When I was young, I made a big mistake: I married the first man who told me I was beautiful. It doesn’t sound much like a mistake, but if you think standing still and smiling while an old native American man beats a drum in front of your face is a mistake, then what I did was equally tragic and misguided.
The thing is, back in the day when I left my now ex-husband, for things he did to me and I had very little culpability in except for—like the young MAGA hat boy—staying and taking it, people weren’t publicly shamed for something they couldn’t have understood would be an issue. Worse than that, people were allowed to get over the mistake and move on with their lives. I myself moved out of the house, got a divorce and raised my kids on my own (though I had been effectively doing that for years before I left him). I could escape the city we lived in together and strike out on my own in a new place.
That sort of fresh start no longer exists for people thanks to the Twitter Mob.
Kevin Hart was kicked out of the premium hosting job for a comedian at the Oscars for something he had already apologized for. The offending tweet being already a decade old, he probably thought that forgiveness had been granted, since no one made an issue of it until later. Even after it had been dug up again, his advocates pleading his case, the twitter mob still would not forgive him.
And you don’t even have to be on Twitter to be unforgiven and have your public persona executed by the Twitter Mob. Sargon of Akaad (AKA Carl Benjamin) was kicked off of twitter years ago, but lets do a bullet list of what has happened to him since being being kicked off of twitter:
- Called a “garbage human” in a public platform by a pop culture feminist that went viral
- Attacked publicly by Antifa – who coordinated on Twitter, by the way
- Kicked off of Patreon, deprived of thousands of dollars
- Unable to collect from Subscribestar because Paypal bows to the Twitter Mob too
I’m sure Sargon would and could list out many, many more things that have happened to him and continue to happen to him, being coordinated and enforced by the Twitter Mob.
How did we become so unforgiving?
I would speculate that when you drop Christianity in the trash bin, you’ve given up any perspective for forgiveness if any sector of society deems you unworthy. There is no longer a religious process in place to earn forgiveness, or even who and when someone can be called out for error. Anything can be an error in the new Internet Age, and there is no forgiveness.
The new religion we’ve created online is dependent on social network retweet counts. The Internet culture is a fickle, ever changing creature that moves from film to television to games to politics in vast, unthinking mobs of blue checkmarks enforcing the latest jihad pronounced by a pop culture icon.
There is no telling who will be guilty of what sin, since sins are no longer written down in scriptures, but on Twitter by the capricious, feckless celebrities and media pundits who don’t seem to care if they destroy someone’s life and livelihood in a matter of seconds and a character count under 250.
These are the same people who think words are violence. They think this because they know the power they wield. The keyboard is mightier than the sword, if you could carry a sword, but they will make sure you are swordless. And even if you can man a keyboard, these Twitteratti and their unthinking mobs will make sure you can never use it to any effect—even to feed your family. They are ruthless and unforgiving. But they, of all people, should be wary of this lack of forgiveness because if the past and Kevin Hart are any indication, the keyboard you use today to strike down your enemy will be the same keyboard someone uses to #Metoo you.
Noelle Campbell 
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