Listen, Scum Author

Welp, it finally happened. Yesterday, for the first (and hopefully last) time ever, I banned a reader here at The Commentary.

We’ve been rolling along every week for around a year and a half now, and I’ve never really laid out any ground rules. I’d like to keep it that way. You’re all adults, I’ve come to respect many of you greatly, and the last thing I want to do is be the language police.

So I thought I’d try to share my vision for conversation here by sharing one of the most unhinged comments I’ve ever received on Medium.

In my article, What If White Supremacy Isn’t The Problem? (this one really is the outrage gift that keeps on giving), I did my best to tease apart the fact and the fiction of this infamous case.

Kathleen…well, it’s probably best if you just read for yourself.

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Kathleen:

Working in Kenosha County and having a very close proximity to the riots and protests...I'm APPALLED at this batshit crazy article. Listen, scum author...YOU didn't know the victims he maimed and murdered just like that scum Rittenhouse didn't know them or their background. To post-humously suggest that Rittenhouse was in the right to murder them because they had less than perfect backgrounds is exactly what is wrong with your right-wing extremist idiot faction. Fuck you and your faction for this bullshit opinion. You are total trash.

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Where to begin? No, I didn’t suggest that Rittenhouse was in the right to murder anybody, no I’m not a right-wing extremist, and, I mean, come on! I might be trash, but I’m not total trash.

In real life, when we meet somebody, we instantly absorb a thousand little details about who they are. Do they have a kind smile? Do they have one of those “wet fish” handshakes? Do they take care of themselves? Body language, eye contact, halitosis, we pick up all of this and more before we’ve said a word.

And all of this is missing when we meet somebody online.

Instead, the entirety of that person is contained in the sentences they’ve typed on the screen. Whether we “like” that person is based entirely on whether we like what they have to say.

Kathleen didn’t like what I said. Or more precisely, she didn’t like her faulty reading of what I said. And apparently, that told her everything she needed to know about me. But in return, what Kathleen wrote told me something about her.

Because setting aside the possibility that any emotionally healthy person talks to strangers this way, this strikes me as the reaction of a deeply unhappy and probably deeply unwell person. Her reaction was so laughably extreme that it snapped me out of any irritation I might otherwise have felt.