ESSAY: PATRICK DAI -BAD WORDS MATTER

A Cornell University student named Patrick Dai puts a tranquil, isolated college campus on edge with toxic hate speech. Words matter. And terrible, wrong words can end a career in a matter of minutes.

Imagine being the proud Chinese immigrant parents of a child for whom you make all the usual sacrifices to raise in a big, comfortable home in a leafy suburb of Rochester in upstate New York. He excels in his studies, gets a perfect score on his math SAT and graduates high school with honors and admission to an Ivy League University. Your child’s senior yearbook quote is taken from the silly SpongeBob SquarePants cartoon character named Patrick Star who rightly says:

“Knowledge can never replace friendship.”

There are some rough patches after that. Your child does well in school but apparently suffers from depression and then takes two terms off. Then he’s back in school and suddenly he cuts off contact. Imagine rushing to campus to find out what’s going on with your child only to find the police have beat you to his door. He’s been arrested.

Taken into custody on October 31 by a large team of local police aided by the FBI, Patrick Dai admitted to authorship of the threatening posts. The posts were so over-the-top toxic, so fundamentally disturbing and got so much bad press that even after his arrest, Cornell University cancelled all classes to give the community a chance to heal. Even China’s Xinhua News covered it.

Using keystrokes like a trigger-happy word assassin, Dai managed in a few short posts to fire an unforgettable broadside at fellow students, singling out Jews with particular vehemence.

But even the most deeply troubled individuals don’t live in a linguistic vacuum, and the terrible words he used to vilify, threaten and abuse Jewish people are almost entirely terms borrowed from others.

His toxic rant under the name “Hamas warrior” opens with “the genocidal fascist Zionist regime will be destroyed” and goes downhill from there.  But he’s not the first person to refer to Israel as “the Zionist entity,” is he, so where did he get that odd phrase from?  

Much of the rhetoric is so hateful it hardly bears repeating, but even using one of his milder missives as an example, there seems to be a disturbing level of malevolent echolalia at play.

Unlike the post attributed to “Hamas warrior” this one is tagged “kill jews”. The reference to 104 West is the address of the Kosher dining hall on the edge of the Cornell campus.

He opens with “allahu akbar,”  a powerful refrain possessed of totemic power, even to the American non-believer’s ear. It may be an endearing, indeed stimulating, term of Muslim religiosity to believers, but in the Western media ecosystem it’s commonly associated with hijackings and acts of suicidal or murderous violence.

—“from the river to the sea, palestine will be free!”  

Dai quotes this pro-Palestinian slogan, and as slogans go, it’s got a ring to it. It’s deceptively simple and easy on the ear, but it contains multitudes of meaning, some quite hateful.

Israel is wedged between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, so by implication it does not or cannot exist, if Palestine is free to assume its imaginary natural boundaries.

The origin of “glory to hamas!” is unclear, but Patrick Dai was probably familiar with news reports about the political struggle in Hong Kong when “glory to Hong Kong” was a word on many lips.

Dai employs the term “any means necessary” a term commonly attributed to Malcolm X, who sometimes included violence in his evolving toolkit of addressing racial injustice. Dai’s use of this term echoes the historic language of struggle of African-Americans.

The student newspaper reported that Dai’s only Instagram post was in support of Black Lives Matter, more specifically #BlackOutTuesday, a commemoration which started out as a music industry protest in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death.

Dai’s online record also indicates that he was a Cornell University college orientation counselor, so he likely would have been exposed to diversity training to one degree or another.

It’s not known if Dai had any interaction with Russell Rickford, a Cornell professor who is among those who chose to link Black Lives Matter with the Palestinian struggle. Rickford, by most accounts a popular teacher, is now on leave of absence for his intemperate reaction to the October 7 massacre of Israelis. His initial reaction to the bloody Hamas attack, as he described it in a public forum, was “exciting” and “exhilarating.”

Dai also uses the loaded term “liberation.”  

What college student, woke or otherwise, does not find a certain frisson in such a term? It might be etymologically related to liberal or liberty, but in an intellectualized campus context, it’s more likely to be a descriptor for armed struggle or aggressive “decolonization” in the tradition of Franz Fanon and other radical thinkers.

In sum, all of the phrases used by Dai in his mildest anti-Semitic post were common currency on the Cornell campus before, during and after the shocking Hamas attack of October 7, 2023.

