I missed this when Jesse Singal published it a few weeks ago. The specific online fracas that was the impetus behind this column is now ancient news in internet time. Former Vox writer Matt Yglesias had decided to join Bluesky, one of the Twitter alternatives which progressives have been promoting as a safe space for their kind of people. And as soon as Yglesias joined he apparently got dog-piled by a whole bunch of people who hate him because he’s not longer an orthodox progressive on every issue. For instance, he’s argued at length that more police means less crime,

Yglesias quickly realized he wasn’t welcome on Bluesky and left. That was followed by celebration from those who’d participated in the collective harassment. One particular individual, Alex Goldman, suggested people should head to Twitter and bully Yglesias off that site as well.

I’m only vaguely familiar with Goldman from seeing his tweets but apparently he’s had some major struggles with depression. In fact, Jesse Singal noticed that one tweet below his call to run Matt Yglesias off Twitter was a tweet about his personal struggles. He wrote “Responding to my first text in weeks as I emerge from a crippling depressive episode.”

It’s a very odd contrast. One moment you’re asking people to acknowledge your very personal struggles online and the next you’re trying to lead a witch hunt against someone you disagree with. And here’s the thing, I know because I’ve read many of Matt Yglesias’ pieces over the years that he has also dealt with depression. So if you’re someone who struggles with this yourself, wouldn’t you hesitate a bit before going full cancel culture against someone who is in the same boat? You would think so but obviously that’s not always how it goes, especially online.

So I guess my argument is that you can’t really call for pain to be inflicted on others while also trying to call attention to, and generate sympathy for, your own pain. And what Goldman is doing here is unfortunately characteristic of a broad swath of the online lefty world, which is just a miserable, deranged, angry place…

I think Twitter in particular has gotten worse because over time, the better-functioning, less sadistic and damaged people have left (I am not including myself — my departure is temporary). Whether or not my theory is correct, you see this a lot: you see people rapidly vacillate between trying to express their pain, or trying to defend their friends against pain being inflicted on them, and seeking to firehouse as much pain as humanly possible at their own enemies…

There are certain people who, as a result of trauma or personality disorders or boredom or resentment or some combination of these and other factors, have a strong will to hurt others. They can’t just go torment some random weak, hapless person, because in bien-pensant lefty circles such bullying is in theory verboten. In theory. But if you can find someone who is a bad person (because everyone says they are), then all bets are off: You can bully them and call them a piece of shit and seek to inflict so much harassment on them they flee a social media platform. That’s just social justice, baby! That’s the kind of fearless activism favored by organizations that are “abolitionist, anti-capitalist & anti-imperialist collective[s] amplifying the voice of the people through direct action, public ed + community space.”

We all know the type. To be a good leftist these days is to be an expert in call-out culture. But it’s better to call out someone else than it is to be called out, so you wind up with a lot of angry, damaged people trying to unload some negativity on whoever has been designated today’s villain. Meanwhile, they’re also desperately trying to virtue signal that they are on the right side of history and therefore should not be tomorrow’s villain. This isn’t morality or virtue, it’s just rats in a barrel trying to avoid sinking to the bottom.

Increasingly, I’m of the opinion that these issues matter more than any ideological commitments. There are lots of people online that I disagree with but I still think I could probably sit down at a bar and talk to them (whether they would talk to me is another issue). In general, I think the left has a real problem with the kind of unhappy culture of endless bullying it has embraced. But that can’t be an excuse to emulate it. At some point, you have to try to remember that even the people with bad opinions are real people. At some point that humanity has to matter and over time I think showing a bit more openness about your own difficulties is probably the best way to earn a little respect online.