needed intervention, where age appropriate but also real & deep consequences need to be delivered.

At a minimum, even a doodle like that, much less a flag, needs to be treated as a sign that the kid is not mature enough to handle the digital world unsupervised, not for some time.

The logical consequence is, they don't get to access it unsupervised anymore.

I'm not trying to shit on the mom here.

I don't think most people-- parents or not-- have even an inkling of how accessible Nazi terrorism recruitment chambers are, that many of them are literally for kids by kids.

But we *need* parents and other adults in the room to realize this, because it means it is so much easier for kids to find spaces explicitly created to walk them from edgelord doodle to unsupervised chambers where they double dog dare each other into Nazi terrorism.

For all we know, the mom could have known her kid was interested in violence, could have even been afraid of what he would do or how he might snap if she pushed him farther by delivering those consequences by herself.

But if that were the case, it wouldn't be a time to fall back.

It would be a time to tap other adults into the room to assist in that intervention.

And that's where *we* need to be the adults in the room, because that kind of support system for parents who can't do it alone just isn't there and isn't funded.

And what *is* there is heavily stigmatized.

We need to be a culture that understands that kids are human, not just Pavlov conditioning units, and that like all humans they learn best when appropriate consequences are delivered by a community in an empathetic but meaningful and impactful way.

If the intervention points are missed, for whatever reason, there's a non-zero chance those kids will end up facing consequences delivered by a world that couldn't care less about their age or ability to learn and grow.

And then those kids end up slapped with adult world consequences they aren't mature enough to handle, consequences they really don't have the capacity to process or understand.

Tough love is a thorny and loaded term that often gets used to justify abuse rather than teach empathy, but kids do need real consequences when they start doing real racist shit.

To learn, to be better humans, to stop them from traumatizing others, and also to just be safe.

It sucks that this world exists, but if the adults in these teens respective rooms intervened, a lot of these teen double-dare Nazi terror chambers would just dry up.

Because as much as we want to believe it's bad adult strangers luring kids into beer hall putschs with candy, a lot of the time it's more like th Nazi equivalent of kids finding some dude's copy of Playboy.

It wasn't even necessarily made for them, but that's part of the appeal.

There's no just, finding the big bad Hitler mustachioed recruiter and saving the kids from him, because the kids are recruiting each other..

It's on us to find ways to make sure kids *have* adults in the room, & that those adults have support systems they can fall back on.

And, it's on all of us to make it clear what's going on, how fast that accelerationist car can accelerate when platforms like Telegram give kids a whole Nazi Wild West to play Hitler cowboys in together.

The adults in the room need to understand what's hiding in the corners.

And finally, it's on us to TAKE RACISM FUCKING SERIOUSLY so it's not just "oh Joey make a shrine to George Lincoln Rockwell I guess he's going through a rebellious phase."

Adults need to treat the doodle/flag/n-word drop/etc as the critical point of intervention it needs to be.

That is the only way this shit changes.

When we start treat racism as the serious offense that it is, teach our communities' kids that, and start demanding and organizing to force companies and platforms to do the same, we move the needle.

It's that easy, and that difficult.