The media, amazingly, swallowed this obvious attempt to delegitimize criticism and ran with it. Not just the film media, you understand, but also the political, mainstream and even alternative media. They had their perfect story: four helpless actresses were being preyed upon by hordes of anonymous men. The frantic pro-Ghostbusters campaign reached peak absurdity when, after disappointing box office returns, politicians from the California Legislative Women’s Caucus gathered at a private screening to watch the movie. After the viewing, their leading members gave what felt to me like a series of pre-arranged statements to journalists, each one of them celebrating the movie as a work of high art and a progressive leap forward.
As always, the smell of butt hurt attracts trolls. Breitbart editor Ezra Dulis put it eloquently: “To a Twitter troll, there is no greater rush than a response from an angry celebrity—the knowledge that you, in the middle of Podunkville, USA, have the power to get under the skin of someone rich, famous, and surrounded by ass kissers.”38
So, when Leslie Jones, one of the four leading actresses in this cinematic train-wreck, began angrily responding to her detractors on Twitter, the result was inevitable. She was feeding the trolls, so they swarmed like frogs on grasshoppers.
Media reports say I was the one who led these swarms. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Jones was engaging in running battles with her detractors on Twitter for hours before I got involved, actively trading insults with them and provoking them.
I criticized Jones, tossing a few jabs her way. The reason lefties in the media saw me as ringleader of the trolls is that it’s hard for them to imagine people moving collectively without a leader. It’s their authoritarianism showing: for them, a herd must have a shepherd. The idea of people thinking and acting independently frightens them.
My only crime was daring to criticize a black woman, itself seemingly proof of racism today. I tweeted that Jones was playing the victim,39 that her character in Ghostbusters was an unfunny racial stereotype, and that her tweets were barely literate.40 All are true. (Despite calling people “bitches” all evening, she had the audacity to report me for that last one.)
Like Mogwai, there are very specific rules to follow when it comes to feeding trolls, or else you’ll end up with Gremlins. A small minority tweeted revolting things at Jones, such as comparisons between her and Harambe, the recently deceased gorilla. Jones accused me of supporting the racists tweeting her gorilla pictures (wrong), and she retweeted sycophants accusing me of being a “Gay Uncle Tom.” (Later, she would laughably claim the retweets were a result of her “being hacked”). Finally, she blocked me and closed her Twitter account. I sent out a final tweet (“Rejected by yet another black dude!”) and left it at that. Another easy victory over a hypocritical, thin-skinned Hollywood celebrity.
I can’t stand celebrities with thin skin. Getting hate mail is part and parcel of being famous no matter what you look like. Even someone as ridiculously good-looking as me gets hate mail.
The next day, a day that will live in social media infamy, I was scheduled to headline a “Gays for Trump” party at the Republican National Convention. A few minutes before I was to take the stage, I was banned from Twitter forever. I suspect—but can’t prove—that they waited until just before my event deliberately, to cause maximum damage. This is a company whose employees wrote “#SCREWNERO” on a whiteboard in its San Francisco headquarters.41
They didn’t plan on my preternatural skill for turning every minor setback into a gigantic, glittering triumph.
Like all progressive imbeciles, Twitter HQ was clueless about the Streisand Effect: whenever censorship is attempted, it simply draws more attention to its target. The immediate result of my ban was the greatest barrage of press attention I’d ever received, up until then anyway. I became Patient Zero in Twitter’s crusade against conservatives, particularly the Trump-supporting kind. CNN, CNBC, and ABC all wanted me on to talk about it. Sometimes I wonder if my biggest enemies are in fact my biggest friends, and are all secretly helping me out while pretending to be leftists in public.
I was the number-one trending topic for a full day, with tens of thousands of users tweeting #FreeMilo in solidarity. My fans scrawled the slogan in chalk outside Twitter’s international network of offices. One of my more mischievous fans filmed himself convincing a group of animal rights activists to chant “Free Milo,” after persuading them that I was a captive donkey.
Do I feel bad about being a catalyst for Twitter’s censorship? No more than Jean-Luc Picard should feel bad about being a catalyst for the Borg’s invasion of Federation space.
Despite what you’ll have read in the media, I neither tweeted anything racist or harassing at Leslie Jones, nor in any way did I encourage the few anonymous people who did. Twitter says I led “targeted harassment” against Jones, which seems to mean “being famous and having the wrong opinions.” My supposed harassment was so bad, Jones was “driven off Twitter.” Though it must not have been that bad because she was back after 48 hours.
This is a shocking double standard. We don’t blame Justin Bieber when he tweets or posts on Instagram about Selena Gomez, prompting death and rape threats toward her. We don’t blame Beyoncé for what the Beyhive does to Taylor Swift. They are never held accountable for the actions of their fans by the media. If Bieber or Bey came out as Trump supporters, I guarantee you this would change.
Another thing you won’t read in the press is that Leslie Jones directly incited harassment against her critics, the very rule violation I was falsely accused of when Twitter suspended my account. A user suggested to Jones that some introspection might be in order if she wanted to stop the wave of trolling, to which Jones responded with an unequivocal call to dog-pile: “Bitch I want to tell everyone about you but I’m going to let everybody else do it I’m gonna retweet your hate!! Get her!!”42 In another tweet, she also urged her followers to “go after them like they going after me.”43 Twitter did nothing in the face of these flagrant rule-violations; she didn’t even have to delete her tweets to unlock her account, which—as I know well—is the site’s mildest form of punishment for a terms-of-service breach.
I don’t mean to sound whiny about all this, because my Twitter ban made me a lot more famous. It was one of the best things that ever happened to me. It broke my addiction to the constant little dopamine hits I got from all those retweets and likes. I get a lot more actual work done these days.
Plus, being banned was cool, like Madonna and Andrew Dice Clay being banned from MTV in the 1990s. I joined an elite club of dangerous people banned from Twitter, like musical genius Azealia Banks and right-wing investigative journalist Chuck Johnson. (All three of us are Trump supporters; go figure.) As a result of my Twitter ban, I became, for a huge slice of young America, a forbidden, guilty pleasure. So, yes, I don’t mean to whine because I’m not in the least bit sad about it. But it’s important to set the record straight when the lying mainstream media comes for you with its usual arsenal of name-calling, hysteria, selective disclosure and outright mendacity.