It's more insidious than that. They don't care what happens to Vic. They care about appearing virtuous. A glorious shining defender of minorities, of females, of children (but I repeat myself), of what have you. A paladin, to borrow the gaming term -- or, to rephrase, a warrior for justice.
But virtue is relative. If all you're doing is calling for the exact same thing the rest of the woke horde is asking for, you aren't special. You have to go BEYOND the woke horde to stand out, to get credit for being an awesome shiny social paladin. But there's nothing stopping the rest of the horde, equally desperate for dopamine and asspats, from stepping forward to match you.
When this is used internally in a movement, it's called a purity spiral. When it's used externally on one's enemies, someone in GG called it a virtue spiral. Someone steps forward with an even more extreme position to show how amazingly virtuous they are, the horde steps up to meet them, then someone else steps forward. This continues until something stops the escalation -- social pressure, someone calling them out with enough social force to make the horde stagger, the victim making some unexpected move that causes the horde to stop, et cetera.
Take Magic The Gathering. You had, in a very short order of time, people going from merely being upset about The Quartering offending some CosThot because he didn't think Cosplay Exhibitionists had anything to add to MTG events, to them successfully calling for him to be permanently banned from life from official MTG events for the offense of offending her, to doxing him and posting pictures of his house, to posting video recordings of his wife along with direct threats to murder her and their new kitten just to hurt him.
All because he didn't like some cosplay thot that was being taken advantage of by WOTC -- using her as free advertising -- and who quit to go to nursing school, which outraged her thirsty paypigs.
It's always interesting to watch a virtue spiral in real time. It's even more interesting when you remember the old name we used to have for a virtue spiral.
A lynch mob.
Fortunately, KickVic never got the critical mass required to see a good woke horde kick up against him. The pushback was too fast and too hard on social media, and the people who would amplify it simply aren't there in the various Journo-activist blogs like Buzzfeed News and HuffPo, thanks to the Obama era propaganda bill expiring. So instead you just saw a handful of sociopaths -- MarzGurl, Marchi, Rial, Toye, Thotmoore, Skye, etc -- who would have normally been the ones escalating to keep themselves in front of the horde, but without the horde to constantly drive them forward. So they just looked like idiots instead.
