Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.
A prolific online troll and former intern of Milo Yiannopoulos has been charged with first-degree murder after allegedly stabbing his father to death in his Washington home. According to audio of the incident obtained by the Daily Beast, 33-year-old Lane Davis set upon his father after the latter called him a Nazi. “He’s chasing us around the house,” Davis’ mother told a police dispatcher. “He’s mad about something on the internet about leftist pedophiles and he thinks we’re leftist and he’s calling us pedophiles, and I don’t know what-all.”
Davis has entered a plea of not guilty, and his trial is scheduled for January.
The Samish Island native fits a disturbing if increasingly familiar profile. After dropping out of Washington State University in 2004, he developed a following on YouTube peddling conspiracy theories that ran the gamut from 9/11 being an inside job to vaccines causing autism. By 2014, he had become a fixture in Gamergate, a campaign of online harassment of women in the video game industry that included doxxing and death threats. Davis would ultimately renounce his fellow travelers in the movement, but that did not stop him from targeting Joshua Idehen, whose manager, agent and charity he contacted accusing the London musician of pedophilia.
Shortly thereafter, Davis began working for Milo Yiannopoulos, with whom he co-wrote an article accusing the MacArthur Foundation of promoting censorship on social media. Yiannopoulos, who was recently outed for his close collaboration with prominent neo-Nazis and members of the alt-right, has since released the following statement to the Daily Beast:
“Mr. Davis was a volunteer for me for a brief period of time prior to my founding Milo, Inc. I was unhappy with his work and discontinued the relationship. I then experienced his anger firsthand as he threatened me and later went to Buzzfeed making false and inaccurate accusations.”
Davis parlayed his short tenure at Breitbart into an unpaid blogging gig at a far-right website called theRalphRetort.com, which features such verticals as “SJW Insanity” and “Campus Crazies,” and whose editor, Ethan Ralph, is serving an eight-month sentence in Loudon County, Virginia, for assaulting a police officer. Ralph’s wife pledged to remove all of Davis’ stories, which he posted under the name Seattle4Truth.
A fervent Trump supporter, Davis had grown increasingly agitated in recent months, so much so that his father had taken to recording his rage-fueled outbursts on his phone. On the day of his arrest, the Daily Beast reports Davis “retweeted posts celebrating the Second Amendment, bemoaning diversity, and spreading conspiracy theories that alleged Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta was involved in a child sex ring and DNC staffer Seth Rich had been murdered.”
“He just lives on the internet and he gets really worked up about everything that’s going on,” his mother told police. “He needs an intervention of some kind here.”
Minutes later, her husband was bleeding to death on the back porch, and her son had raised his hands in the air, awaiting his arrest.
H/T Daily Beast
Jacob Sugarman is a managing editor at AlterNet.
Header image source.
