of him grimacing. “His anger was palpable from the moment he walked into the room,” the author said. “He said ‘fuck’ so many times during our interview that he jokingly said he hoped it wouldn’t be televised.” The Outline piece was well reported, and generally perceptive, but that take on David—true?
It was tough to reconcile with the bubbly, playful David I had chatted with that first weekend. He was equally joyous and agreeable on follow-ups that week. But when I interviewed him in mid-March, David was spitting fire. “Politicians have been allowed to become corrupt, abused their power, and kept their power, to allow the slaughter of their citizens,” he said. “These politicians have shown that they want to be on the wrong side of history and that’s absolutely fine—we’ll be sure to smear them in our history textbooks that we write, and that will be their legacy and how they will be forever remembered, as the cowards that many of them are—that want to take money from special interest groups instead of putting their constituents’ lives in front of their political agenda.”
He peppered random answers with allusions to his Twitter accusers, spitting out terms like “libtards,” “Nazis,” and “crisis actors.” The digs were getting to him. He was angry at the system rigged against young black boys, repeatedly decrying the “school-to-prison pipeline.” That was a signature phrase of the Peace Warriors, and while David had missed the meeting at Emma’s house, the concept quickly permeated the group.
David kept saying he was an angry person and a nihilist. His mother rolled her eyes. He was never an angry person, Rebecca Boldrick said. Now, though, he’s like a pit bull. If David were a comic book character, he would be Bruce Banner, appearing in public as the Hulk.
The anger was new, but David’s obsessiveness went way back. “Oh my god, like he will get really into something like drone photography, and for like three months he’s just maniacal about it,” Rebecca said. “And then something else comes up and he’s just totally into that.”
She ticked through several obsessions, all visual. “Like making movies, and editing things.”
David was doing interviews constantly, calling himself the de facto MFOL press secretary, so the anger never cooled. And there was another factor: living beside Lauren. “I couldn’t stand to be around my sister in this same house with her crying incessantly and knowing that I couldn’t do anything to help her four friends that had died,” he said. “That was one of the hardest things for me, because whenever I would call my mom, my sister would pick up and she couldn’t even speak, she would just be crying, for like four days straight, she could barely even speak. And as cowardly as it is I couldn’t stand to be around her knowing I couldn’t do anything.” So he threw himself into the movement nonstop. “That’s my way of dealing with it.”
And it was helping, he said. It helped to channel his rage into something constructive, and it helped to engage with all these creative new friends at MFOL. “It’s kind of like our own therapy group,” he said. “We’re all kind of misfits. Oh, we are absolutely huge fucking misfits. Like you hear the square peg in a round hole, we’re like a fucking mutated octagon trying to go in there.”
David was pursuing a career in words, but often thinks in shapes. “Did you know David’s dyslexic?” his mother said. “I always like telling people that. I am, my dad was, it runs in the family.” Rebecca had watched David struggle, failing to read until fourth grade. Teachers wrote him off, he said, “telling my parents I would amount to nothing, like I was some kind of broken toy.” Rebecca wants other kids to know that dyslexia doesn’t have to stand in their way. She is as fierce and stubborn as David, and they butt heads constantly, but she was amazed by what he had done. David also inherited her quirky sense of humor. He said he had no time for laughter anymore, but he confessed that John Oliver was still getting through. “Just cause he’s, like, fucking hilarious. That’s my dream job right there, working to expose the ridiculousness and corruption and just how frankly stupid these politicians have become.”
Little things amused David. He paused midrant to chuckle over the name of a Norwegian interviewer, Fjord. That got him on a roll. “The French always talk very slowly with the French accent”—he amused