Liberal Crusader Admits: Social Justice is a Poisonous Snitch Culture

Last updated on: July 16, 2018 at 1:05 pm by Mark Meckler

Liberal Crusader Admits: Social Justice is a Poisonous Snitch Culture 2018-07-16T13:05:43-06:00 Mark Meckler

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A liberal social justice warrior — writing as the pseudonym Barrett Wilson — recently was sobered to realize that the “mob” had turned on him.

I once had a well paid job in what might be described as the social justice industry. Then I upset the wrong person, and within a short window of time, I was considered too toxic for my employer’s taste. I was publicly shamed, mobbed, and reduced to a symbol of male privilege. I was cast out of my career and my professional community… In my previous life, I was a self-righteous social justice crusader. I would use my mid-sized Twitter and Facebook platforms to signal my wokeness on topics such as LGBT rights, rape culture, and racial injustice. Many of the opinions I held then are still opinions that I hold today. But I now realize that my social-media hyperactivity was, in reality, doing more harm than good.

Within the world created by the various apps I used, I got plenty of shares and retweets. But this masked how ineffective I had become outside, in the real world. The only causes I was actually contributing to were the causes of mobbing and public shaming. Real change does not stem from these tactics. They only cause division, alienation, and bitterness.

Wilson’s public shaming was so severe that he can’t even write online anymore. (He wrote the piece on Quillette, from which I am quoting, anonymously.) He also is now a food delivery driver to make ends meet.

When my callouts were met with approval and admiration, I was lavished with praise: “Thank you so much for speaking out!” “You’re so brave!” “We need more men like you!”

Then one day, suddenly, I was accused of some of the very transgressions I’d called out in others. I was guilty, of course: There’s no such thing as due process in this world. And once judgment has been rendered against you, the mob starts combing through your past, looking for similar transgressions that might have been missed at the time. I was now told that I’d been creating a toxic environment for years at my workplace; that I’d been making the space around me unsafe through microaggressions and macroaggressions alike.

But now, upon reflection, he realizes that he was “a part of a mob, until the mob came for me.” And his words are chilling:

Social justice is a surveillance culture, a snitch culture. The constant vigilance on the part of my colleagues and friends did me in. That’s why I’m delivering sushi and pizza. Not that I’m complaining. It’s honest work, and it’s led me to rediscover how to interact with people in the real world. I am a kinder and more respectful person now that I’m not regularly on social media attacking people for not being “kind” and “respectful.”

I mobbed and shamed people for incidents that became front page news. But when they were vindicated or exonerated by some real-world investigation, it was treated as a footnote by my online community. If someone survives a social justice callout, it simply means that the mob has moved on to someone new. No one ever apologizes for a false accusation, and everyone has a selective memory regarding what they’ve done.

He also laments how terribly people treat each other online. He read Jon Ronson’s 2015 book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed which includes a case study on Justine Sacco, who made a bad AIDS joke on Twitter in 2013. Though the anonymous author believed he had not been Justine’s online harasser, he went back through his Twitter feed and discovered that — shockingly — he had been. In fact, he had delivered some of her harshest critiques. “There is a ‘disconnect between the severity of the crime and the gleeful savagery of the punishment,'” he wrote. “For years, I was blind to my own gleeful savagery.”

But here’s the kicker.

Aggressive online virtue signaling is a fundamentally two-dimensional act. It has no human depth. It’s only when we snap out of it, see the world as it really is, and people as they really are, that we appreciate the destruction and human suffering we caused when we were trapped inside.

Image Credit: Wikimedia

Hat Tip: Quillette

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