I would be remiss if I let the day pass without challenging my colleague Eddie Scarry. Earlier today, he defended right-wing writer Denise McAllister — formerly of the Federalist and the Daily Wire, before she was fired from both — for a Twitter tirade against journalist Yashar Ali. The tweets, which I won't relay here in their entirety, essentially amounted to McAllister attacking Ali's homosexuality in response to this tweet.



“He’s right. I slipped.”



Oh Denise ☹️ pic.twitter.com/8cWlcGPtUm — Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) March 31, 2019



In since-deleted tweets, McCallister then wrote:



A gay men commenting on a heterosexual relationship is just. Sad. Pathetic really. I think @yashar has a crush on me. Maybe I’m making him doubt his love of penis. Oh so sad. @yashar is lost. He doesn’t know his purpose as a man. He doesn’t know his purpose as a human being. He doesn’t know his purpose as an Individual. So he wallows and tries to find himself in another man’s asshole. Sad.





Scarry defended McAllister on the following grounds:



Is McAllister a homophobe? I have no clue ... But no one who has suffered through the insufferable Twitter mob can blame her for her temporary insanity ... McAllister hit back at Ali where she thought it might hurt because she knew what he was encouraging the Twitter mob to do to her. That doesn’t automatically make her a homophobe. It makes her a righteously angry woman.



But McAllister wasn't just unjustified in hitting Ali "where she thought it might hurt." She wasn't even righteously angry to begin with.

To begin with the obvious, anyone who enters public life signs up for the risk of public criticism. While we ought to inculcate a culture of grace and not try to scalp every personality or politico for honest mistakes, Ali wasn't punching down and he certainly wasn't doing so in a way that was beyond the pale. McAllister, who has more than 68,000 Twitter followers, publicly discussed her personal life, as she often does in the course of criticizing feminists. Ali, who has 389,000 followers, fired back.

I've been at the bottom of a Twitter mob before. I think every journalist with a blue check mark probably has. And guess what? I've never, ever, ever lashed out at someone's sexuality before, much less in as graphic and insulting a way as McAllister did. McAllister had every right to defend herself, but her response is disgusting and indefensible.

Scarry says that he has "no clue" if McAllister is actually a homophobe, or if, as he hypothesizes, she simply chose a sore spot to invoke maximum damage. You know what's a great clue that she's a raging, bigoted, and vicious homophobe? Her own words, effectively an attempt to shame gay people into thinking that they are less than human.

Furthermore, McAllister is one of the meanest people on Twitter. She has engaged in doxxing of Twitter personalities and, after weeks of obsessively tweeting about writer and podcaster Bridget Phetasy, she effectively directed a mob of incels toward her. The harassment and death threats got so bad that Phetasy had to temporarily deactivate her account. Dozens of her friends had to call her to check in and make sure that some online fanatic hadn't found her address.

McAllister is the worst kind of walking contradiction — a bully performing as a victim, a misogynist performing as an empowered wife, a sex-obsessive performing as a Christian. The only thing she's finally accepted openly is a hatred of gays within herself so virulent as to make her unfit for public life and unworthy of public defense.