The absolute best story so far about the liberal drama queens picking up the pieces of their lame lives since the Elon Muskification of Twitter was published online Sunday by NBC News. And I’ve read it so you don’t have to!
Crammed into one convenient article are some of the dorkiest elected Democrats and internet leftists having a kind of cringeworthy therapy session dedicated to their despair over Twitter and their inability to exit the platform whose new owner they so despise (because he’s letting more people say what they want on it).
You have Hillary Clinton’s former running mate, Democrat Sen. Tim Kaine: “I think Musk is an entitled jerk, and so participating in a platform of his just helps him out, and I generally don’t like helping out entitled jerks.” He says he’s currently “in a dialogue” with staff about possibly closing his account. (It takes “a dialogue” to make such a complicated decision, of course.)
There’s podcaster and mangy dog owner Molly Jong-Fast: “Until there is a viable alternative, I will be at Twitter and you will have to pry my fingers from my phone.”
Also, Rep. Jamaal Bowman, Democrat of New York: “And since [Musk’s] purchase, there’s even more vitriol and bullying and hostility and just inhumanity that takes place there.” Nonetheless, Bowman confessed he’s been unable to “get away.”
And my personal favorite, former White House paper pusher Alexander Vindman, the catalyst for Trump impeachment 1.0: “I’m just coming up with coping mechanisms for how I can still use this thing.”
The coping mechanisms are apparently working out for Alex “I wear my Army uniform to bed” Vindman. The same day the NBC article came out, he declared in a tweet that Twitter “is dead.”
He’s still on Twitter, though, having tweeted seven times since. Resistance, ironically, is futile.
You can quit Twitter but it won’t quit you. At this point, there are simply too many influential figures, both inside and outside traditional institutions of power, who use the platform to effect meaningful change. Not having an account or ignoring who tweets what doesn’t diminish Twitter’s importance just because a sour-faced liberal decides to log off.
This is truer nowhere else than in Washington, the place with the final say in what is legal and what isn’t; the place that determines what a dollar is worth. NBC’s article described it perfectly: “In a clubby city obsessed with status and information, Twitter delivers both, all from the comfort of one’s mobile phone.”
How do you top that? Mastodon, one of the platforms that the former Twitter users have flocked to, now has 2 million users, it says. That’s great — best of luck to them catching up to Twitter, which is nearly 240 times that size.
To be fair, it wouldn’t be particularly surprising if there was a mass exodus of Twitter users following a shocking rise in obscene content and hateful speech. But neither has happened. New CEO Elon Musk has promised to be more aggressive in removing child sex trafficking content. And while I know that the usual sham “anti-hate” groups are claiming to have documented a rise in antisemitism or racism, it’s a hoax, as it is every time they make that claim.
But back to the first point: Twitter affects everyone, whether they realize it or not, whether they have an account or don’t. So long as it exists, nothing will change that, not even the departure of Alexander “my opinion matters more than the U.S. president’s” Vindman.
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