The Twitter mob attacked me and I lived to tell about it
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It began in waves on Friday night with “notifications” on Twitter telling me to take cover.
It continued through the night and all of Saturday.
A Twitter mob had formed with torches and pitchforks and animal intensity all in pursuit of ... me.
A schlep like me.
As quickly as I could click on the Twitter bell icon that informs me I’ve got “notifications” – Twitter’s euphemism for flaming rocks launched in my direction – the icon filled with more and more and more.
One by one, 10 by 10, 100 by 100, they told me in words both civilized and not what an idiot and imbecile and son of you know what I am, and my relatives, too.
They accused me of being MAGA. Ha! Considering how many times I have criticized Trump and his supporters, the only people who hate me as much wear adjustable red ball caps.
The Twitter mob wanted my head on a pike and my job on a poker.
The source of all this Twitter fury
Why were they so angry?
I had written a couple of columns saying the Justice Department and FBI screwed up by breaking more than 200 years of precedent and sending dozens of federal agents into the home of a former president.
I argued the U.S. attorney general was playing a double game when he finally, three days too late, addressed the nation.
Merrick Garland, I explained, told the national media he is saying little to protect the constitutional rights of the accused – one Donald Trump – while at the very same time his cadre of unnamed sources was indicting the accused in all of the left’s friendly newspapers.
The Twitter mob didn’t like that.
Those attacks were music to my ears
When they came for me, I suppose I could have done the decent thing and stepped aside. I could have just tweeted:
“Listen, you can argue this with the Justice Department, because their own anonymous sources admitted to Newsweek they screwed up – they failed to anticipate the public reaction and therefore weren’t ready to manage it.”
That would have been the civilized thing to do. But, God forgive me, I couldn’t do the civilized thing.
I tweeted back at the mob: You’re “music to my ears.”
As ashamed as I am to admit it now, they were.
The left owns every facet of our culture
There’s nothing I enjoy more than the howl of liberals who’ve been forced to endure the cataclysmic macroaggression of a contrary opinion.
On Judgment Day when they’re handing out harps and clouds to all my friends, St. Peter will hand me a pitchfork and point me to the cellblock labeled “fire and brimstone.”
“Why? Because I upset the Twitter mob?”
“No. Because, you enjoyed it.”
I enjoyed it because the American left owns the culture. They control every major echo chamber – the national media, academia, medicine, arts and entertainment, sports, the Fortune 500, Big Tech, public education.
Unprecedented: Trump FBI raid brings a political minefield
And every major echo chamber long ago abandoned professionalism for advocacy – they’ve turned themselves into ideologues – an army for the progressive left.
There’s no balance in America anymore. There’s no attempt at balance. Politics have taken over everything, and when opinion calcifies like that it starts to turn into control.
The modern left believes the Ma and Pa Kettles who back Donald Trump are the greatest threat to American democracy. But Ma and Pa Kettle don’t have the power to switch off and de-platform internet voices they don’t like. The left does that.
Conservative opinions are stamped out
When the eccentric Elon Musk threatened to take over Twitter, the left went berserk because they knew Musk was about to give the rabble a voice – an opinion. The left wants to stamp out “misinformation,” its euphemism for “opinions that don’t agree with ours.”
When you control the cultural echo chambers, you can live in a bubble. You never have to question or cross-examine your own bad ideas.
An American liberal can go through life cossetted by Stephen Colbert, Saturday Night Live, Leonardo DiCaprio, The View, all telling them they’re beautiful people, always on the cutting edge of chic.
Conservatives can’t.
The national echo chambers tell them they’re morons. Reptiles. Backwards and ignorant.
The American right is always walking into the headwinds of the establishment. The American left is the headwind. It is the establishment.
And here’s the practical effect:
When the right forms protest lines to contest restrictions in a pandemic, the public health community – controlled by the left – tells them they’re superspreaders.
When the left forms protest lines to decry the police in a pandemic, the public health community tells them they’re rock stars.
A 6-year obsession to get Trump hurts them, too
So yeah, I don’t mind telling the Twitter progressives that their six-year obsession to get Donald Trump has made them insane.
That some two years after the Trump presidency and 90 days before a national election we’ve got a congressional commission, a New York attorney general, a U.S. attorney general, an FBI director and a Georgia district attorney all trying to harpoon the white whale.
Is all that critical mass random? I have my doubts.
What I don’t doubt is that sending FBI agents into the home of a former president for the first time in American history is a provocation in the extreme when the country is more divided now than at any point in our lifetimes, when left and right are filled with rogues and scoundrels who’ve sent us careening toward national dissolution.
The Justice Department and FBI admit they didn’t appreciate any of that before they risked becoming the spark that lights the kindling.
That’s a pretty serious oversight. A massive blunder.
I pointed it out and now the Twitter mob is after me.
And I don’t care, because they need me. I’m their friend.
I’m the guy who reminds them that Ahab went down with the whale.
Phil Boas is an editorial columnist for The Arizona Republic. Email him at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: The Twitter mob attacked me over Trump and I enjoyed it
