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A respected lawyer told an Akron paper, “Frankly, if I’d been faced with the same situation and had a submachine gun…there probably would have been 140 of them dead.” People expressed disappointment that the rabblerousing professors—the gurus—had escaped: “The only mistake they made was not to shoot all the students and then start in on the faculty.”

When it was established that none of the four victims were guardsmen, citizens greeted each other by flashing four fingers in the air (“The score is four / And next time more”). The Kent paper printed pages of letters for weeks, a community purgation: “Hurray! I shout for God and Country, recourse to justice under law, fifes, drums, marshal music, parades, ice cream cones—America—support it or leave it.” “Why do they allow these so-called educated punks, who apparently know only how to spell four-lettered words, to run loose on our campuses tearing down and destroying that which good men spent years building up?…Signed by one who was taught that ‘to educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.’” “I extend appreciation and whole-hearted support of the Guard of every state for their fine efforts in protecting citizens like me and our property.” “When is the long-suffering silent majority going to rise up?”

It was the advance guard of a national mood. A Gallup poll found 58 percent blamed the Kent students for their own deaths. Only 11 percent blamed the National Guard.

A rumor spread in Kent that Jeff Miller, whose head was blown off, was such a dirty hippie that they had to keep the ambulance door open on the way to the hospital for the smell. Another rumor was that five hundred Black Panthers were on their way from elsewhere in Ohio to lead a real riot; and that Allison Krause was “the campus whore” and found with hand grenades on her.

Many recalled the State of Ohio’s original intention for the land upon which Kent State was built: a lunatic asylum. President White was flooded with letters saying it was his fault for letting Jerry Rubin speak on campus. Students started talking about the “Easy Rider syndrome,” after the Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda movie about hippies murdered by vigilantes. Townspeople picketed memorial services. “The Kent State Four!” they chanted. “Should have studied more!”

“Anyone who appears on the streets of a city like Kent with long hair, dirty clothes, or barefooted deserves to be shot,” a Kent resident told a researcher.

“Have I your permission to quote that?”

“You sure do. It would have been better if the Guard had shot the whole lot of them that morning.”

“But you had three sons there.”

“If they didn’t do what the Guards told them, they should have been mowed down.”

A letter to Life later that summer read, “It was a valuable object lesson to homegrown advocates of anarchy and revolution, regardless of age.”

You think people are morally obligated to serve your emotions and do what you want them to do, because you are the one deciding what “the best interests of society as a whole” are. There is no way around this. You decide other people have the obligation to have their resources stolen from them to be given to those that you feel deserve those resources more, based on nothing but your feelings, but of course your resources should not be stolen because what a fucking coincidence the amount of resources you have is exactly the right amount of resources to be a morally good person.

A few things are likely happening. The first is curation. The reddit group was likely feeding her son a constant stream of outrages of men being ill-treated by feminists. An ad that denigrates male aggressiveness in sports. The story of a woman falsely accusing a man of rape.  Statistics showing the wage gap is a myth. A feminist saying outrageous things. Probably some fake stuff, ala #EndFathersDay thrown in for good measure. When these things are put all together in a stream, it can seem like there is a vast conspiracy to suppress the real truth. How come they never taught you this stuff, right?

Now, this is where we’d think being inquisitive would help. Get out and Google it, right? And for someone skilled at finding the right information on the web that strategy might work. But the curation and the language used produces loaded searches that just pulls one deeper into the narrative that the curation scaffolded.

What do I mean? Well, take the infamous Dylann Roof search “black on white crime” which he indicated was his first step into the radicalization that led to him slaughtering black worshipers in a church basement in an attempt to incite a “race war”. In the beginning, he put “black on white crime” into Google, and this is what happened next:

But more importantly this prompted me to type in the words “black on White crime” into Google, and I have never been the same since that day. The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders. I was in disbelief. At this moment I realized that something was very wrong. How could the news be blowing up the Trayvon Martin case while hundreds of these black on White murders got ignored?  

As I’ve talked about previously, “black on white crime” is a data void. It is not a term used by social scientists or reputable news organizations, which is why the white nationalist site Council of Conservative Citizens came up in those results.  That site has since gone away, but what it was was a running catalog of cases where black men had murdered (usually) white women. In other words, it’s yet another curation, even more radical and toxic than the one that got you there. And then the process begins again.

The thing to remember about this algorithmic-human grooming hybrid is that the gradualness of it — the step-by-step nature of it — is a feature for the groomers, not a bug. I imagine if the first page Roof had encountered on this — the CCC page — had sported a Nazi flag and and a big banner saying  “Kill All Jews” he’d have hit the back button, and maybe the world might be different. (Maybe). But the curation/search spiral brings you to that point step by step. In the center of the spiral you probably still have enough good sense to not read stuff by Nazis, at least knowingly. By the time you  get to the edges, not so much.

