Anna has requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation.

I’d request anonymity because of how embarrassing this is. This woman has children. Imagine being her daughter and reading about how publicly cruel and petty your mother was… and she didn’t figure it out until recently.

She did it not only because she just wanted the attention for being edgy, but because it was profitable.

“I was in love with the frisson of transgression.” The online right had begun to engage more explicitly with forbidden subjects: nativism, race science, and gender essentialism drawn from evolutionary psychology. “There was an element of gnosticism to it,” she says, “the sense that you know secret things that other people don’t know.”

These are adults who can vote, and this is what they care about. Feeling special.

They assumed, she says, “because of how I presented myself” — as anti-feminist, as “based” and unbothered — “that I was not like the other girls.”

Again, she had children at this point, and was cashing in on throwing women as a whole under the bus.

“I’m somebody, dispositionally, who likes to have a good time,” she tells me. She found the humorlessness of the contemporary left more alienating than the conservatism of her youth.

This is why the rest of us feel so much secondhand embarrassment for conservatives. Everyone can tell how pathetic they are; everything they do shows they haven’t matured since they were children.

I can’t imagine being an adult and falling for the things she did, just because I loved and profited from the attention.