Social Justice Rhetoric Is Often A Smokescreen For Being A Jerk
Sorry, I don't believe you when you say that you're making fun of ugly men to challenge the patriarchy
About a year ago, lots of people on left-wing Twitter told
to kill himself.Singal apparently misread a pretty ambiguous bit of a transcript and Tweeted about it. This was all it took for lots of people to suggest he should stop being alive. Noah Kulwin, a shockingly prominent left-wing writer, was quite explicit in his demands for Jesse’s death—though, of course, he wrapped it up in the sort of weird internet irony speak that is common among many who spend too much time on Twitter.
Many other people joined in. Ostensibly in the name of fighting transphobia, they suggested someone should kill himself. It needn’t even be said that were the shoe to be on the other foot, were someone to tell a trans activist to kill themself for misreading a transcript, that would be all anyone could talk about—it would be seen as the most profound and vicious example of transphobia conceivable.
I don’t actually think that these people believed they were doing anything noble. They were leaning into the ubiquitous impulse to be an asshole on the internet to people you don’t like. Of course, if tasked with defending their assholery, they’d say something about civility politics and pushing back against transphobia, but this is clearly a facade.
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