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Twitterverse witch trials

The mindset behind those with pitchforks and torches never went away. They just replaced their pitchforks with 280 characters and their torches with doxxing.

This lithograph, drawn in 1892, is commonly thought to be a fantasized scene of the Salem Witch Trials. We know now that this is actually a theorized scene of a social media mob ostracizing a white cis-gendered female. The mob of people is denouncing her because she used the wrong pronoun. The person laying on on the ground had been bludgeoned for standing up for her. The lighting represents the almighty Zucc. The chains represent the upcoming doxxing. // lithograph by Joseph E. Baker

Remember the "Central Park Karen" from a year ago? She was the person who was the featured star villain of a video that went viral. The lore, as it went when the incident just happened, was that Amy Cooper, the featured antagonist, was walking her dog off-leash in a part of Central Park that required dogs to be leashed. Christian Cooper (no relation), the featured protagonist and avid birder, asked her nicely to put the leash on and Amy refused, part of an ongoing war between birders and dog walkers in Central Park. He then began filming, and at some point, Amy called the police, telling them "an African American man" was threatening her life, getting more and more hysterical for no apparent reason as the call went on. Eventually, she put the leash on, Christian said "thank you", and turned the video off. Several hours later, George Floyd was murdered elsewhere in the city, fueling the racial tensions further.

In short order, Amy's life was completely ruined, with the Twitterverse immediately lashing out at her, getting the hashtag #AmyCooperIsARacist to trend. She was doxxed, resulting in people sending her death threats and her employer firing her from her job. News channels and newspapers ran the story alongside the George Floyd incident that had occurred the same day, with pundits calling her 911 call "performative" and calling her an attempted murderer for calling the police on a black man. Things got so bad she had to flee the country.

It was the perfect storyline for the Critical Race Theory left. Racist white person calls the police on a black man and puts on a show to try to get the police to show up and arrest him for no reason. One good guy, one bad guy. Nice and binary, easy to comprehend, just like their favorite show on primetime cable. Therefore, destroy the bad guy, hail the good guy as a hero. Nice happy ending as the hero rides off into the sunset, to the fanfare of the fine antiracists. The mob can feel good about themselves, helping out the good guy and chasing off the bad guy. 

Those that were more in tune with reality figured something was fishy. People just don't tend to call the cops for no reason to try to get someone arrested. Not that people thought the roles were likely reversed or anything, just that things were likely more complicated than at first glance. The level-headed ones figured that due process matters and we should wait until more evidence to come out. It's not like similar incidents haven't happened before with evidence coming out later more or less exonerating the "guilty" party.

That wait sure was long.

Only recently, over a year later, Kmele Foster of The Fifth Column and Bari Weiss of Honestly with Bari Weiss teamed up and conducted a deep dive investigation into the event, resulting in a fantastic podcast episode. Together, they interviewed Amy Cooper, her first long-form interview since the incident. Additionally, they uncovered some background information pertinent to the story that was not revealed when the incident flooded the media channels.

They delved into the history of the ongoing feud between birders and dog owners in the Ramble. Christian had apparently been to several public meetings to complain about the off-leash dogs. There were also birder groups that have discussed a person who had figured out a tactic of giving treats to dogs off-leash to draw them away from their owners to leash them. This person they mentioned was almost assuredly Christian, as he used the tactic exactly as described. Christian's own Facebook page detailed his encounters.

Kmele and Bari also contacted several other dog owners that have encountered Christian, stating there were extremely tense moments with him, some encounters culminating in some physical altercations, mainly just pushing and shoving. Only one, however, a black man, was willing to give a written statement signed with his name to it. In it, he explicitly stated that several other dog owners, white dog owners, that have had altercations with Christian refused to issue their own letters, afraid of what might happen if their letter goes into the open and they get doxxed, just like Amy did. Who can really blame them?

