As it turns out,??? ?? ?? the voice of the people can still, on occasion, upend the government.
It's how a civic official in Clay County, West Virginia lost her job after she called Michelle Obama an "ape in heels" on a Facebook post, which Clay County's mayor commented on, approvingly.
The post garnered widespread attention over the weekend after screenshots of the post were circulated on the internet. By Monday, the official was no longer employed by the county. It is unclear if she resigned or was fired. By Monday evening, the mayor of Clay County had resigned.
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The officials join the ranks of other infamous people who have dealt with the swift and severe consequences of the internet's patented brand of public shaming.
These people are often looked upon with a certain amount of sympathy as some imperfect souls who just happened to stumble into the path of an angry, snowballing digital mob. Their one moment of indiscretion creates a reputation for them online that becomes, to a large degree, unshakeable. Does the punishment really fit the crime?
Regardless of how you answer any of those questions, over the last few days, one thing's become increasingly clear: That digital mob has now become more important than ever.
Less than a week after the election, racists, emboldened by Donald Trump's candidacy, are making their presence felt in America in blatant and unabashed ways that would've seemed unthinkable a year ago. Many still operate anonymously, spray-painting graffiti, or trolling on Twitter. Their facelessness has traditionally served as a reminder that they're still on the fringes of society, and for good reason.
Then again, maybe they're moving inward. The president-elect spent much of his campaign railing against Muslims and Mexicans. His words would've been socially ruinous in even private conversation just a year ago, let alone in public forums. And those words have now become, by definition, "presidential."
So it's understandable why people would feel emboldened to safely lob a racial epithet about the First Lady on Facebook. This is Trump's America. The power balance has shifted, and with it, our notions of tact, decorum, and what does and doesn't constitute suitable conversational norms.
But one of those norms hasn't, to a certain degree, changed. You're not going to be able to call Michelle Obama an Ape on Facebook without it being screengrabbed by someone else from Clay County, West Virginia looking at it. And, as a result, find yourself taking some serious heat for it. Maybe you're willing to take that heat if you're a particularly outspoken racist. You're probably not so willing if you're a public servant (or in this case: working for a non-profit funded by both the state and federal government), whose job requires some sense of decorum.
In Trump's America, this official seemed to believe that the sum of America now would tolerate this kind of thing. And I can't say I don't see why she might think that considering everything that has happened. When Trump was pressed by 60 Minutes on the emergence of racism in his name, he could only muster a "stop it."
This official now knows otherwise. A switch did not flip on election night—Trump's election didn't suddenly mean that everyone's threshold for racist behavior was raised, or that those who stand against racism will suddenly stop fighting (if anything, the opposite is true). That switch didn't flip over the last eighteen months either.
That's why it was reassuring (however darkly) to see the digital speech mob—often maligned for good reason—mobilize around this particular situation. Trump's more racist supporters might believe that the election has given them a mandate to bring back the most vile and destructive rhetoric that's been mostly relegated to the wastebin of history, or at least the darkest corners of the internet.
It's the kind of speech that intimidates, menaces, and frightens. Living in a free society means we have to deal with those voices.
Yet those people are only as correct as the rest of society allows them to be. And in this case, that assumption—that it's okay to say something so gobstoppingly racist, so casually, among assumedly likeminded people—proved itself to be wildly off-base. We don't live in a society that will tolerate calling the first lady an "ape"—at least, thankfully, not at this point, not yet. Say what you will about the snowballing effect of a pitchfork-carrying digital mob, and the reputational damage they might cause, it still remains nothing if not an effective antidote to the spreading of hate. And in fact, it might be one of the very few antidotes we have left.