If you're going to act like a woke dickhead, do it somewhere anonymously, not under your real name on Linkedin
I forget what the LinkedIn discussion was about. I said something positive about Elon Musk returning free speech to Twitter and allowing people to criticize the trans movement, and for being able to state the scientific fact once again that women are women and men aren’t. I wasn’t mean, and I wasn’t snarky.
But as we all know, the woke are always on the lookout for someone to cyberbully. Especially commenters backed by science.
Some young guy responded back with the usual woke parrot response, ‘You’re transphobic.’ LinkedIn no longer lets me see the back-and-forth comments we engaged in that day last year except for my end-of-the-exchange comment denying his accusation I’d been ‘harassing’ anyone and noted that he had harassed me. He had been a woke little nag all day long in his previous, highly patronizing comments.
Unfortunately ‘woke’ influence has normalized misogyny on the left and while, to my knowledge, LinkedIn isn’t super-woke or super-censor-y, woke kiddies have too much power to get people banned, suspended and de-platformed. So I watched my mouth but I challenged the kid. I reminded myself to ‘take back my power’ and stand up to a male bully, especially in front of others, and stuck to the scientific facts about a sexually dimorphic species.
At the end of the day I received a message from the tech support folks at a sales agency I worked for. Seems someone had complained I’d been making ‘transphobic’ comments on LinkedIn. 'We just thought you ought to know,” they said.
I replied back that I’d merely been gender-critical, but thanks for letting me know. Seems the little shit wanted to make trouble and pat himself on the back for being a good little wokenazi.
I figured support wouldn’t say anything to the managers and they didn’t.
But man, was I pissed. The next morning, a Saturday, I lay in bed and thought about what the little shit had done. And then I realized something.
When I’d gone back for my last comment the previous evening, after learning he’d tried to get me in trouble with my employer, I’d planned my answer carefully and didn’t acknowledge what he’d done. I wanted to end the conversation and forget about it.
In his last comment, though, he seemed even more eager than I to end it.
His last response was definitely un-wokey.
He stated we would just have to agree to disagree on this, and he’s done with this conversation.
When the hell does a spoiled virtue-signalling woke kiddie ever admit it’s okay to agree to disagree? Or give up that easily?
He was spooked about something.
I reviewed our conversation over breakfast. I revisited his profile and located what I figured was the reason for his spookiness.
He’d just started a new job.
Oh, man, wouldn’t it be bad if he’d done something dumb that could get him in trouble?
Ready to rumble!
I wasn’t worried about my job. There was nothing pejorative or ‘transphobic’ about my comments.
I spent a little time researching the woke kiddie’s company on LinkedIn, and then I reached out to him in direct message:
Before I report you to HR...
...Maybe we can resolve this privately. I don't appreciate your bullying, misogynist comments, using me to virtue signal and call me names just because you don't like my standing up for women's free speech rights. How classically patriarchal and misogynist you are to treat male-bodied people as though they were no different, and more important than, the class of people men have been bullying and dominating for thousands of years. How *dare* you dic(k)tate to women as men have always done what constitutes a 'real' woman. You don't know me, you don't know anything about me, and you sure as hell don't know where I stand on trans rights. Nor do you know what 'transphobic' means.
You're entitled to your opinions, as I am to mine, but you don't have the right to hurl pejoratives and shut down opinions you disagree with. I shortlisted two or three XXX [his new employer] HR names I could report you to. But it looks like you just started a new job, so it might be more productive to come to an understanding here. Want to reconsider or rephrase anything you said the other day?
His response was swift.
Sure. I apologize, it's a tough subject and I wish people would be respectful. I should have worded it better. I can delete those later if you'd like.
I told him I didn’t care if he deleted them or not (privately, I hoped they’d stay so others could see someone standing up to a woke bully) but maybe he did and that’s why I can’t see the previous comments now.
This was a minor kerfuffle, but it created serious anxiety for me to learn this little shit had tried to get me fired.
It would have made sense if I’d been as snarky as I am on my blog. Not justifiable, but comprehensible. But I hadn’t been. My initial comment, reviewing it many months later, was pretty straightforward, and I was definitely guarded in my later responses.
Woke kiddies (this includes all ages of this self-infantilizing extremism) just can’t ignore a non-woke comment that offends their dogmatic narrative, however respectfully worded. This is LinkedIn, after all, the world’s biggest corporate office. It’s not like people don’t engage in political discussion, with perpetual corners of the platform burning with raging flame wars. I largely stay out of them.
But sometimes I take the opportunity to reservedly challenge common narratives.
I repurposed an old blog post on pronouns and posted it on Linkedin earlier this year. I made a straightforward and sincere complaint about how the people who need to offer their pronouns the most don’t. There were no flame wars. There were a few positive comments, including one pointing out that people might not want to ‘out’ themselves that way. I pointed out that they must know they’re androgynous-looking and to please help us out. Meanwhile, those whose pronouns are glaringly clear proclaim what we already know.
Not to mention, if you can’t tell the world your pronouns, they’re really not that important.
Sometimes, we have to step out on a limb and take back our power. Today’s woke kiddies have entirely too much power they don’t know how to wield wisely and for reasons I may never understand, so-called responsible adults bow and scrape to their every whim. Maybe it’s all the Gen X’ers in charge who raised Millennials and Gen Z’s to be protected, undeservedly rewarded, and most importantly, unchallenged. Gen X’ers are used to caving and treating their young’uns as the adults they are not.
Mostly, I keep my un-woke opinions to myself on LinkedIn. I never mention my website. I have a second profile under which people, if they wanted to, could find it, read my horrendous opinions and try to cancel me once they revived from their faint. But I expect most won’t. And I’m getting too old to care.
I removed the sales agency from my LinkedIn profile. I use a different last name on the phone with my calling campaigns.
This is where woke censorship has led. It DOES feel a bit like Nazi Germany, or the former Soviet Union.
But one little wokie boy on LinkedIn, I hope, learned an important lesson from fucking with a pissed-off older woman. Take your own medicine, sonny-boy, and be respectful.
And if you're going to act like a woke dickhead, do it somewhere anonymously, not under your real name.
Amateurs….
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