Before we begin, this episode contains references to sexual assault and racist content.

On the morning of October 15th, 2021, the conservative political strategist Liz Mayer tweeted,

"...I have resorted to burning Pokemon cards as a punishment when my kid doesn't do

basic stuff he has to do. Inevitably, people on the internet got mad."

The feeling of knowing that you're being trolled is it's hard to describe,

but I'm going to try to describe it. Rachel Hampton is one of the hosts of Slate's internet

culture podcast ICYMI. The immediate response to that is, I should do something about this,

and I do something about it. It's like snarky quote-tweet or react or something in some way.

That's what thousands of people did to Mayor's Tweet, which has over 15,000 responses,

including this one, which captures the gist of the reaction. Why are people allowed to have kids

before some kind of test to prove they're not psychopaths? One response even came from the actor

Seth Rogan who wrote, "...save the valuable ones the kid can pay for therapy when they're older."

But then there's the second reaction, the kind of smarter, non-lizard brain part of you that

is like, why am I giving this air time? That smarter part of you knows. The person who tweeted

that outrageous thing wants attention, even if it's hostile. And as it turns out, just the day before

Mayor had tweeted, this website is getting to be really boring. I'm starting to consider

tweeting deliberately crazy and offensive stuff just to try to spice it up again.

By the end of the day, she was playing the whole thing off as a gacha,

something she'd done on purpose to rile people up. And if you'd gotten riled up,

you might have felt a little used.

In the scheme of online outrage, this was not a significant event. Someone who seemed to want

attention got it. Just another day on the internet, where this kind of thing has come to feel like

...