In actually interviewing Amy, which almost no journalist seemed to have thought to do, more background as to what happened before the actual incident was uncovered. She was trying to hurry home and strolled into the Ramble, a part of the park she was unfamiliar with, and certainly not aware of the birder versus dog owner saga. When she encountered Christian, he was extremely aggressive in tone until he started recording the incident. Of course, her statement is all we really have to go on, but given that there are other people who have had tense altercations with Christian, is it really that hard to believe?

As it was even reported early on, though frequently buried or contextualized differently than it had actually happened, Christian said "If you're going to do what you want, I'm going to do what I want. And you're not going to like it."

Already, this is shaping up to be quite different than all the reports on the incident to date. It appears to be more apparent that Christian was not just the victim all the way through. Christian has had a long history of doing this while this was just sprung on Amy that day, shocking her. Given that weird vague threat, and that apparently Amy was a victim of sexual assault when she was younger, a detail seemingly left off of most, if not, all, reports last year, it would be understandable that the incident would really spook her. She was, after all, completely alone with one man, as Christian himself described, with a rather large presence. The left, of all people, should understand this male-female dynamic in that setting, especially one #MeToo'd before, could cause some alarm.

With the multitude of talking heads on cable news networks calling Amy's 911 call "performative" and that the hysteria was heightened as acting, to get the police as shot up with adrenaline as possible, one would have thought they would try to obtain the 911 call. But no one did. If they had, as Kmele and Bari did, a year later, they would have found out that the signal was breaking up as she was trying to ask for help. Imagine if you were in duress and your call to 911, in your mind at the time, your only lifeline, started to break up, would that cause your voice to elevate in volume and stress? Almost certainly so, unless you have ice running through your veins.

It is perhaps a good time to stress that Christian is not a bad person. Far from it. He himself has already shown to be a much better person than the vast majority of the people on Twitter, stating that he thought the response to Amy was overblown, shocked at the retaliation, dismayed at the death threats. He is an imperfect person, just like Amy and the rest of us, caught up in frustration that some dog owners don't respect the rules of the Ramble. 

But these so-called journalists, let alone the pathologically virulent people on Twitter, could perhaps be called bad people. Certainly worse than either Christian or Amy. They had one job, and they either abjectly failed to do it or chose to do it maliciously. Instead of actually trying to present all the facts as neutrally as possible, they decided to just fan the flames.

How could all of these details have been missing from the original accounts of the story, covered by hundreds of media outlets, some with extremely deep pockets? The New York Times has a cash flow in the nine digits. They couldn't pay a journalist the hour and a half to obtain the 911 call? These calls are public record. Why did it take two independent journalists, a year later, in a special effort outside their regular episodes...to do actual journalism?

It's actually worse than simple incompetence spread throughout nearly the entire industry. Looking at the reporting from "the paper of record" New York Times in their own hometown, it was clearly a piece manufactured to create sympathy for Christian and incite hatred for Amy, if one knows what to look for.

The article talks about Christian's Harvard-educated background and his board seat on the Audubon Society. It starts off by framing Amy's transgressions against park rules, without explaining how she was in an area unfamiliar to her, and framing her 911 call in the worst possible light, calling it hysterical without bothering to investigate, which would have shown a bad cell phone connection. It left off Amy's victim status of sexual abuse and didn't explain how Christian had done this multiple times, intimately familiar with the conflict, while Amy did not know about this birder-dog owner slap-fight. It wasn't until halfway through the article where it even brought up Christian Cooper's vague, ominous threat, made less ominous by explaining the threat in the paragraph before, context that Amy did not have when the comment was made.

If they had framed it honestly, readers would have received a much more complex view of the situation that more accurately reflected reality, a complex situation that resulted in a misunderstood exchange between the two. Instead, it created a cartoonish good guy versus bad guy situation with no nuance, inciting the outcry.

