(Kacper Pempel/Reuters)

There’s a funny little social-media brouhaha happening over the phrase “learn to code.” It is something that certain right-wing knuckleheads tweet mockingly at media people who have lost their jobs in the recent wave of layoffs. Supposedly, this is the knuckleheads throwing the media elites’ own words back in their faces, “learn to code” having been what these callous coastal elites offered as advice to the unhappy residents of dead and dying Rust Belt towns.


I mention this only because I am generally identified as being the originator of “learn to code.” The thing is, I don’t think I’ve ever written those words. I’m sure somebody will show me where I did so if I am wrong, and I’ll be happy to be corrected. But I don’t think I did.

Since our theme here is detestable elitism, I’ll send a bottle of very good wine to the first person who shows me where I wrote “learn to code” in the context mentioned above. Maybe a Chateau d’Yquem?

But if I’m not wrong, then it’s a reminder of Abraham Lincoln’s sage advice not to believe everything you see on the Internet, and a reminder that “credibility” and “credulousness” are related words. There are a few institutions and individuals, purportedly on “our side,” who are doing us no good at all in the long run.


While I’m on the subject of Twitter rage-monkeys and the instrumentalization of my name, a number of people, surely well-meaning, are in the habit of tweeting “What about Kevin Williamson?” at the editors and writers of a certain August Journalistic Institution with which I was briefly associated. The same people give grief to some of my journalist friends and colleagues who sometimes contribute to said journal. A personal request: Stop it. It’s a fine journal, and I have many friends who work there or occasionally contribute to it. I read it regularly myself. (Besides, none of you knows the real story of what happened with me there.) Do what you will, but not in my name and not with my name. If I wanted to boycott every publication that had ever made a management decision that I think was wrong, I’d have to boycott pretty much every outlet I know anything about — including the newspapers I edited myself in my previous career.


And Topic A in this post relates to Topic B: If you are so angry about politics that you wish personal harm on strangers, then there is something wrong with you, and it isn’t about politics. It’s about you. And hurling invective at strangers is not going to make you feel any better, any less impotent, or any less lonely — and everybody watching knows, at some level, that that is what drives you. You are psychologically naked. Everybody sees. If not your sense of citizenship (in this kingdom or the next) then at least consider your self-respect. Aren’t you at least a little bit embarrassed to be so emotionally invested in the work life of some nobody at BuzzFeed? Because he isn’t thinking about you at all. I know this as somebody who used to spend too much time smacking around Twitter trolls: You guys are very little more than a means of procrastination, a vice to which many writers are vulnerable. I gave up social media and . . . my house has never been so clean.


I’ll have a great deal more to say about this in my upcoming book, The Smallest Minority, but, until then: Lighten up, Francis.