Consider these reports from the Cornell Daily Sun, whose student reporters and photographers covered some of the demonstrations on campus:  

According to the Sun, the October 18 demonstration on Ho Plaza in the center of campus was alive with chants including:

--“Free, free Palestine”

—“From the river to the sea”

—“No justice, no peace”

Sun reporters also noted that demonstrators “gathered at the entrance to Willard Straight Hall, carrying signs with phrases such as “We know occupation” and “End Apartheid, Free Palestine” while at another rally, a student slammed the Cornell administration with the claim:

—“your silence is saying that Muslim bodies do not matter to you, that Palestinian bodies do not matter to you.”

On October 25, obscene graffiti was scrawled in front of the campus store and on the sidewalk by the Engineering School, singling out Israel for abuse.

This is the toxic word pool that Patrick Dai, by his father’s account a victim of serious depression, swam in during the days leading up the internet posts that led to his arrest, the end of his academic career and might quite possibly land him in prison.

The first post attributed to his IP address was made on October 26 and the last on October 29, posts that the FBI has determined as traceable to his Collegetown apartment on Eddy Street.

That his messages were exceedingly foul, a veritable sewer of hate speech targeting Jews, is not contested. The question remains, why? What did a 21 year old college junior, described by peers as quiet--so quiet some classmates and club members didn’t even know who he was—adopt such pro-Hamas, anti-Israel hate speech?  

For starters, his word choice is suspect. There’s not an original thought, and nothing personal either. It’s more like he’s mimicking things he’s heard elsewhere, words in circulation, sick memes in the ether.  

How much, if any, of that incendiary rhetoric is born of his own experience?

With due respect to the need for professional psychiatric examination, he sounds, in layman’s terms, like someone who just snapped.

Confused, lonely, unstable, he may very well have been experiencing psychotic episodes. Even if his illness is congenital, it is not beyond being triggered in part by a toxic news cycle based on truly toxic events.

We live in disturbing times. Despite Ithaca’s physical isolation, the toxic hate of the distant Gaza battleground suddenly seemed close at hand.

How disturbing for the Cornell community to wake up and discover what sounded like an evil outside agitator turned out to be one of them?  

The 24/7 news cycle and ubiquity of online media has brought a digital onslaught of hate and ugliness to an isolated and picturesque campus perched on a hill overlooking Cayuga Lake. It’s natural for a colleges to be a hothouse of all kinds of ideas, especially at such a juncture, given the preponderance of malleable young people, often idealistic, with time on their hands and ideas to grapple with, while trying to figure out who they are and what they think.  

At such a time, the student experience is beset with everything from group think, to unthinking upholding of the status quo to fiery iconoclasm. It’s a crucible and it’s hot. There are conflicting and contradictory passions, shifting loyalties, varying degrees of paranoia, an underlying search for meaning, an open quest for identity, tortured self-reflection, the desire to accommodate and reconcile, all in a fog of shifting goalposts, nebulous ideals and amorphous morality.

The NY Post, covered the story with admirable persistence and gumshoe investigations while its crosstown rival, the fabled Grey Lady AKA the New York Times slept. Remarkably enough, the Post obtained quotes from Patrick Dai’s father, a professor associated with both the University of Rochester and the University of Tianjin. It is he who indicated that his son has struggled with depression.

Patrick Dai took a leave of absence for unspecified reasons during the spring term, but was back at school in the swing of things this term when he cobbled together a volatile mix of jumbled anti-Semitic missives for reasons that still elude understanding.

He was no Hamas warrior.

Some of his milder terminology may reflect familiar on-campus polemics, but the more toxic matter is equally derivative, not a reflection of original, let alone thoughtful thinking. His screed is a copy and paste job from the dark corners of the internet.

In an act that was as cowardly as it was cruel, but guaranteed to shock, Patrick Dai tapped ‘send’ on a set of hateful messages, launching an attack that sounds like the polar opposite of a cry for help, but is not without suicidal overtones. As a computer science major, he was almost certainly aware that such messages could be traced. He crashed and burned and his college career is over.

From Tel Aviv to Washington, from CNN to NBC, from the NY Post to the Daily Mail, from the US Senate floor to the White House, Dai’s shocking words put people on edge.

The provocative posts took flight from his computer, causing a stir around the world, a tribute to the negative potential of words, and the problem of hate speech on the internet.

updates:

The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle (November 7) has more detail on this story

The Cornell Sun (11/9)