Mother Jones's Josh Harkinson has an excellent piece on the history of
KnightSec, an Anonymous offshoot that publicized the Steubenville and
Halifax rape cases, galvanizing both the public and police responses to
both. The piece includes an interview with Michelle McKee, who is
credited with swaying a critical mass of Anons to participation in
KnightSec. The whole story is pretty incredible, especially where it
spills over into the real world:
The video went viral, and the next Occupy Steubenville rally drew 2,000
people to the courthouse steps. Because MC brought the sound system, he
ended up serving as the de facto master of ceremonies (which is how he
ended up with his Twitter handle). As he played excerpts of the Nodianos
video over the loudspeakers, he told me, people in the crowd grew so
angry that he started to worry that they would riot.
When the Steubenville sheriff showed up, MC invited him up and grilled
him about the case. In the end, he diffused the tension by giving the
cop a hug. "I'm going to take this negative energy and turn it into a
positive thing," he remembers thinking. "You've got to let the crowd
vent."
And vent they did. For four hours, there was a catharsis of personal
pain and grief that nobody in the small town could have imagined. Women
who had been raped stood in front of the crowd, clad in Guy Fawkes
masks, to share their stories. Some of them unmasked at the end of their
testimonies as they burst into tears. Rapes at parties, date rapes,
rapes by friends and relatives—their pent-up secrets came pouring out.
"It turned into this women's liberation movement, in a way," MC recalls.
"And it just changed everything. There was nothing anybody could do
against us at that point because it was so real and so true."
No comments:
Post a Comment