Elon Musk is the latest victim of the online ragetrap

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Elon Musk is the latest victim of the online ragetrap

Matthew Yglesias

11 - 13 minutes

New episode of Bad Takes is out about Kyrsten Sinema.

The other day, Elon Musk joked on Twitter that “my pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.” It’s a mean spirited joke from Musk, who we already know enjoys mean jokes about trans people — the suspension of the Babylon Bee for making a mean joke about Rachel Levine was an important motivator of Musk’s decision to buy Twitter.

Even more bizarre, though, was the crack about Fauci that he fired off 30 minutes earlier, depicting Fauci as a Wormtongue figure talking Joe Biden into “just one more lockdown.”

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The pronouns thing references a genuine dispute in American politics and culture. Small numbers of people really are using they/them pronouns or socially transitioning from she/her to he/him, and if someone wants to spend their time being angry about that then I think that’s a weird decision, but they are, in fact, choosing to be angry about a thing that is happening in the world. But if you’re sitting here in mid-December 2022 getting mad at Fauci and Biden for imposing repeated rounds of lockdowns, then you’re getting mad about something you made up. A pseudonymous wag using the handle @ToiletGun quipped a couple of years ago that “Twitter is 90% someone imagining a guy, tricking themselves into believing that guy exists and then getting mad about it.”

That was a real funny-because-it’s-true moment. Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s only Twitter — this dynamic plays a tragically large role in politics and society writ large. Too many people have fallen into the habit of believing that all righteous causes are motivated by righteous anger, that all anger is righteous, and that cultivating anger and nursing grudges is a good mode of engagement.

This comes up frequently in Covid-19 policy debates, I think because it’s so difficult to admit the truth about the situation, which is that the emergence of the virus and its subsequent evolution into the Delta and Omicron strains are fundamentally sad. The world is much worse than it would have been had the virus not emerged, and that’s not the fault of columnists you disagree with. But this practice of nursing grievances and seeking opportunities to be angry seems to be swallowing larger and larger swathes of the public sphere.

In the fall of 2020, Biden and Donald Trump had some real disagreements about Covid policy.

Trump, as part of his campaign for reelection, exaggerated the extent of those disagreements, saying Biden “wants to shut down this country and I want to keep it open.” Biden denied this, and media fact-checkers agreed that Trump was lying to people.

But everyone knows you can’t trust the liars in the mainstream media. So if you’re a Republican sitting at home in October of 2020 worried that Biden’s election will lead to a return to the conditions of spring 2020, then I hear you and I empathize with you. There really are a non-zero number of extreme Covid hawks out there, Biden has clearly positioned himself as the more Covid-hawkish candidate, and a president you like and people you trust are telling you that Biden wants to go back to the way things were in the spring. Heck, you’ve heard some people praise the much more extreme lockdowns that were imposed in parts of Europe. You’re nervous, you’re afraid.

But that was over two years ago. Biden won the election, and the thing you were afraid of happening didn’t happen.

It’s true that Biden kept some Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) in place for longer than a Republican probably would have. But he didn’t impose any new ones. All that happened during Biden’s first two years in office is that various measures — state measures, local measures, federal measures — were relaxed or went away in response to shifting objective conditions and public sentiment. Now there’s a group of people who are angry about that and have cast Fauci and Biden as the traitors who stabbed the Covid hawk cause in the back.

There’s an entire cottage industry of people talking about how Joe Biden is doing eugenics by shifting over time to a vaxxed and relaxed posture. But the Covid superhawks never seem to present any kind of policy proposals that remotely scale to their level of anger and inflammatory knowledge. The problem of Covid-19 in 2021 and 2022 is that the Delta and Omicron variants that undermined the efficacy of vaccines also undermined the efficacy of NPIs. It used to be the case that moderate measures like requiring masks in public spaces significantly reduced transmission. But that stopped being true even as prior exposure, vaccination, Paxlovid, and improved treatment knowledge made the virus less risky. It sucks that tons of people are still getting sick with Covid-19 and that some of them are dying, but it’s not Biden’s fault any more than Fauci is to blame for Biden-era lockdowns that didn’t happen.

A lot of this pronoun rage strikes me as the same. A small number of people I know prefer to be referred to as “they” rather than “he” or “she,” and I also know some people whose preferred pronouns are at odds with my understanding of their chromosomes. I try to refer to people how they prefer to be referred to, because that’s polite and because language is a bottomless pit of arbitrary conventions.

