Her fall from grace has been unavoidable that the second we place her on a pedestal By Feb 9:00am EST Photo by Bryan Bedder / Getty Images for OUT Magazine After whistleblower Chelsea Manning was released from prison last, I penned an essay for The Verge titled”One of Us” about how she’d become”a fanatic, even a saintly figure” into several trans women specifically. It was a testament to her courage and dignity amid Kafkaesque injustice, a thing I admire in Manning. Many people about the political left, so desperate to get a heroine in difficult times, were excited to place Manning on a pedestal — equipping her to the type of suffocating heights which nearly inevitably precede a drop. Looking back on it now, it revealed a good deal about the accelerant of social networking, race, and sex, and how all three intersect with cults of celebrity. I’ve been reflecting on this a lot because the recent revelations that Manning had spent time with members of their white supremacist alt-right — including sharing an escape room encounter and visiting the home to play table games. Her questionable fraternizing became public knowledge later she tweeted that she’d”crashed” an Basic Things That Liberal Fascists Don’t Understand | Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler alt-right celebration celebrating the first anniversary of Trump’s presidency, since she’d”learned in prison that the best way to confront your enemies would be facial in their distance.” But critics quickly noted this confrontation hadn’t seemed very confrontational, and she had been photographed laughing, drink in hand, together with Gavin McInnes, the founder of the Proud Boys, a self-described”Western chauvinist” company. (Although McInnes — that describes anti-Islam, frequently discusses the idea of”white genocide,” called actress Jada Pinkett Smith as a”fighter actor,” known former U. S. diplomat Susan Rice using all the racial slur”dindu nuffin,” called Asians”slopes” and”rice balls,” and characterized Palestinians as”dumb Rottweilers” — insists that he and his company are not white supremacist or white nationalist, even the host of a alt-right podcast described McInnes as”essentially carrying white nationalism but [that he ] came up with a new name for it.”) Much Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich asserted that he Manning had shaken hands in the event. In response to the immediate backlash — including accusations that she was a turncoat — Manning talked with The Daily Beast, insisting she was not socializing but instead gathering intelligence on the extreme right (a tactic sometimes used by anti-fascist activists)