Grace in the Troll Age
By Taylor Lewis
Stop me if you’re surprised: the man whose idea of a screaming stitch is short busjokes and spaffing senator zings won’t summarily dismiss an employee over tasteless tweets? It would seem trolls of a feather club propriety together.
Elon Musk’s nerd force charged with snipping bureaucratic inefficiency has run into a few road bumps—an expected occupational hazard when an entire town swells its neck folds off the skimmed fat of the federal fisc. Musk’s merry band of cost-euthanizers aren’t just keen about saving Uncle Sam a few dollars here, within the murky swamp, or a few dollars there, in sex-change clinics in Malaysia. These callow coders have a proclivity for, in Joyce’s expression, entwining their fiscal arts with laughters low.
How low? To the very nether of digital discourse, deep in the infernal pit where the most de trop among us affront our cardinal sin: racism. This may come as a shock, but young, internet-astute men apparently like to lob impolitic sneers into the world wide ether. For fun! Or for the lulz. Or to épater le bourgeois. Or even to stave off boredom in the Call of Duty lobby.
Either way, the jibesters don’t fall far from the Twitter tree. Trump re-conquered the White House thanks in no small part to restive Zoomers dudes bucking againstthe overbearing political correctness of their parents, teachers, and distaff peers, not to mention the culture at large, including finger-wagging athletes, uppity celebrities, and sponsored-contentfluencers who profess woke ideals while linking to $75 Chinese-made t-shirts that say “Sassy and Classy” in comic sans.
The danger in pushing the envelope is that sometimes the pusher, trying ever harder to offend sensibility in more provocative ways, goes so close to the edge, his foot slips and he plunges into the dark depths below. One day, you’re a garden variety wiseacre playing the dozens, the next you’re saying Papa Adolph really went wrong straying too far from kinder, küche, kirche.
Or you go for the low-hanging fruit of anti-miscegenation, otherwise known as the refusal to mix colored clothes with your whites in your bottom loader.
One of Musk’s henchdorks, 25-year-old Marko Elez, is the spitting image of a keyboard pot-stirrer. But he seems to have been watching too much of Nick Fuentes’s incel power-hour show. He tweeted last fall that “you could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity.” (Has Mr. Elez, um, seen the typical spouse of a pasty computer programmer? Let’s just say their descendants rarely hail from the Caucasus valley.) He also indulged in anti-curry-ism, tweeting “normalize Indian hate.” Then he rounded out his bigoted ecumenism, clarifying “I was racist before it was cool.”
(Cool as in whom, one wonders. Joe Cool chomping on Franklin’s spindle shins?)
Elez, despite being a purported tech wiz, forgot the first rule of shitposting: always use a burner, preferably one with an email account not nominally linked to your baptismal name. He composed his controversial posts with the handle @nullllptr, which was previously @marko_elez and listed SpaceX and Starlink as employers. Small wonder some viral-site stringer was able to uncork his history?
Upon discovering that an Elon Musk protégé had a penchant for poking decorum, Elez was kicked from his station. That is, until his former boss took pity, or, as is his novelty-needing wont, took interest in making a broader political point.
Musk announced he was considering Elez’s reinstatement, but would rely on the surest measure to determine if the job would be offered: vox populi. Or, since Musk couldn’t just issue a national plebiscite on the future of one lowly desk jockey, he substituted his own handy tool: a Twitter poll. In a result that’d make Vladimir Putin’s cheeks go gules, Musk’s slavish followers agreed: Bring us Marko! So the autistic rocketeer acquiesced. It was what democracy looks like, after all.
The Left reacted with its usual mixture of moral forthrightness and poise: like a spitting, rabies-infested pit bull catching a whiff of fresh blood. “BIGOT!” they bayed. “RACIST!” they rang. “XENOPHOBE!” they resounded. In the Trump 2.0-era, such curling cries were as effectual as Liz Cheney urging Wisconites to vote Harris.
J.D. Vance, who seems to have more time for Twitter as vice president than he did as a working senator, decided to opine on the issue, given that his wife is of Indian extract and his three children are half as such. Vance, despite his Appalachian heritage, has what the youngins call “living experience” with Indian culture, having pledged his troth to one of its kind. Channeling his recent conversion, he offered that most rare thing in online argumentation: caritas. “I obviously disagree with some of Elez’s posts but I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life. We shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people. Ever. So I say bring him back.”
For such humility, Vance was rewarded with an endless stream of bad-faith accusations, vituperation, even challenge from a sitting congressman. Ro Khanna, a tech-populist Democrat representing a chip of Silicon Valley, butted in with a cheap progeny shot: “Are you going to tell him to apologize for saying ‘Normalize Indian hate’ before this rehire? Just asking for the sake of both of our kids.”
Now had Khanna asked such a thing to Vance’s face, I can only assume his hillbilly gene, roughed and formed centuries ago on the lowland sod, would have jumped active, leading to a brawl. But Vance, being a more gentle MAGA emissary, settled for the much softer riposte: “For the sake of both of our kids? Grow up. Racist trolls on the internet, while offensive, don’t threaten my kids. You know what does? A culture that denies grace to people who make mistakes.” The VP finished his top-rope jump with a final elbow: “A culture that encourages congressmen to act like whiny children.”
Browse all the center-right books, The Free Press columns, Jordan Peterson podcasts, and those Instagram videos where Charlie Kirk gish gallops college students half his age, and you won’t come across a more pointed description of schoolmarmish speech policing has reduced social relations to then grown-men with important jobs devolved into petulant brats, always on the inch to take a new offense and hound some poor loose-lipper out of public life.
The Biden years brought a synthesizing of government with Big Tech, amalgamating what Sohrab Ahmari termed our vicious “terms-of-service censorship regime,” which muted every counterargument cutting against the liberal-narrative grain, from inquiries into the COVID-19 virus to questioning the wisdom of drizzling puberty blockers on a six-year-old’s Lucky Charms. And for those who told dirty jokes about race or sexual preference? Well, good luck ever getting a job, a mortgage, a car loan, or basically any means to not be a welfare ward.
That kareth system failed to alleviate supposed “minority stress”—did you ever adduce that most vocal identity cliques were happily satisfied sometime around 2021? Its only accomplishment, besides filling enforcing virtucrats with a warm feeling of superiority, was sowing distrust and double-thinking among the populace.
“If a person cannot walk into the middle of the town square and express his or her views without fear of arrest, imprisonment, or physical harm, then the person is living in a fear society,” said Natan Sharansky.
That necessarily includes offensive, vile, and even racist (gasp!) remarks. The vice president understands that, even if he doesn’t approve. He is able to do what the philosopher called the mark of a learned man: balancing two competing ideas without his frontal cortex melting.
A far more preferable thought fettle than a dozen BLM-marching aides pulling the levers behind a puppet president and his ditzy deputy.
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