Facebook Bullying in the Name of Politics

City Safari: Flower Girl Gets Into The Fray Christine Flowers: Happy Halloween - On Twitter. Mon, Nov 16, 2020 By Thom Nickels Contributing Editor The snowflake hypersensitivity wave plaguing social media for the last several years reached a kind of zenith on Facebook recently. That’s when I encountered a post aimed at local writer Christine Flowers. Flowers, of course, is a conservative columnist and immigration lawyer who once wrote for The Philadelphia Inquirerbut who is now happily employed by The Delaware County Times. Flowers’ columns sometimes irritate people—liberals with narrow minds who cannot stomach a diversity of opinions. Presenting opposing points of view is a good thing because it means that Flowers is doing her job as a columnist. Too many millennials tend to forget that the aim of a newspaper columnist is to present an opinion that you may disagree with. Conversely, there are conservatives with narrow minds who cannot tolerate a diversity of opinions when it comes to liberal views. These people are just as bad as the liberal thought mafia. Both extremes deserve our hearty condemnation. According to this Facebook post, Flowers sent a Tweet or an Instagram message calling attention to 2018 Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’ weight as well as the gap between her two front teeth. Flowers’ Tweet was posted on FB with the header that perhaps she needed to be fired from The Delaware County Timesbecause she seemed to be making fun of Abrams’ weight and that gap between her two front teeth. Medical News Todaydescribes the gap as a diastema. "A diastema is a gap between teeth that is wider than 0.5 millimeters. It can develop between any teeth. Treatment is not usually necessary for medical reasons. But if a person dislikes the appearance of their diastema, it is possible to close or narrow the gap.” The Flowers post drew a lot of comments, mostly from people on the other side of the political spectrum who had always put the conservative columnist on their enemies list. The comments, typically, were unflattering and reminded me of the comments from liberals directed at other conservative commentators. Many expressed shock that Flowers could say such things and then went on to call her a racist. Ideally, of course, commenting on a person’s personal appearance is never good and should be avoided but when it happens reaction should be kept in perspective. Criticizing a person because they have a gap between their front teeth has about as much to do with racism as a fish riding a bicycle. Many overweight people embrace the word ‘fat’ and say it with pride, and yet judging from the severity of the comments you might have thought that Flowers had flipped her lid and done something truly disastrous like blow up a public building or looted some stores on Rittenhouse Square. Her offense, if indeed it can even be called that, was merely a speck of dust on the wide map of real city offenses that have been committed of late, and for that reason not worthy of any outrage at all. I felt sorry for Flowers. Indeed, as a writer and columnist myself, I’ve been on the receiving end of harassment and bullying. When it happens to you for the first time it is always a shock. You feel persecuted and harassed but then you realize that this is something that comes with the territory. People on social media love to gang up on people who express views they don’t agree with. They love to bully and intimidate. These bullying social media gangs go out of their way to get friends and friends of friends to write comments and letters and make it look as if the whole world is crashing down in outrage on the "offender’s” head. It’s all a sham and a game of smoke and mirrors because "the outrage” is made to look much larger than it really is. Conservative commentator and global UK gadabout Katie Hopkins glories in being the most hated woman in all of Britain. Hopkins has learned to love the controversy. Bring it on, she says. All newspaper columnists need to adopt the Hopkins attitude. As for Flowers being called an abhorrent scandalous "racist,” I was curious to see how she replied to the mob on that Facebook post. Writers who have been through this know that there’s a choice: Do you engage with the mob when you are being attacked, or do you take the high road, step aside and say nothing and just let them attack you? Engaging has its risks. You risk being drawn into an endless squabble from which there is no escape. You are certainly not going to change anyone’s mind. Flowers did respond to the Facebook attacks. It was in reply to someone who promised to do all they could to get her fired from that Delco newspaper. Flowers’ response was a mere, "I’m quivering in my boots.” Her response, of course, enraged the mob even more. I’ve been on Flowers’ radio show when she had a show, and she once came to a lecture of mine at the Library Company, so we are sort of friends but not real friends. It’s more of a writerly association with occasional how-do-you-do’s exchanged on social media. But when I saw that she was being attacked on Facebook, I jumped into fray, lasso in the air and my mental pen on fire. I know how important it is to have people rush in to speak up for you at moments like this. So, I spoke up. And my speaking up led to my hearing the other side of the story. Online bullying is not the province of the Left but can just as easily happen on the Right. So, I got the story of how the Right, or Flowers’ fans, bullied the poster of this FB thread that called into question Flowers’ competence as a columnist. I was informed that Flowers’ fans swamped the anti-Flowers poster’s FB page with just as much snake venom as was directed at Flowers herself. This person then gave me a few examples of what was said, some of it not very nice but, in the end, mostly just sticks and stones, words meant to hurt and insult but ultimately just words. A big fat exchange of insulting words… with the accent on ‘fat’ of course.