Final reflections from an awful, awful week.

Finding the Brown shooter was hard. Getting accountability for the bad actors who exploited this tragedy will be even harder.

It’s finally over. As you’ve probably seen, last night law enforcement found the man who attacked Brown University in a storage unit in New Hampshire, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Maybe it’s best to leave this well enough alone, now that we’re through the anxious uncertainty and in a place where our Brown and Providence communities can focus on healing and supporting those who are grieving.

But I have to admit: I am still, at times, shaking with rage thinking about the cynicism, the mendacity, the obscenity of what the MAGA movement just put us through. So I wanted to share a few final reflections on an awful, awful week.

First, needless to say, every rightwing fraudster spinning bullshit conspiracies and doxxing innocent students and attacking our community was wrong. This was not, as thousands of people with massive followings claimed based on literally zero evidence, a targeted attack against the right. There was not a coverup or refusal to investigate because Brown or Providence authorities don’t care about conservative people’s safety. The shooter wasn’t a Muslim. The random student that MAGA decided to target and endanger, simply because they were transgender and pro-Palestine, had nothing to do with the attack.

Second, even beyond the pain and fear these cowards caused to innocent doxxing victims and to many of the survivors whose grief they interrupted, they also, according to law enforcement, actively hurt the investigation. As the Colonel of the Rhode Island State Police said last night: “The endless barrage of misinformation, disinformation, rumors, and clickbait were not helpful in this investigation. Distractions and unfounded criticisms do not support this work. They complicated and threatened to undermine the justice we seek for the victims and grieving families.”

Third, it’s worth noting that these unbelievably irresponsible attacks weren’t just coming from the random fringes of the far right. These were coming from Republican officials of significant power and stature. Here’s a Republican member of the United States House of Representatives actively amplifying a false conspiracy that law enforcement has said made their work harder.

Here’s the head of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division doing the same.

It’s hard to put into words how disgusting this behavior is.

Fourth, it’s important to remember that these people didn’t just engage in their campaign of disinformation for laughs. This was a political project. Their goal was, very explicitly, to use this tragedy to justify and build support for a martial crackdown by the Trump administration on the left and the Muslim community. The fact that the shooter was a middle-aged, white, European, can’t-be-framed-as-a-leftist, cisgender man made that harder for them. But still, the administration wasted no time trying to use the one identity factor they could shoehorn into their narrative—that the shooter was originally from Portugal and received a green card in 2017 (can we remember who was president that year?)—to dismantle the immigrant visa program he entered the country through. These fascists are desperate for their Reichstag fire, and it’s chilling to think of the repression we likely would have seen if the shooter hadn’t been, as usual, a deranged white guy.

Finally, I just want to name the surreality of the fact that there will be zero accountability for the bad actors who engaged in this vile conduct. In fact, they haven’t slowed down their hateful disinformation for a single second. Here’s what Laura Loomer—someone who has Pentagon press credentials, who is a high-level advisor to the president, such that she has the power to get national security advisors fired—posted last night, just minutes after being proven beyond any possible shred of a doubt to be lying.

I’m so glad this investigation has come to a close. I’m so glad our community can now focus on healing. But we should not forget the craven treacherousness with which the MAGA movement seizes on any possible opportunity to instantiate their fascist vision for our country, to overrule truth with known lies so vociferously that the lie eventually becomes our accepted truth.

We need to defeat MAGA—in 2026, in 2028, and beyond—and then we need to hold these bad actors to account. It’s not just our democracy that’s at stake. It’s our very capacity to maintain an understanding of reality that exists outside of their sick and cruel fever dreams.