Getting Ratio'd on Twitter

Apparently, I'm a "sociopath."

The other day I came across a tweet thread posted by a writer named A.R. Moxon. I do not follow Moxon and had never heard of him; someone I follow must have liked or retweeted him. In the thread, Moxon expresses his dismay at a recent Atlantic piece, written by Helen Lewis, titled “Two Years Is Long Enough: After multiple lockdowns, three vaccines, and one bout of COVID, I want my life back.”

“‘I want my life back’ is a hell of a thing to say much less publish when 5.5 million people have actually lost their actual lives,” Moxon wrote in the first of his 14-tweet thread.

“A society that abandons the old and sick to die is a society that will eventually abandon you, if you ever get sick or old,” he says in another.

In the sixth tweet, he tags The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg with the question: “For what other global human tragedies with a death count past 5 million, would you promote a perspective of smug unconcern, and why? What is valuable about this perspective? What good is it?”

Because writers and editors really need to be “held accountable” for publishing such immoral drivel.

Never mind that Lewis makes, to any thinking person, perfectly reasonable points in her article, such as:

If the health-care system needs more investment to deal with future winter COVID waves, hit me up for the taxes needed. In the meantime, we should simplify our public-health rules and wean ourselves off hygiene theater. Outdoor masking—which is still mandated in some European countries, such as Spain—is absurd. End it. The recent travel bans effectively punished South Africa for responsibly monitoring new variants, and should not be repeated. Because “‘post-vax COVID’ is a new disease,” isolation periods should be shortened to five days for the vaccinated, which would help hospitals and schools struggling with staff absences. Politicians should explain their planned endgame: Will we test and isolate forever, or will COVID one day be treated like the flu? Oh, and people should stop terrifying their children. Your kids will get COVID, if they haven’t had it already. Statistically, they will be fine. They are in more danger on the drive to school than from COVID once they get there.

And:

As for the vaccine-hesitant, I sympathize with those who are afraid of needles and with pregnant and breastfeeding women, for whom the advice has been inconsistent, but less so with those who think that the vaccines are untested or “experimental”—a plausible concern last year but not now—and those who object to “putting chemicals in their body,” unless they eat only homegrown food and wash their hair with soap nuts. Public policy should make life more irritating for the unvaxxed—or rather, consistently less irritating for the vaxxed.

And never mind that in the article Lewis holds herself accountable, after admitting that she’s so desperate for a party, she’d “attend an enemy’s books launch,” “improv-comedy night,” and even an “amateur production of Shakespeare.”

“Perhaps you think this is shallow,” she wrote. “You are right! Life should be shallow sometimes.”

Lewis’s article exemplifies her prescience; it anticipates the scorn that writers like Moxon righteously doled out after it was published:

Yet to publicly question the current level of restrictions is to invite accusations from your more COVID-averse friends, or even strangers on social media, that you hate doctors, reject science, and actively want people to die. I am not anti-lockdown; I lived through three of them without a single illicit wine-and-cheese party or Christmas quiz, unlike senior members of the British government. I got my vaccines the minute I was allowed to. I wear a mask whenever doing so is mandated. But I’m done, profoundly done.

As you can probably see, nothing that Lewis wrote should have garnered the level of vitriol that Moxon directed at Lewis, which is why on Twitter I quote-tweeted his thread, writing: “Hardly anything is more cringe than this type of sanctimonious moralizing and virtue-signaling (just check out the thread). Just gross.”

I’ll admit, I wasn’t very tactful. In hindsight, which I should have done (besides taking a screenshot of his thread and posting about it, rather than tagging him with a quote-tweet), was state why I object to this type of moralizing (because it’s puritanical, and it lacks any empathy for the millions of very lonely people who suffer in isolation, and who, because of people like Moxon, are afraid to voice their objections to the enduring, often nonsensical COVID policies that continue to upend and in some ways even ruin their lives—emotionally, mentally, and financially—lest they be privately or publicly accused of moral bankruptcy) and why I read it as nothing more than a grotesquely self-righteous virtue signal (because Moxon, exhibiting zero compassion for Lewis and people like her, gets to show his 125,000+ followers how he’s the one who actually cares about people). Not to mention that it is absurdly cruel to suggest that Lewis, and people who feel similarly, don’t care about people dying!

