

Discover more from The Distance
Democracy Dies In Dorkness: WaPo Roasted Over Trans Sorority 'Sister' Sob Story
Or, why everyone hates Elon Musk
FLASH SALE ENDS AT MIDNIGHT! Lock in our lowest-ever rate on annual subscriptions NOW! We have exclusive content on the way!
Don’t get me wrong. I am not pleased with all or even most of Elon Musk’s decisions as owner of Twitter. But he does own Twitter. He bought it, so he gets to break it. The same goes for Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post. It’s a free country, and the freedom of the press belongs to the owner of the press. If you WANT to shill for a man who gets off on convincing women to let him hang around and leer at them, you are free to buy a newspaper-of-record and pursue that interest. Fine. Whatever.
In a democracy, I am also allowed to tell said newspaper-of-record that their proverbial emperors are wearing no clothes. So I popped off a standard reply, a variation on a question that I have posed maybe a thousand times on Twitter/X without ever receiving a good faith answer from anyone on the other side of the issue. I asked the newspaper-of-record to tell me the difference between a man leering at women in a sorority house and a man named Susan leering at women in a sorority house.
No wonder the paper is going broke. Now, I am not going to rehash the facts of this case. And I don’t have to, because when I returned to Twitter/X (let’s be real, everyone is still calling it Twitter) after some football viewing and a beer nap, I found a helpful community note appended to the Post’s tweet. (I am not writing ‘the Post’s post’, Elon.) Community notes is a good idea, and it works even better without the hall monitors of the previous regime power-tripping over pronouns.
Twitter was always a node of discourse, not really a profitable product, which is why Blackrock and the WEF crowd were happy to let it run at a loss under Jack Dorsey. Now ESG money and the Biden administration are still trying to claw back Twitter from Musk’s control because its true value was never monetary. This campaign involves a lot of noise about ‘hate speech’ supposedly flooding the platform, but this is an example of the speech they just hate to see.
Simultaneous to this, I was hovering just under 10,000 followers on Twitter. When I woke up from the post-football beer nap, however, I was well past that milestone. And while I was not expecting the reply to ‘go viral,’ as the kids used to say, because surely I have tired it out by now, it was the top reply. None of the top replies is positive. As the kids always say, ‘this is what democracy looks like.’ It is not what the Washington Post, or the class of Americans that regards the WaPo as their vanguard of moral authority, want democracy to look like.
My favorite replies to this tweet/post of mine all included John Belushi standing before the windows of the sorority in Animal House, smiling back over his shoulder. Today’s John Blutarsky wears some lippy and eyeshadow, likely microdoses estrogen, and describes the feminine virtues of his penis, which always sounds exactly like any other man on earth talking about his penis.
Artemis Langford is a man with a penis who enjoys making women accommodate his presence. An actual sorority decided that this was fine, that he could not even be disqualified for substandard academic performance, because something something ‘inclusion’, and that sorority members had no right to complain because something something ‘safety.’ WaPo thinks this is all fine, that middle America will empathize with the subject of their story. They are wrong. They are so wrong, but they are just now finding out because there is no filter on the democracy of Twitter anymore.
The internet is changing and The Distance must change along with it. Musk, like Zuckerberg, has chosen to smash the former ecosystem of information in a bid to keep Twitter and Facbook users using Twitter and Facebook instead of visiting outbound links. Musk has clearly decided to regard Substack as a rival platform and tweets will never embed properly here again as a result. Democracy is back, but the old social media universe is going away, while the ad-driven models are long gone and never coming back. New, paid models are taking over the platforms. It’s the reality of what we do, now. Please consider helping us get it done.