A few weeks ago I angrily tweeted an extremely dark joke about white male victimhood. Then I told a self-avowed Neo-Nazi—who had told me he wanted to put me in an oven—that he should kill himself. Screenshots of those tweets have been taken out of context—both intentionally and otherwise—and viewed and shared thousands of times since then.
This is the tweet: “This is rude but speaking for myself only I think it would be funny to play piñata with the bodies of white straight men who hung themselves.” People have asked me dozens of times what context could possibly explain this joke. You’d have had to been following me on Twitter to get it, but a few days earlier I had stumbled into a dark, terrible bit of the internet called ReturnofKings.com where racist, misogynist bigots swap date rape tips and complain about how society is biased against straight white men. The worst rabbit holes are the ones that stay with you even after you think you’re out of them. I had tweeted that entire descent into madness (Act 1, Act 2, Act 3) and because I had documented my deep dive into that cesspool I assumed my Twitter followers would understand what I was referring to. And for the most part they did! But by the morning it had been screenshotted and sent around to people who had no idea who I was or what I meant. All they knew was my name, my Twitter bio, and that tweet.
So, in response to the piñata tweet, a Nazi started tweeting at me and calling me a kike and saying all Jews should die and a whole bunch of other vile garbage. I said mean things about him and then he deleted his tweets. A screenshot of my side of that conversation has been going around the internet. Here are the screenshots of his side of the conversation. In other words, I fell for a common troll ploy: Enrage someone so much that they flame back, then disappear back under the bridge.
I have been trying to explain this episode to outraged individuals on Twitter, and a bunch have asked me to write something detangling it. I’ve avoided doing that until now because I just wanted it to go away. These tweets look bad. They make no sense out of context. I don’t want to defend them. I apologized for them the next day and deleted them. I cringe at the misleading mockups that make it look like I was talking about gamers or, far worse, Robin Williams. But this clearly isn’t going away so here we are.
Look, it was a dark unfunny stupid joke. I didn’t say it to make everyone laugh. I said it to vent. I said it to help me deal with people who disgust me. It was a stupid mistake. I was also not trying to send up white straight men. I am a white straight man. I was trying to satirize men’s rights activists and PUAs and ACTUAL Nazis; sad pathetic little boys who live in a world of persecuted pretend where they are now and forever the victims of a society which in reality is entrenched in defense of their specific demographic interests.
The telling the Nazi to kill himself thing. Should you tell someone to put a gun in their mouth? Should you tell them to kill themselves? Probably not! But this particular Nazi had been after me all week and said he wanted to put me in an oven. There was not even the slightest chance that that Nazi was going to read my tweet, get up, write a note (“It was the kike’s tweet that finally convinced me”), and jump off a building.
Still: I never should have tweeted this stuff. I apologized the next day, and I apologize again here now. I sincerely regret it. I have said it many times and it’s true here too: There are no winners on the internet. There are no losers on the internet. There are only causalities on the internet.
But the lovely folks at Stormfront and the Daily Stormer behind the screenshots that make it look like I was talking about Gamergate, or that make it look like I was talking about Robin Williams, the people who sent these screenshots to Zelda Williams so many times that she had to ask them to stop? These people are bad people. They are taking advantage of folks who trust them. They are telling those people, “Here is a thing that will hurt you, it will outrage you, it will injure you. That is what it was designed to do by Ben Dreyfuss.” In fact, it was they who designed it.
I wish this was a well-thought-out essay with a point and a theme and a moral and at the end I’d save Christmas. It’s not. I’m pretty upset. Upset it happened. Upset I let it happen.
There are different types of outrage on the internet. There’s genuine real outrage. In my experience it is almost always reserved for actual events and not just words. Then there is outrage on someone’s behalf, where you feel like someone else, an imagined person, would be outraged by something so you do it for them. This is, I think, the most common form of outrage on the internet. It is a bad thing, but it’s mostly innocent. Then there is entirely trumped up pretend outrage. There is so much of the latter two that the former is like a precious rare earth material.
To anyone who was genuinely offended, who believed my tweets were about yothemu—or all white men—I am sorry. I should have known tweets can and will be used out of context to hurt, or at least pretend to hurt.
To the hundred thousand people who have seen these tweets after I deleted them, apologized for them, clarified them: You have been lied to by people wholly indifferent to the truth. You have been sold counterfeit outrage.
