“I often write about social media mobs…and what I have found is that they are not frequently misinformed, but they are almost always misinformed. You just don’t know what happened unless you were (a) there or (b) someone has actually investigated whatever claims have come forth. But that’s not how mobs work.
“This atmosphere makes it difficult, if not impossible, to dissent. I was recently talking to a friend about the #MeToo movement. In hushed tones, she told me she had a confession to make. “Don’t tell anyone,” she said, “but I don’t think Woody Allen raped his daughter.”
“Luckily for her, she was in good company — I also doubt the veracity of Woody Allen’s guilt because the evidence just doesn’t support the claims — but she said this as though she were confessing to a terrible crime.
“And she was: a thought crime, one so potentially harmful to her standing among her own friends that expressing it to anyone besides a known thought criminal was unthinkable. The resistance, it seems, is intersectional in everything but opinions.” — from “Call-Out Culture Is a Toxic Garbage Dumpster Fire of Trash,” posted by The Stranger’s Katie Herzog on 1.23.18 at 3:27 pm.