So it looks like my Tumblr, LuffyMonkey1227, is gone. I do not have confirmation of exactly why, Tumblr does not exactly hand out detailed explanations when an account disappears, but I have a pretty strong guess, and the guess is that a mass reporting campaign from people who did not like what I was saying about Luigi Mangione got the account flagged and pulled, probably not because anything I wrote actually violated a real policy, but because enough people did not like hearing it and decided the easiest solution was to make the account disappear rather than engage with a single word of it. I could be wrong about the exact mechanism, I am speculating based on timing and based on the kind of response those posts were already getting before the account vanished, but if that is what happened, I want to say clearly, that does not change a single thing I said, and it does not make any of it less true.
Here is the thing about getting silenced instead of argued with, it does not actually refute anything, it just confirms that the people doing the silencing did not have a real counterargument available and decided removal was easier than rebuttal. If what I said about Mangione’s actual documented politics, the anti-DEI posts, the letters to a conservative podcaster, the approving review of a domestic terrorist’s manifesto, the country club background, the private school, the Ivy League pedigree, if any of that were wrong, the correct response would have been to show me where it was wrong, to bring receipts, to actually engage with the specific claims and demonstrate they do not hold up. That is not what happened. What happened, as far as I can tell, was a wave of people who found the argument inconvenient deciding the fastest path forward was to get the account nuked rather than address a single fact in it, and I think that tells you something important about the actual strength of the position on the other side of this, because people with a strong argument generally do not need to get their opposition’s account taken down, they just make the argument and let it stand or fall on its own.
So let me say it again, plainly, one more time, in case anyone thought the account disappearing meant the point disappeared with it. Luigi Mangione is not a leftist. He was not a leftist before any of this happened, and nothing about what he is accused of doing retroactively makes him one. I do not care what he did or did not do, I am not here to relitigate the facts of the case, that is what a jury and two separate trials are for. I do not care whether you personally think what he is accused of doing was justified or not, that is a different conversation entirely, one about political violence and its limits that people are welcome to have honestly. What I am saying, and what apparently a lot of people could not stand hearing, is narrower and more specific than either of those things, it is simply this, based on his own documented words, his own social media history, his own reading list, his own correspondence from prison, the man does not hold left wing or progressive politics, has never held left wing or progressive politics, and the fact that so many people who call themselves leftist or progressive have decided to claim him anyway, to defend him past the point of reason, to mock anyone who points out the gap between his actual beliefs and the symbol they have built, is genuinely strange, and pointing that strangeness out should not have been controversial enough to get an account removed over.
I am not going to pretend I am not annoyed about losing an account I put time into, that is a real loss and it is frustrating, especially when I suspect the reason has nothing to do with anything I actually did wrong and everything to do with a coordinated effort to make an inconvenient voice disappear rather than answer it. But I also am not going to pretend it changes my position, because it does not, and honestly, if anything, it confirms something about how weak the pushback against my actual argument has been the entire time, since apparently the more effective strategy turned out to be trying to remove the person saying it rather than ever actually proving them wrong.