I used to laugh at these scenarios of ridiculous anonymous threats...

...until about a year ago when I had a socialist lunatic on a different website scare the shit out of me. He went above and beyond doxxing. It was psychopathic stalking. Creepy doesn't begin to describe it. He was taunting me with information about me that I didn't know were even on the internet.

I thought he was going to make some horrible false anonymous tip to my employer or the police or hack into my accounts. I was almost certain of it. Over years of political debates I have experienced and laughed off countless empty threats, but this lunatic rattled me. The words were not written by an angry, ignorant college freshman. The perpetrator was clearly highly educated. His vocabulary was so strong that I had to use a dictionary to interpret his messages. Although it was obvious that he was desperately attempting to intimidate me as being intellectually superior, it worked.

In fear I spent hours digging through his account history on the site and found out that he was an instructor of computer science at a Chicago university. He had bragged about his advanced research that was so specific that I had it narrowed down to only a few people it could be. When I sent him a link to a journal article I thought he was an author of the taunting finally stopped.

That was the last time I ever went on that site.

What's sick is that he was provoked by comments that were as cordial as I would say to a personal friend. The hostility he responded with was unbelievably disturbing. I have no doubt that he would 'retaliated' if he knew his identity was totally anonymous and that he wouldn't get caught. I truly felt that my livelihood was in real danger.

I used to enjoy internet political debates. No longer. Some people are sick in the head.