None of this changes the fact that I believe men and women differ, on average, in a number of significant physical and mental ways and that left-wing activists sometimes get this wrong both in general and in particular. A random fact I recently learned is that men and women have, on average, different ridge density in their fingerprints, so scientists can track shifting gender norms around the production of pottery in ancient Mesopotamia by tracking the shifting distribution of fingerprint ridge density. That’s a quirky example, but a real-world illustration of the fact that dogmatic denial of gender difference can blind you to certain things.

But the people who insist that using someone’s preferred pronouns will automatically commit them to the most extreme and indefensible activist claims about sex differences are just wrong.

Or, rather, they are deliberately misconstruing the issue to make themselves mad in order to have something to fight about. It is clearly possible to accept the reality and significance of biology and also refer to people by their preferred pronouns. I also just don’t believe the people who tell me that the reason they are stewing in anger over this is their exacting commitment to scientific truth. A huge share of Americans tell the General Social Survey that they believe the Bible is the literal word of God.

Not only is this belief not true, but it’s a belief that’s primarily held by the very same people who are most hostile to LGBT causes. And I can remember a time in the not-so-distant past when the brief fad for “New Atheism” claimed that secular people should run around being angry about the existence of these religious people, getting in their faces and being rude about their rituals and community institutions. That was dumb and has, mercifully, passed. But the very fact of its passing is strong evidence that the people claiming their anger about pronouns is rooted in deep devotion to science are, in fact, normal adult human beings capable of regulating their emotions.

They are simply choosing not to in this case, instead convincing themselves that nursing this grudge is vital to the pursuit of reason.

No political movement has a monopoly on this kind of behavior. Today’s post mostly focuses on the right because Elon Musk is such a pointed example of a guy who’s doing great in life and refusing to be happy about it. He’s the richest man in the world, the Covid restrictions he hates are gone, and he already owns Twitter so he can allow whatever jokes he wants. I wish the guy would try to take some pleasure in his achievements.

But the left has its own version of Covid dead-enders, of people who insist that any effort to ask about the changing standards of care for gender transition is literally murdering people. Perhaps most consequential is the very vocal community organized around the idea that climate change is a literal extinction-level threat to the human race. Throwing soup at famous paintings is not actually doing anything to mitigate climate change, which is a problem because climate change is a real issue. But a key element to this kind of rage and theatricality is convincing yourself that being calm is a form of weakness or lack of commitment and that the world needs you to be more aggro. Fortunately, the left seems to be getting chiller with Joe Biden in the White House, and we’re getting more thoughtful pieces like Clare Coffey’s Gawker article about blaming “capitalism” for one’s personal problems, an annoying online trend that seems to have diminished in recent years.

But rage is still very good at going viral on the internet. Negative content is more engaging, so if you can find more things to be angry about, you’ll do better online.

We saw during the Trump years how this led so many progressive elites astray, with so much content about how all your anxieties in life were due to the climate apocalypse and all your personal problems were due to capitalism. A lot of liberal leaders gaslit themselves into believing that the American people were crying out for radical political change. The genius of Joe Biden was recognizing that most people wanted a treatment for the most acute manifestations of Trump’s dysfunctionality. Biden’s biggest political successes have come from calming things down, and his biggest political problems have been quite banal — commodity prices soared in a way that hurt middle-class families, and people are worried about crime and immigration.

A guy like Glenn Youngkin successfully made political hay out of Covid NPIs because he was running at a time when Covid NPIs were still in place in Virginia — and the fact that Virginia voters knew a Democratic House of Delegates would stop him from enacting many right-wing policies turned this into great practical politics. But banging on a year later about nonexistent “lockdowns” is politics for cranks. Gas is getting cheaper, and I think the economic narrative is turning around for Biden. To the extent that “woke” considerations prevent Democrats from bringing down the crime rate, that’s going to be a huge vulnerability for them — but it’s telling that Musk isn’t out there talking about his idea for foot patrols or how to improve police recruiting. He’s talking about a “woke mind virus” that is somehow both an existential threat to humanity and also primarily manifests as people criticizing stand-up comedians.

This is crank stuff and it leads you to crank places. Issuing measured criticisms of specific Biden administration policy ideas you disagree with is less likely to go viral, but much more likely to accomplish something and it’s better for your mental health, too. But the risk is you might get what you want — there are no “lockdowns,” there hasn’t been anything resembling a lockdown since the summer of 2020, and there are currently no Covid NPIs in place at all — at which point you have to admit you won and that whatever misery you’re experiencing in life isn’t stemming from the political system.