Revere man charged with spray-painting swastikas on Muslim woman's car

that "mischievous teens" is often the Trumpie's first dismissive rationalization for this kind of hate crime. It used to be a more convincing trope. Formerly, when I saw this kind of vandalism, I'd wonder if it might merely be dopey adolescent boys trying to be badass and wild without any actual malice.

I was that kind of harebrained fuck-shit-up type as a lad: pulling down clotheslines, stringing hazard-warning sawhorses across the county road, chucking rocks at streetlights, shooting bottle rockets over the hoods of passing cars, carving up ancient trees with crap penknife graffiti. I thought hawking loogies from smoking pilfered Marlboro Reds made me look tough.

Typical shitty-nowhere-Masshole-town callow-youth behavior, or at least it was when I and my gang were pimply, newly testosterone-crazed, insecure 14-year-olds. We never went as far as spray-painting SS lightning bolts on the schoolyard walls, but we were unworldly enough that we might have done so, thinking it was totally *metal* without any clue about its symbolic hatefulness. "Fuckin' rock-and-roll, maaan, yeah!" Oof.

So, could spraying swastikas or chalking "White Power" on a sidewalk simply be the not-intentionally-malign handiwork of ignorant young louts? Doesn't apply here, as we have a grown-assed man dead to rights on it, but it's an argument I used to entertain because I was once a bored, under-supervised, knuckleheaded teenager, too. (Granted, we'd never stoop to Nazi dribble just to be provocative: our ne plus ultra of transgressive language was "motherfucker".)

In 2020, I no longer grant that benefit of the doubt, not in the wake of Flailing, Desperate President Very-Fine-People and his newly-empowered legion of mouth-breathing racists, xenophobes and religious bigots. As long as Trump has a soapbox, that convenient, tissue-thin "naughty baby nihilists" excuse won't pass the smell test.