The Double Downers
Yesterday something surprising, even unprecedented happened. People said dumb, transparently false things on the internet.
Shocking, right? I was under the impression that the internet had a one strike policy and if you said something dumb and wrong you were banned for life.
That appears not to be the case. Apparently you can literally spend your entire life posting idiotic horseshit online and the only “consequences”, beyond a wasted life, of course, is public ridicule.
If you post dumb shit on the net people will call you a dumbass. That’s internet justice, baby! When people are called on their shit they sometimes acknowledge their mistake and/or delete it out of a richly merited sense of shame.
In the aftermath of the Texas school shooting, for example, Republican Paul Gosar, a figure so cartoonishly monstrous that his own family campaigns against him, tweeted that the person behind the massacre was a “transsexual leftist illegal alien.”
Gosar is the worst of the worst. He’s considered stupid and corrupt even by the exceedingly lenient standards of the hardcore MAGA set.
But even Gosar, generally considered a flaming pile of human garbage the world would be better off without, had the decency to delete that awful tweet when it became apparent to seemingly all but the most bitterly partisan right-wing nuts, that despite what they might want to believe about people they consider their enemies, there is pretty much no proof that the Texas shooter was trans, leftist OR an undocumented immigrant.
That did not stop Alt-Right troll Candace Owens from confidently asserting that the shooter was trans and consequently a symbol of a moral decline that led directly to the massacre, tweeting, “What’s drives an 18 year old to murder innocent children? I don’t know. But judging by the photos of him cross-dressing, we can assume there were plenty of signs that he was mentally disturbed and abused by adults in his life. Societal cowardice ignored those plenty of signs.”
When Owens was corrected she characteristically doubled down, insisting that it was the mainstream media, or rather the lame-stream media that got things wrong because it fit their radical left-wing agenda.
The problem, in Owens’ mind at least, was not that she had gotten something very wrong by acting rashly in the heat of the moment to promote a strident political agenda, but rather that everyone else was lying to make her, the last truth-teller, look bad.
Owens sees the fact that the killer apparently wore eyeliner sometimes as incontrovertible proof that he was trans and deeply mentally ill because Owens sees being trans as a mental illness.
She seems to think that gender ambiguity and mass murder go hand in hand, that a boy will put on eyeliner for the first time, look in the mirror with a warped smile and enthuse, “I feel pretty. Pretty sure I’m going to shoot up my school! All hail Biden!”
Quinta Brunson, the black female creator of the hit show Abbott Elementary, tweeted of requests for the show to address school shootings, “wild how many people have asked for a school shooting episode of the show I write. people are that deeply removed from demanding more from the politicians they've elected and are instead demanding "entertainment." I can't ask "are y’all ok" anymore because the answer is “no."
One of the many responses to this incisive observation came from someone named Roderic Day, who rage-tweeted, “I don't even know what this show is, but the way powerful and influential people shirk their responsibility to promote good politics in their work under the guise of keeping art "pure" will never sit right with me.”
People understandably were annoyed by Day’s annoyance, and pointed out how boldly ignorant it was to seemingly take pride in not knowing anything about a television show and then making broad judgments on how the writers and producers should act.
That Day was a white man telling the black female creator of a show with a largely black cast added an additional element of ickiness to the whole situation.
Rather than concede that it was foolish to angrily judge a show you know nothing about Day instead doubled down, hollering to the heavens that artists are cowards unless they use their art and entertainment to very explicitly confront social issues, because artists have more power than politicians and consequently must use the power exactly how Day sees fit.
Of course the king of the double downers is Donald Trump, who almost invariably doubles down when called on his bullshit no matter how clearly wrong he is.
Trump is still, at this late date, 100 percent certain that what was once known as the Central Park 5 are guilty and they have been given tens of millions of dollars for being falsely imprisoned.
I am fascinated by double downers because it is so antithetical to my own personality. If I even think there is a chance that I might be wrong about something I delete it out of a combination of shame and a desire not to spread disinformation and lies.
I think that’s true of most people. That’s what makes the double downers such a curious breed. They’re so invested in being right that they angrily defend their ignorant observations despite clearly knowing, on some level, that they’re wrong.
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