More than a year ago, Trump ally Representative Devin Nunes (R-CA) sued a parody cow account on Twitter for, ah, being mean to him. Now there’s news that the Barr DoJ got a grand jury subpoena to try to force Twitter to reveal the identity of the person behind the account, and that anonymous person now has a response:
There's nothing remarkable about me. I'm a basic smartass with a Twitter account.
So then why am I being sued by a US congressman? Why would the DOJ ever target me?
Is it the mean tweets and bad memes?
It's not about me or this silly account. It's about silencing all of us. https://t.co/kdU87LVZI2
— Devin Nunes' Alt-Mom (@NunesAlt) May 17, 2021
Silencing is just the surface tension. Autocrats succeed because good people let them, and that happens because of the respect of the distracted or frightened.
Ah, but a good mockery, it’s a rare person who doesn’t like a good mockery. It’s a social signal that there’s something wrong with someone else in the opinion of the mocker. Sometimes it’s purely malicious, of course, but the more easily someone is mocked regarding a serious issue, the more likely there’s something seriously wrong.
And an autocrat, who by definition is wrong, hates the mockery because it not only signals that they should be investigated and booted out of power, but because it pricks the ego inside them: someone doesn’t respect them. And that, in turn, feeds that little impostor syndrome that often also resides there: the suspicion that they are not worthy of respect.
And they hate that.
