Big accounts, a small man, and a journalist

Nothing offends a liar more than people who tell the truth

I don’t know if this is of interest to anyone but I imagine it would be to me if I didn’t have a window it through my surreal Twitter “popularity.” I apologize in advance for whatever sucks about this post because I have 27 minutes to peck this out stream-of-consciousness before racing off for a trip but think it is important and shouldn’t wait.

As you all know, I have (undeservedly IMHO) come to have a “large account” on Twitter. The path to that place has been utterly surreal and gets no less so with time. It will never not seem weird to me.

There is nothing in our adult lives that preps us for suddenly having A LOT of people listening to us and responding to our every word. There is nothing that preps us for suddenly being able to reach millions of people by merely hitting “post”… and then having them come to love, hate, accept or judge you with a passion that is sometimes blows your hair back.

It is both wonderful and terrible. It comes with stresses and pressures. It opens doors and through them comes both opportunity and anxieties.

I literally dream about accidentally saying something the wrong way and running afoul of communities I care about. I wouldn’t call them nightmares per se. They aren’t terrifying. They are just the internalized stress that comes with having a microphone playing out in my sleep because as Jason Kander explained in courageous book about PTSD, it is in sleep that our mind surfaces the things we haven’t attended to when awake.

It’s… a lot.

It’s one thing to have already been in the public eye or known for something before becoming “popular” on Twitter.

(I keep putting that word in quotes because being highly followed does not mean being highly liked. It merely means a lot of people read your shit regardless of how they feel about you. I am not “popular” in the ordinary way we use that word to mean “liked by a lot of people”. I have a highly followed account. There is a big difference between those two things and it is important.)

Over the past six years, a lot of people like me and many of you flocked to Twitter to just try to help in some way. We all posted and shared and interacted to just try to “do our part” without a plan or strategy. We just joined the fight so to speak.

Then, some regular, ordinary folks like me saw their accounts take on lives of their own. People like Aaron Rupar and Judd Legum (and the people behind accounts like Brooklyn Dad Defiant, Stonekettle, and Mueller She Wrote) suddenly had “large accounts” and lots of fans and haters (and all of the baggage that comes with that kind of reach.))

In a way, we all became members of a club we never applied for and weren’t really prepared for. So, somewhat naturally I guess, some of us came to form relationships behind the scenes.

For me, those relationships are mostly like having a light, informal network of peers. We chat or DM on occasion but not every day or even often. We reach out to each other when one of us is going through the meat grinder of getting bombarded by trolls or impersonated or harassed. We implicitly know what sucks the most about having large accounts and when we generally support each other when it’s our turn in the barrel regardless of whether we’re even real fans of each other.

One of the people I’ve come to know in that way is Aaron Rupar.

If you aren’t familiar with Aaron, he is a journalist who does the agonizingly painful job of watching all of the things we don’t want to so he can report on what is being done and said over on the right.

Aaron was a journalist on staff (for Vox, I believe) and had amassed a well earned good-sized following.

About a year ago, he made the pretty courageous decision to go out on his own and try to make a go of being an independent journalist supported solely through direct subscriptions here on Substack.

I am fan of Aaron’s. I’d like to say that we are “friends” but truth be told, I don’t regard my Twitter persona as all that likeable or inviting and don’t assume anyone who knows me only through Twitter shares the same affinity for me that I have for them.

I like Aaron though regardless of whether that is mutual. And one should. He is an incredibly nice guy. He is without affect or guile. He is just a nice guy who works hard and tells the truth and does his best.

About a month ago, I was invited down to the White House as part of a group of “influencers”. It was a fairly large group and a lot of the people behind large accounts you likely know or follow were there. I had a chance to meet a friend in the West Wing beforehand. Then we toured the White House and sat for briefings. It was a memorable and fun day.

It was also one of those social gatherings where you know a lot of the other people but don’t… I knew a fair number of the other attendees via their accounts but not personally.

I spent much of the afternoon sitting next to Aaron.

At one point, when we were on a break and had time to just talk, I asked him how his Substack was going and confessed that I was thinking about jumping off the cliff into trying to be a writer and was considering trying to live off of support through Substack like he had.

He was incredibly generous with his time and experiences. He openly shared how it had worked for him (and was working now) and what that meant in terms of trying to earn an income to support his family. It was the kind of honest sharing that means so much more than anything you can possibly research or read up on elsewhere.

A few weeks later, I jumped off the cliff and started this Substack.

A week after that, he graciously carved out time to talk with me about how MY Substack was going.

Aaron is just a good human being. He is a good person.

It is not hyperbolic to say that I would not be here were it not for our conversations and his openness.

The honest, transparent, open conversation we had made me think that doing this was actually possible. I would not have jumped off the cliff without it.

I doubt he understands the impact he had on what has already happened for me and will come from this but such is the way it is with people who are just generous with themselves without thought of return or reward.

Yesterday, Elon Musk banned Aaron’s account from Twitter as part of a wave of bans of accounts that had been critical of him. Musk claimed it was because they had violated a nonexistent rule about sharing publicly available information. It was bullshit and was immediately debunked as a ludicrously dishonest excuse for just banning critics.

Aaron relied on Twitter to help grow his audience here on Substack. He produced endless Twitter content people valued without compensation. Now, as an independent journalist, that channel mattered a whole lot. It was the means by which people who valued his work often came to know that they could follow and support him here.

It literally helped put food on his table.

And now, because Elon Musk is a fragile, narcissistic piece of trash, that incredibly hard-earned following - that suddenly important contributor to Aaron’s livelihood - has been taken away from someone I know to be a good, kind, honest, hardworking person.

I think I am more aggrieved at Aaron’s account being banned than I would be if it were mine. I have done plenty to deserve it. Aaron has not.

Regardless of whether Musk ever reverses course and undoes the ban, damage has been done and some of it is irreversible. There is no remedy for causing someone to suddenly have to worry about the impact on their young family a week before Christmas.

Aaron deserved and deserves better.

A small, fragile, narcissistic man is doing harm to a someone I personally know to be generous and kind.

And that makes me alternatingly incredibly angry and sad.

I hope the community of people who have benefitted from Aaron’s efforts and work pulls him close in its arms and supports him here on Substack. He deserves it.

His feed and his pieces about all of this can be found here:

Yes, my Twitter account was permanently suspended

Aaron is one of the good ones.

I have a deep appreciation for his help and support and I hope the world comes to his aid and supports him with the very same generosity he showed me.

And now I am incredibly late and this took an hour not 27 minutes but it is important and was important for me to share without delay.

When good people go through bad things, they deserve to reap the kindness they’ve long sown without expectation. Aaron is one of those people and this one of those times.