Here’s what happened: last night, Vox writer Emmett Rensin tweeted, “Advice: if Trump comes to your town, start a riot.” Today, Vox suspended him. This is the funniest fucking media uproar in at least a week or two.

Rensin’s tweet last night started its own little backlash, with people (generally conservatives) exclaiming in a faux-shocked-but-actually-gleeful manner: hey, this member of the media is calling for riots, which are bad! Which led to Vox, if you can believe it, putting out a statement on this whole thing. A statement. Let us enumerate the primary absurdities here:

If you think that a Vox writer, of all people, is capable of spurring anyone to riot, lmao.

If you feel the need to start issuing formal statements every time conservatives get mad at you on Twitter, you are gonna be issuing a lot of formal statements, my man.

Twitter is where people go to say dumb things they will come to regret. That’s what Twitter is.

Twitter is where people go to make fun of the dumb things other people said until it is their turn to be made fun of for something dumb they said. Twitter is its own form of punishment.



The proper response to one of your employees saying something dumb on Twitter is not to suspend them, it is to laugh at them, until they’re like, “okay, I fucking get it man, shut up. Seriously.” Publishers should be glad that writers are putting all their dumbest ideas on Twitter, where they can be read and ignored in a moment, rather than turning them into lengthy think pieces which take much longer to read and ignore. There is virtually no chance that anyone who who has followed this little saga closely enough to understand what we’re talking about will ever start a riot. Have you ever seen any riots started by media Twitter? How about riots started by Vox stories? Slate riots? Gawker riots? No. Everyone who cares about this at all is soft as hell, including us. The fact that we all get to spend several hours talking about this just makes me thankful that I don’t have to have a real job, where I would have to do work. Moving stuff, or whatever people who don’t spend their days composing responses to other people’s tweets do.

Everyone stop spending so much time on Twitter. There’s bad shit happening in the real world. Riots, etc.