I wish this was an isolated case, but this is a repeated pattern in the corporate media with these incidents in the past few years, such as the Covington kids and the Jussie Smollett story. In both instances, the media just had a knee-jerk reaction that there must have been white racist boogeymen, and in both instances, they were completely false.

As bad as the media has been, the cancel mob has been worse. The list of names the progressive cancel mobs have attacked is long and varied. Conservatives, of course, have been targeted, famously, Jordan Peterson, Milo Yianopolous, and Andy Ngo, with the latter two even suffering physical violence, despite the fact that both are gay, proving that the progressive left really doesn't have any so-called protected classes. 

The people targeted, were in no way, limited to conservatives. Many progressives have, themselves, been major targets. Some are people who have acted like douches, but hardly deserving of being treated like rapists, like former Democratic Senator Al Franken. His "crime" was to take some untasteful photos of himself with a woman who was passed out on a couch, when he was still in the entertainment industry. Most frustratingly idiotic, are their targets that have actually been people that fight for social justice. Molly Rush, for example, worked on behalf of black construction workers being denied jobs from the local unions, but was cancelled after she dared to criticize the violent riots after the George Floyd murder, according to Kmele Foster. As Glenn Greenwald often brings up, Martina Navratilova was a female tennis player that had done substantial work to advance gay rights, particularly in sports, and she was the target of a cancellation mob because she thought that transsexual women shouldn't play in women's leagues due to biological differences. The horror! Both Rush and Navratilova have individually done more to advance social rights issues, at a time doing so was extremely unpopular, than these Twitter cancel mobs have done, collectively.

Interestingly, this is not a new phenomenon. This type of behavior has been with humans for as long as humans have been around, likely evolved from our ancestors that thrived in tribes. Most people today still retain these tribalist tendencies, forming mobs against people. Twitter mobs today are simply the latest incarnation. It takes special, resilient, and independent people like Navratilova, to advance society and to maintain her sense of ethics, in the face of fierce opposition.

In just the past few years, we've seen many examples of this tribalist behavior, providing horrific results. Many of these share characteristics with the modern Critical Race Theory Twitter mobs.

Let's just dive headfirst into Godwin's Law. The Nazis scapegoated an entire race of people for the Weimar Republic's economic woes. Similarly, the CRT Social Justice Warriors have scapegoated an entire race of people for the collective woes, often economic grievances, of minorities. The evidence for this, today, is about as solid as the Nazis had for their scapegoating of Jews, which is to say, pretty much zero. While it's true there have been many racists in history, creating many negative outcomes for minorities, that has not been the case for decades now, despite their claims. There have been nearly no major racist uprisings (against minorities, that is) in the United States for decades. Whenever evidence of one is asked, the answer is pretty much always "Charlottesville". Okay, one event which when they tried to do it again, barely anyone showed up. Some may consider January 6th to be one, but there is no evidence of it being racially motivated. There is one officer that testified there was a crowd of 20 people that chanted racial epithets to him, but it is curious, as Kmele Foster noted, that of all the thousands of hours of video scraped together in perhaps the most surveilled area in the entire country along with all the hours of cell phone video piece together, there is not one corroborating minute of video. There are also claims that laws disproportionately affect black people, which, okay, I don't necessarily disagree with, and the libertarian philosophy would curb this effect greatly by decreasing police-citizen interactions, but there is nary a case where people can point to an overtly racist law in its text.

The Salem Witch Trials also have parallels to the modern mobs. Many people were rounded up and accused of being witches. They were given trials in a kangaroo court, given no real due process, and many were executed for being witches. None of them were actually witches. Probably. Similarly, the modern mobs have shown to have very little interest in due process. If they say you're guilty, you're guilty.  Evidence be damned. Even with all the new facts that came out about Amy Cooper, Kmele Foster (a black man, mind you) gets hate mail about daring to make a nuanced argument about it. 

