"The first question that leapt to my mind"

When I saw that there were a bunch of violently anti-Jewish messages at Cornell, my first guess was that this was from a troll (edgelord or earnest antisemite or whynotboth) who didn’t necessarily have anything to do with Cornell. People post dumb shit (this is the technical term for it) to the internet, is the point of the internet, apart from the other point of the internet, that is.

Anyway here’s this: “Patrick Dai, age 21, a junior at Cornell University who is originally from Pittsford, New York, was arrested today on a federal criminal complaint charging him with posting threats to kill or injure another using interstate communications.”

The Twitter account StopAntisemites posted a big photo of Dai’s face, which is itself seemingly within the bounds of an account with that mission. What’s relevant is the assumptions made in the replies. A sampling:

Dai is, let us recall, originally from Pittsford, New York.

The response is despicable and stupid, on the where-to-begin level. So I will start with the biggest one: