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A Final Post About Shirtgate

Conor Friedersdorf has the last word. I promise!
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I think we’re all pretty much done with Shirtgate, don’t you? Still, I don’t want to let it pass without bringing to your attention Conor Friedersdorf’s long analysis of Shirtgate at the Atlantic. He invents an idealized civil dialogue between people on both sides of the issue, friendly antagonists who actually learn something and get somewhere. This kind of exchange only happens in fantasyland, alas. But it’s worth reading.

Conor faults left-wingers for overreacting to Shirtgate, but he also faults Glenn Reynolds, Boris Johnson, and me for overreacting. He says:

That’s one driver of dysfunction: the desire of competing tribes in the culture war to cast themselves as the victims and their antagonists as the lynch mob. Had the scientist made his television appearance in a pro-abortion t-shirt or a Che Guevara tank-top, an identical cycle would’ve ensued but with tribal roles reversed.

Notice that my intention here isn’t to dismiss what I take to be the core concern that Dreher, Reynolds, and Johnson have, down beneath all of the hyperbolic posturing. While the scientist in this case wasn’t drummed out of a job or polite company for an alleged transgression against social justice, it isn’t unheard of for digital mobs to victimize people, whether female gaming journalists or Brendan Eich or the conservative bloggers who suffered the ordeal of having their homes SWATed. There are differences that distinguish those controversies, but one similarity is that no one anticipated any of those mobs when they first came to claim a scalp, and no one could quite tell which individual would be targeted next.

I think it’s undeniable that people on the Right are susceptible to claiming victimhood when they don’t deserve it, but I don’t agree with Conor that my post, or the columns by BoJo and Instapundit, are hyperbolic or trivial. What triggered my ire was not the initial complaint about Taylor, which is about what you would expect, but the fact that a distinguished scientist who had just done a mind-blowingly astonishing thing — helped lead a team that remotely landed a spaceship on a comet! — had been shamed by feminist loons into weeping on television and expressing his remorse for having worn a garish Hawaiian shirt.

I can’t speak for the others, but had he worn a Che Guevara or pro-abortion shirt to the press conference, I might have noticed it, but I wouldn’t have gone into ideological convulsions at the sight of it. Anybody who has spent any time around scientists or nerds knows how peculiar they can be, and how silly their politics, cultural and otherwise, can be. I would have thought the same thing I thought when I saw Taylor’s gaudy cheesecake shirt: I can’t believe a grown man who is also a distinguished scientist would go out in public dressed like that. 

Roll your eyes and move on.

What incensed me was the fact that a man who had achieved such an incredible thing for humanity was reduced to a blubbering, knee-biting idiot by the howling feminist mob. It is a terrible thing for public life that this kind of thing can happen. It is an example of microaggressions humiliating people who have done nothing seriously wrong, and maybe nothing wrong at all.

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