David McElroy

I found myself in a time machine Monday night. My body didn’t move, but my mind and my heart were transported to the years when I was a teen-ager.

I didn’t mean to take this trip into the past. I ran across a YouTube video promising snippets of the most popular song from every month of the decade of my youth. I was curious whether I’d know all the songs. It never occurred to me that the music would awaken something disturbing.

At first, I didn’t feel anything out of the ordinary. Then the songs reached the years when I was about 14, 15 and 16.

All of a sudden, I was feeling emotions I had experienced during those years. Some of the sounds awakened specific memories. My mind was a blur. What I didn’t expect was the flood of emotions.

I can talk clinically about the experience of growing up with a narcissistic father and an absent mother. I can outline the ways this affected me, but I almost always talk about it with the matter-of-fact tone of reciting facts.

What I felt tonight wasn’t about reason or psychology or dry narrative. It was a flood of feelings such as fear and shame and pain. They were emotions I was too terrified to openly feel at the time.

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When I first heard the words, I thought it had to be a joke.

“I’m such a good slut for my daddy,” the woman purred in a sensual tone.

I looked over and saw the woman lean in toward a man at the table in a seductive way. Surely this is some kind of strange joke. But I quickly realized it was no joke.

I was in a fast food place near my office Monday night, somewhere I almost never go. The place is large, but it was quiet because there were only two tables in use. I was alone with my MacBook. Another nearby table was taken by three men and a woman.

The men were dressed in what I’d call business casual. The woman looked as though she was trying to be as sexually provocative as possible while still wearing expensive clothes. I’d say they were all in their early to mid 30s.

They talked a lot about sex, but what made it noteworthy was something more than that. They seemed to casually talk about sex as dirty — and they all seemed to agree that the more nasty and filthy and “slutty” a woman could be, the more attractive she was.

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The email from Twitter this afternoon shocked me. The subject line said, “Your Twitter account has been locked.”

Why?

The email said I had violated Twitter’s “rules against glorifying violence.” What? Me? That’s not possible. But the email helpfully included the tweet in which I had allegedly glorified violence. What terrible thing had I said? It was a reply to a friend’s tweet about the Kyle Rittenhouse trial.

“Agreed on both counts,” I replied to this friend. “Rittenhouse was no hero, but what he did wasn’t murder and he’s not the monster some want to make him. I would’ve been happier if all the people involved that night had had the good sense to stay home and out of harm’s way.”

And that — in the eyes of Twitter’s platform monitors — is enough to conclude that I’m “glorifying violence.”

I angrily shot an appeal back to Twitter, hopeful that someone will be smart enough to reverse the suspension. But the incident is another reminder that we are slowly handing over control of public discourse to social media platforms — and we’re left to pray that these reckless people will stop being so reckless.

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