MAGAt would prefer not to be charged in the FBI investigation into the coup attempt

Jody Williams knew things had gotten out of hand early last month, when a post on the pro-Trump message board TheDonald included a detailed diagram of how to tie a “hangman’s knot” on a noose. Williams was a moderator for the board and owner of its Web address, so he removed the noose instructions. But within an hour, he said, another moderator quietly restored it near the top of the site. Three days later, on Jan. 6, a real noose was hung on makeshift gallows on the National Mall, amid a violent siege on the U.S. Capitol.

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“You might be happy being some ethno-nationalist, but I’m not,” said Williams, recalling his exchanges with a handful of particularly hardcore moderators. “I don’t want anything to do with this.”

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What began on Reddit as an online political rally for an upstart presidential candidate turned increasingly foul as Williams fought — and often lost — against what he said were “nefarious forces” determined to advance the most extreme ideologies, including white supremacy.

Williams — who controlled the Web address where the forum moved after Reddit expelled it last year — finally took decisive action on Jan. 21, two weeks after the Capitol assault, after waking to news that a group of other moderators had started their own site and used it to attack him. Soon, Williams used his power as the Web address owner to knock TheDonald offline.

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Williams, who lives in Texas and has three young children, also endured death threats, online harassment and FBI questioning, he said.

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Online communities that frame themselves as refuges for free expression often find themselves pulled to the fringes, forcing members to either confront the shift or tolerate increasingly radical ideas.

Such dynamics have played out on Facebook and other mainstream social media sites, but they have been supercharged on niche forums such as Gab, 8kun, Parler and TheDonald, which promoted themselves as free-speech zones but ended up trafficking in the worst of the Web.

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Some of the violent and incendiary comments posted on the site were quoted in an internal FBI report issued a day before the riot, though the report, which was reviewed by The Washington Post, does not mention TheDonald by name, these people said.

One of the comments cited in the FBI memo declared Trump supporters should go to Washington and get “violent. Stop calling this a march, or rally, or a protest. Go there ready for war. We get our President or we die.”

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“Whether or not Williams condones racism and anti-Semitism is irrelevant. His site helped incite and facilitate one of the most egregious assaults on American democracy,” said Rita Katz, executive director of SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors online extremism. “He doesn’t get to pretend he wasn’t part of the problem.”

In response to such critiques, Williams said he wanted Trump to win and stay in the White House. He didn’t want to destroy something he had spent so long growing. He didn’t think, until the very end, that it was necessarily his call whether to blow it all up. He thought his actions as a moderator, part of a team that removed 3,500 problematic posts and comments on an average day, helped keep the worst stuff at bay — while also helping Trump.

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Williams also knew that members of TheDonald community had indeed used the site to instigate the assault [on the Capitol].

“People definitely used the site to communicate and coordinate,” he said, echoing the conclusions of independent researchers.

Asked whether he now feels regret or guilt, Williams accepts the former but rejects the latter.

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In since-deleted tweets, he said that Democratic “communists” were screaming “for war,” and he defended a post on TheDonald showing a box of bullets as a response to the “rigged ballot box.” Days before Jan. 6, Williams tweeted that Trump supporters going to D.C. should “siege the corrupt Federal Apparatus that seeks to chain you all up,” including the hashtag “#DCMustFall.”

Williams, [who said he’s a Christian and a regular churchgoer and] who deleted his Twitter account and other social media after questions about them from The Washington Post, said he was urging political action, not violence, and persistence in challenging what he saw as an entrenched, geographically concentrated ruling class.

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“Did I compromise some of my principles to do so? Without a doubt,” Williams acknowledged. “Sometimes you swallow pills you don’t like to get things done. That’s the world we live in. … That’s politics.”

  WaPo

And sometimes you incite violent people to action.

He now is spending his time caring for family and trying to get a new site, America.win, up and running. Unlike TheDonald, it will not offer unfettered discussion. It will be, he said, more of an aggregator of what Williams considers important content about free markets, individual liberty and other “common patriotic causes.”

Which is, of course, how TheDonald.win started.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.