In the minutes before the first detainees set foot on Guantánamo, “you could literally hear a pin drop,” Brandon Neely, a military-police officer, recalled, in an interview with the Guantánamo Testimonials Project, at the University of California, Davis, in 2008. “Everyone, including myself, was very nervous,” he said. It was January 11, 2002. The Bush Administration had decided that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the war on terror, which meant that the men captured abroad could be deprived of the rights of prisoners of war. That day, Neely’s job was to haul captives from a bus to a holding area for processing, and then to small, outdoor cages, where they would spend nearly four months sleeping on rocks, and relieving themselves in buckets, while soldiers constructed more permanent cellblocks. “I keep thinking, Here it comes—I am fixing to see what a terrorist looks like face to face,” Neely, who was twenty-one at the time, said.

The first man off the bus had only one leg. He wore handcuffs, leg shackles, earmuffs, blackout goggles, a surgical mask, and a bright-orange jumpsuit. As two M.P.s dragged him to the holding area, someone tossed his prosthetic leg out of the bus. All afternoon, guards screamed at the detainees to shut up and walk faster, called them “sand niggers,” and said that their family members and countries had been obliterated by nuclear bombs.

Later that day, Neely and his partner brought an elderly detainee to the holding area and forced him to his knees. When they removed his shackles, the man, who was shaking with fear, suddenly jerked to the left. Neely jumped on top of him, and forced his face into the concrete floor. An officer shouted “Code Red!” into a radio, and the Internal Reaction Force team raced to the scene and hog-tied him. He was left for hours in the Caribbean sun.

Neely later found out that the elderly detainee had jerked because, when he was forced to his knees, he thought he was about to be shot in the back of the head. In his home country, Neely said, “this man had seen some of his friends and family members executed on their knees.” The man’s response was hardly unique; a military document, drafted ten days later for the base commander, noted that “the detainees think they are being taken to be shot.”

Officially, the job of the Internal Reaction Force was to restrain unruly detainees, to prevent them from injuring themselves or the guards. But, in practice, “IRFing” was often done as a form of revenge, initiated liberally—for example, when a detainee was found to have two plastic cups instead of one, or refused to drink a bottle of Ensure, because he thought that he was being given poison. IRFing typically involved a team of six or more men dressed in riot gear: the first man would pepper-spray the detainee, then charge into the cell and, using a heavy shield and his body weight, tackle the detainee; the rest would jump on top, shackling or binding the detainee until he was no longer moving. Although many of the detainees arrived malnourished, with their bodies marked by bullet wounds and broken bones, some IRF teams punched them and slammed their heads into the ground until they were bloody and unconscious. “You could always tell when someone got IRFed, as the detainees throughout the camp would start chanting and screaming,” Neely recalled. Once, he watched an IRF team leader beat a detainee so badly that he had to be sent to the hospital and the floor of his cell was stained with blood; the next time the team leader was in the cellblock, another detainee yelled out, “Sergeant, have you come back to finish him off?”

In Islam, the Quran is considered the transcribed word of God; some Muslims keep the book wrapped in cloth, never letting it touch unclean surfaces. To dispel notions that the United States was at war with Islam, detainees were allowed to have private meetings with a Muslim military chaplain, and were given copies of the Quran. Some guards saw an opportunity to torment the detainees—by tossing the Quran into the toilet, for example, or by breaking the binding under the guise of searching for “weapons.” Desecration of the Quran provoked riots in the cellblocks, which resulted in IRF teams storming into the cells and beating up detainees.

One day, after an interrogator kicked a Quran across the floor, detainees organized a mass suicide attempt. “Once every fifteen minutes, a prisoner tried to hang himself by tying his sheet around his neck and fastening it through the mesh of the cage wall,” James Yee, an Army captain who served as the Muslim chaplain in Guantánamo, recalled in his memoir, “For God and Country,” from 2005. “As soon as the prisoner was taken to the hospital, another detainee would be found—his sheet wound around his neck and tied to his cage wall. The guards would rush in to save him and the chaos would start again. The protest lasted for several days as twenty-three prisoners tried to hang themselves.”

Military-police officers so frequently abused the Quran during cell searches that detainees demanded that the books be kept in the library, where they would be safe. Yee, who had converted to Islam in the early nineties, sent a request up the chain of command, but was rebuffed. “I felt this decision stemmed from the command’s desire to be able to tell the media that we gave all detainees a Quran out of sensitivity to their religious needs,” he wrote. The detainees protested, and so “it was decided that every detainee who refused the Quran would be IRFed.” While the detainees were receiving medical treatment for their post-IRF injuries, the Qurans were placed back in their cells.

In time, Yee came to believe that “Islam was systematically used as a weapon against the prisoners.” Guards mocked the call to prayer, and manipulated Islamic principles of modesty—by having female guards watch naked detainees in the showers, for example—to create tension as an excuse to exact violence. During interrogations, detainees were forced to perform mock satanic rituals, or were draped in the Israeli flag.

Donald Rumsfeld told reporters that the men in Guantánamo were “among the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth.” But after Brandon Neely’s first shift, on the day the detention camp opened, “no one really spoke much,” he recalled. “I went back to my tent and laid down to go to sleep. I was thinking, Those were the worst people the world had to offer?”