Max Boot wrote an entire article about how he was in the eye of the social media hurricane earlier this week. In other words, Max ticked a lot of people off on Twitter with something he wrote and instead of trying to figure out why they’re angry with him (and correcting it), he wrote another story about how he was the victim of the mob.
Don’t make that face, we didn’t write it.
I was in the eye of a social media hurricane on Wednesday. It taught me about the dangers of the online mob fixating on perceived outrages taken out of context. But it also taught me to be more careful with what I write. My @PostOpinions column: https://t.co/3R9j0xUMuJ
— Max Boot (@MaxBoot) January 31, 2019
Seems people thought Max was advocating for some sort of genocide?
Eep.
From WaPo:
On Wednesday afternoon, I was the target for a few hours after I published a Post column arguing that, while we can’t win the wars in Afghanistan or Syria, we can lose them by pulling out prematurely. “In fighting these insurgents, the United States needs to eschew its big war mindset. …,” I wrote. “We need to think of these deployments in much the same way as we thought of our Indian Wars, which lasted roughly 300 years (ca. 1600-1890), or as the British thought about their deployment on the Northwest Frontier (today’s Pakistan-Afghanistan border), which lasted 100 years (1840s-1940s).” To get the word out about my column, I tweeted a link to it along with an abbreviated version of the sentence about the Indian Wars.
Big mistake. I was instantly deluged by Twitter attacks, mostly from progressive journalists and academics, accusing me of advocating racism and genocide. As one professor wrote: “Max Boot wants genocidal war to be our model.” In the next few hours, this “hot take” was endlessly retweeted. It was, to be sure, only a tiny Twitter storm compared to the Category 5 social-media hurricane set off by the clash on the Mall, but when the rain cloud is directly over your head, you’re still getting soaked.
Welcome to the party, pal!
Tweeps on the Left called BS on his claim that he was in a social media hurricane (sheesh, so dramatic):
The people who “came for” @maxboot by asking him not to glorify the genocide of native peoples included ambassadors and historians, veterans and statesmen. For his WaPo editors to reduce them all to a “twitter mob” coarsens our public conversation as much as anything here. pic.twitter.com/jRnwG5wVEi
— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) February 1, 2019
Have fun with that, Max.
Max responded:
Um, I wasn’t glorifying the genocide of anyone! This is a tendentious, offensive misreading. It’s more evidence of the Twitter mob mentality I describe. And just because people have respectable credentials doesn’t mean they aren’t also Twitter trolls: https://t.co/3R9j0xUMuJ https://t.co/QDBZl9Yj4C
— Max Boot (@MaxBoot) February 1, 2019
LOOK! MAX IS REALLY THE VICTIM HERE.
This is … hilarious.
Sorry.
Feel obliged to thread in his response here. https://t.co/ezmshTxD5Y
— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) February 1, 2019
Will do.
SouthPaw continued:
2 things:
1. It’s no misreading. He cited 300y of continent-wide violence, from the 1609 founding of the Jamestown colony (or before?) to the 1890 massacre of Lakota women and children at Wounded Knee, as a favorable model of “policing the frontiers of the Pax Americana.” pic.twitter.com/OhABCMLNyy— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) February 1, 2019
*popcorn*
2. Thoughtful, experienced people with real foreign policy and military backgrounds *asked Boot not to* represent the genocidal Indian Wars as admirable policy; that happened whether if they misread his column or not. Treating them as a mob of trolls is coarse and disrespectful.
— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) February 1, 2019
We don’t disagree.
Stuff like this makes me think that those who have crossed over from his sphere aren’t used to receiving negative reactions for saying such things.
— John Dickson (@johndickson72) February 1, 2019
Nah, just him.
Perceptive. Never-Trump is at best the beginning of a learning process that for Boot has barely started, if at all.
— Martin Vermeer (@SvantesKatt) February 1, 2019
Right?
Related:
Well, well, well … what do we have here?! What BuzzFeed is being accused of NOW has GOT to be karma
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