Last Monday, in a flash of red mesh and twinkling crystals, U.S. figure skater Mirai Nagasu landed a historic triple axel, becoming the first American woman to do so at the Olympics. Her U.S. teammates, including her roommate Adam Rippon, leapt to their feet clapping with joy.

What should have been an uncontroversially proud moment for all Americans—with the exception, perhaps, of Fox’s resident diversity-skeptic John Moody—devolved into a Twitter cause célèbre over race in America.

In the midst of the online jubilation, Bari Weiss, a New York Times op-ed writer and editor, tweeted out, “Immigrants: They get the job done,” along with a video of Nagasu. As has been reported ad nauseam, Nagasu was born in California. Her parents are immigrants from Japan, but they were not depicted in the tweet.

Twitter lit up. The Washington Post’s Ishaan Tharoor asked if Weiss labeled American-born Nagasu as an immigrant because she’s not white, to which Weiss took offense. She said that she knew that Nagasu was born in California, but thought “poetic license was kosher.”

Weiss deleted the first tweet citing a deluge of online abusers telling her she was “a racist, a ghoul and that I deserve to die.” But she didn’t give an inch, retweeting a series of articles that identified Nagasu’s parents—not Nagasu—as immigrants. She seemed genuinely confused about the substantive difference. “Do you need another sign of civilization’s end,” she asked. “The line is a Hamilton reference. I know she was born in Cali. Her parents are immigrants. I was celebrating her and them.”

Many commenters chose to explain why they weren’t crazy about the conflation. In three bubbly tweets, New Yorker contributor Karen Chee broke down the concept of the perpetual foreigner—the assumption that Asian-Americans are always seen as immigrants, regardless of generation—while acknowledging that Weiss’s intention was “kind and noble.” In response to Weiss’s report of abusive treatment, Chrissy Teigen offered a similarly gentle take: “It’s called perpetual otherism or perpetual foreigner syndrome. No one is ashamed of the word immigrant but it’s tiring being treated as foreigners all the time. You made a mistake. It’s okay.”

Weiss thanked Chee, but instead of offering a “my bad” and moving on, she stuck to the view that her critics had “been monitoring her account waiting to pounce.” For her recalcitrant stance, sites like Jezebel mocked her, and Frank Rich tweeted “beware of any writer who cites criticism as ‘a sign of civilization’s end.’” It was a perplexing doubling down. If the online abuse was so bad, why follow up with the exact same sentiment? Was it because Weiss’s elevation of her worst critics also made her into something of a martyr?

Soon an influential tribe of anti-identity-politics intellectuals jumped into the mix. Christina Hoff Sommers, who calls herself the Factual Feminist, took to ridiculing some of Weiss’s more prominent commenters, but none, notably, who were actually abusive. The neuroscientist and author Sam Harris gleefully retweeted her. Bret Weinstein—a former biology professor who was horribly ousted from Evergreen College over bogus accusations of racism—also weighed in, claiming that Weiss’s critics “wait for the slightest misstep” just to “savage” her and this was about “power, and witches.” It was as if Teigen, a 32-year-old swimsuit model with a penchant for junk-food tweets, had been hiding out in an intersectional foxhole, stockpiling torches, instead of merely reacting to an old stereotype she knew well when it popped up in her timeline.