This one may really trigger the modern mob, but the tactics are also similar to the lynch mobs in the Deep South. The pitchforks and torches are now virtual, and they don't physically kill anyone now, but they still form a mob online and they collectively do what they can do to ruin people's lives. Apologies are often ignored. People are seldom spared. 

These traits summed into the modern Twitter mob show that they inhibit the characteristics of the worst groups of collectivist thinking in history. That they think they are the virtuous ones just further cements them into the aforementioned groups as all three of those historical mobs thought they were on the righteous path.

Moreover, the way people are dehumanized is alarming. The un-personing of the three historical events is pretty obvious, but people haven't seemed to catch on to the modern mob's dehumanization of people they disagree with. They've redefined "racist", "white supremacist", "fascist", and "Nazi" to where they'll just label anyone they disagree with as those terms. They have even called a black man who has worked to end (real) racism a white supremacist, with some perpetrating violence against black people for their views. This is the same for the word "fascist", though the tactic of using this slur has been utilized since the Stalin days. 

Then they take those broad-brush redefinitions and consider their targets less than human. It's how they are so willing to ruin people's lives with no consideration to whether or not they're actually guilty of what they claim, like in Amy Cooper's case. Or justify their violence against people they labeled as such, as evidenced by all of the violence Antifa had perpetrated in 2016 and 2020. It's what makes people kill or wantonly cheer on murder. The popular left-wing nonprofit, the Southern Poverty Law Center, has been famously listing "hate groups" on their website, often incorrectly. Someone utilized this list to carry out a shooting on the Family Research Council that was listed on SPLC's website as an "anti-gay hate group".

It is particularly disturbing when looking at it as a whole. If you can redefine an epithet to be so broad as to utilize it against anyone you don't like, dehumanize them, then assume that any kind of bad thing that happened to them was justified, you have, in effect, had the same thought process as those who perpetrated or supported every genocide in the 20th century. People who think this way and utilize words this way while acting on it need to have as much power stripped from them as possible. They are absolutely dangerous.

This is, again, hardly a new thing. People have been dehumanizing others for millennia. It's how slavery was justified. It's how the Holocaust was justified. It's how the Holodomor was justified. It becomes much easier to advocate or attribute violence to people if you don't consider them as actual people.

Further, this is a distraction from real problems and is the primary reason the political and corporate establishment is so eager to cheer them on. Every minute they're chasing boogeymen like Amy Cooper, Louis CK, the Covington kids, and literal figments of imagination who attacked Jussie Smollett, is a minute not spent chasing down actual problems like wars in the Middle East, the drug war, corporate welfare, and civil asset forfeiture. Of course the CIA and Lockheed Martin would prefer the modern mob to focus on canceling people for their woke agenda while they enrich themselves by mass-murdering Muslims. Why do you think they support all this nonsense?

Even the time they spend on people with actual deplorable views like Christopher Cantwell or Richard Spencer is wasted time since people like that have so little power and influence, it's laughable. Between the two of them, they've killed zero people. The body count of innocent people the CIA has racked up would make The Joker blush through his makeup. These efforts are actually counterproductive as the people they target can then just point to their censors and say, "See how they're trying to silence me? They must not have any arguments against what I'm saying." As Milo Yiannopoulos has said, Antifa is his PR firm. There is no way I would have heard about them if his event in Berkeley wasn't violently attacked by Antifa.

Although many of these tactics have been done before, this is a very new progression among those in the American left. Those that came from the politically liberal left of the 20th century have had an intellectual history of free speech and tolerance. The new left has abandoned any pretense of this now that they have amassed power in the political and cultural realm. The same people that supposedly preached rehabilitation over punishment for criminal justice reform is now as bad, if not, worse, than the very conservatives they used to criticize for being intolerant.

In a soldier's stance, I aimed my hand at the mongrel dogs that teach.
Fearing not that I become my enemy in the instant that I preach. 
My pathway led by confusion boats, mutiny from stern to bow.
Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.

-Bob Dylan, My Back Pages

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