I don’t think it’s even about muting your opponents a lot of the time. It often is, but I think there’s a strong element of jealousy to it. People like Rowling and Ellis have lives that most Twittards can only dream of. So do you work to achieve the same success? No, that requires effort. Far easier to destroy them and bring them down to your level.
Yeah, I think there's a dynamic that's often overlooked where when cancel culture really burns the most is when it's from people who are supposed to be "on your side", especially when it's these financially secure internet celebrities. The crowd you associate with is pretty important to existing online, and now Ellis has no one. She's been rendered radioactive by being held to the same standards she held others and it must be absolutely maddening for a large swath of her own idealogical associates to regard her as little better than Mister Metokur.
A big part of the progressive identity is having a high verbal intelligence. While a lot of these people are annoying and stupid, the ability to adapt new language, throw away old, and know how to use it effectively to manipulate and protect yourself from the other Progs is a big deal. It's genuinely impressive how much they're able to keep up with such non-stop shifting verbiage, expectations, and idealogical shifts. The people who can do this almost always skew young, and Lindsay simply got too old to keep up. She kept making mistakes and having little slip-ups; blood in the water for the sharks. She wrongly assumed that her very obvious Progressive principles should be sufficient to keep her on good terms with everyone. But when Racism isn't a social condition that arises from criss-crossing factors like history, culture, and economics and is instead a demonic possession or a viral infection that has to be exercised or quarantined, you get treated like a sinner or a leper.
Good ole' Destiny is always interesting to me, because he's a guy who is very obviously in the same idealogical camp as Ellis, but has avoided any of this bullshit by simply refusing to play these bitchy social ladder games with people. You can't get kicked out if you don't play, and he gets blasted by people his own people all the time, but it never amounts to anything. The end result is someone who is the best internet advocate the Progs ever had, and they more often than not, utterly despise him.
Too bad for Ellis, she loved the game. Was a star player, might have even had a hand in setting the rules of the game. She loved the status climbing, the easy praise, the intellectual masturbation, seeing her enemies driven before her, and being the one to set the standard of who was allowed to hang out with the cool kids. Well, now she lost and doesn't know what to do with herself.