Since Moxon has so many followers, I didn’t think my tweet would even show up on his radar. Much to my dismay, shortly after I posted it, he quote-tweeted me, writing, “Giving a shit is just the worst.” Like flying monkeys, his loyal followers descended upon my timeline. Here are a few of the comments I got:

“Really disturbing how caring has become something to deride and mock.”

“This is the root of modern conservatism: the cruelty had always been the point.” (I guess I’m a conservative now?)

“A dude at that age saying cringe is cringe.” (Agreed. I was going to write “cringier” but I wasn’t sure if it was a word.)

“An Appel a day keeps everyone away.” (My favorite.)

“Ben has certainly done an excellent job of absorbing the South Park ethos that caring about anyone or anything other oneself is the most ridiculous thing imaginable.”

One posted a gif that said I’m “a high-functioning sociopath.”

Another posted a meme in which an angry-faced man takes off what turns out to be a mask, revealing the scared little boy inside his brain. I responded, “Accurate!”

Then this:

Ouch.

A few went through my profile to pull out some criminalizing evidence, like my admiration for Bari Weiss, or that I recently wrote for The Washington Examiner. One guy tagged a famous writer who follows me, asking her, “Why do you follow this Appel guy?” (Because the point is never just to prove someone wrong, but to—if not ruin his life—then make it demonstrably worse. Perhaps I’m sanctimoniously moralizing here, but that, I believe, is repugnant.)

I guess I was in rare form that day, because, rather than deleting my tweet and crawling under a rock, I decided to quote-tweet Moxon’s quote-tweet of me. “Oh god, he made it worse!!!” I wrote. “Didn’t think that was possible.”

That’s when Moxon blocked me.

Being called out on social media (or getting “ratio’d”) used to be one of my biggest fears. The thought of people thinking I’m a “bad person” was enough to leave me paralyzed with dread and shame. I’m not going to lie, I did feel physically ill the other day, when my phone kept notifying me that yet another person had denounced me or had liked a tweet in which someone else did. But while my body radiated with anxiety, my thoughts remained mostly rational. (OK, the thought that my life might be destroyed did flit through my mind once or twice.) I know who I am and why I think the way I do. I know that I’m not a “bad person”, that I actually don’t even believe in the concept of “bad” people and “good” people, but rather that we are all complex products of our experiences, educations, relationships, and genetics. Of course I’m imperfect. Of course I can be selfish, shallow, inconsiderate, arrogant, envious, and many other “bad” things. I’m a human being. I am often also the exact opposite of those things. Like caring about people dying from COVID while also desiring a return to some kind of normalcy after two objectively horrible years, two things can be true at once!

It wasn’t the first time I was “called out” for thoughtcrime, and it certainly won’t be the last. Who knows, maybe next time I won’t feel anything at all. (Then I guess I’ll really be a sociopath.)

Today, what worries me more than being called out on Twitter is the way this new puritanism (call it “wokeness”, whatever), disseminated so effortlessly on social media, is turning us into dogmatic and conformist reality-denying shells of the people we once were.

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As I mentioned above, The Washington Examiner just published a piece I wrote about the takeover of ‘queer,’ and how identifying into the LGBTQ community, which has become all the rage, is actually a capitalist endeavor. You can read it for free here.

I’d like to share with you a message I received today from a Washington Examiner reader:

I'm sorry that all of that had happened to you. It has happened to me as well. I mean, I'm completely opposed to most collectivist ideas, but my experience as a gay man oppressed by socialism has been dismissed so many times that I get it. My "cis" gender expression, my age, even the color of my skin, despite being a mixed, immigrant who grew up in the most abject poverty in the dangerous slums of Havana, have been used against me. I get you. You are not alone. I thank you for being and doing what many are afraid of being and doing.

And if you never got the chance to read my essay that was published in Quillette last summer, go here.

There is much more to come.

Thank you for reading!