Joe McConnell
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I’m old enough to remember the days when if someone said to you, “Oh my God, did you see what Elon Musk just tweeted?” it was because they had made yet another joke about the number 69, shared an interesting meme, or said something pretty surprising about Tesla.
These days, Twitter’s current owner has moved on to much weightier and grander topics. No longer content with mere laughs, the world’s richest and least popular man seems to consider it his moral duty to use the platform to bravely defend a whole range of worthy and persecuted entities: biological women, the West, Donald Trump, British race rioters, and, despite not being religious, Christianity.
“This was extremely disrespectful to Christians,” Musk, who recently decided he was “probably a cultural Christian,” said on X in response to an image from the Olympics opening ceremony, amid widespread outrage that the games had become “COMPLETELY SATANIC” and that one of the scenes resembled Leonardo da Vinci’s depiction of The Last Supper. (Organizers later apologized for any similarity, explaining that the idea was not to parody Jesus and his apostles, but rather to pay homage to the pagan festival of the Olympians.) The next day, the thrice-divorced father of at least 12 children gravely declared that “Unless there is more courage to stand up for what is right and fair, Christianity will perish.”
The idea that a man whose profile picture on X literally shows him wearing a satanic “Devil’s Champion” costume depicting the pagan idol Baphomet and an inverted cross might find this offensive to Christianity is hard to take seriously.
Social media is of course little known as a bastion of authenticity, subtlety, or compassion. Virtue signaling, fabricated outrage, howling mobs, and huddles are the name of the game, rewarded as they are by increasingly sophisticated and attention-seeking algorithms. But increasingly, those engaging in such behavior are the same people who complained about it in the first place. Musk bought Twitter in 2022, saying he wanted to make it “warm and welcoming for everyone,” and not become “a free-for-all hell where anything can be said without consequences.” He has a funny way of trying to achieve that.
Since 2020, all sorts of social media accounts dedicated to seeking anti-woke outrage have sprung up.
It was almost inevitable, given the intolerance of dissenting opinions and lack of nuance during the culture wars that reached fever pitch in 2020-21, that those whose views were deemed beyond the pale by progressives would band together. But now, it seems that many of those who spoke out against the real problems of illiberalism, cancel culture, and echo chambers have morphed into an “anti-woke” tribe of their own, plagued by the same problems they were denouncing just a few years ago and the same intolerance as others.
Anti-woke outrage merchants must now constantly hunt for new outrage to feed their waiting followers. Since 2020, all manner of social media accounts dedicated to this pursuit have sprung up, such as “End Wokeness” and the infamous “Libs of TikTok,” whose very existence and revenue streams depend on finding new liberals to latch onto, mock, or even “cancel.” A Home Depot cashier was recently fired for making a Facebook comment about the attempted assassination of Trump, aVsceker the Libs of TikTok account posted a video of her on X.
And the Olympics have provided more fodder for liberal naysayers. Musk also endorsed U.S. swimmer Riley Gaines’s X-rated post that “men don’t belong in women’s sports” amid last week’s furore, fueled largely by J.K. Rowling, over Algerian boxer Imane Khelif’s 16-round victory over Italian Angela Carini in just 46 seconds in the women’s welterweight bout.
“Could any image better sum up our new men’s rights movement?” Rowling wrote to her nearly 14 million followers, leading many to mistakenly assume that Khelif was trans. “The smile of a man who is [sic] He knows he is protected by a misogynistic sports institution that revels in the pain of a woman he just punched in the head and whose life ambition he just destroyed.”
One might imagine that a photo of a real man would better sum up “our new men’s rights movement,” given that Khelif was born female (though she failed a gender eligibility test last year, resulting in a ban from the International Boxing Association). But Rowling wasn’t the only one who didn’t let the facts get in the way of a healthy dose of outrage. “This is where Kamala Harris’s ideas about gender lead: to a grown man beating up a woman in a boxing match,” echoed Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance.
Khelif’s inclusion in the women’s boxing competition, like that of Taiwanese featherweight boxer Lin Yu-ting, is clearly a complicated and nuanced issue that requires serious thought, with difficult trade-offs to be made between inclusion, fairness, and, in the case of boxing, safety. But Khelif’s treatment reeked of bullying. Attacking and misgendering someone to millions of followers is neither a kind nor constructive way to address the issue.
A little over four years ago, Rowling was one of 150 signatories to a letter published in Harper’s magazine criticizing “the intolerance of opposing views, the fashion for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex political issues into blinding moral certainty.” It is in many ways understandable that those who have been publicly humiliated and marginalized, people like Rowling, would seek the safety and comfort of an ideological tribe. It is also important that they resist the impulse.
jemima.kelly@Vscek.com
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