There was a lot of noise happening online. A lot of it made trying to understand reality really, really difficult. On one hand, Eliza’s own sense of time has been warped because of, as she says, the drugs, the drinking, and the abuse. Someone else might argue that there are major gaps in her story because she’s lying.
At the rate I was personally getting attacked online for injecting myself into this story, I started to think that even if Eliza was a total liar, if she somehow schemed up this wild and elaborate lie that would’ve taken years to plan, it didn’t warrant the level of attack on her—nor anyone in her surroundings.
This is when I started to realize that a lot of the people making the most noise about Eliza’s story were truly the useful idiots. They became tools of destruction rooted in absolute ignorance and disguised as moral authority.
There was that sense of doom again. That sense of modern war which isn’t always as grand and sweeping as Hollywood’s vision of war. This war starts as a seed planted deep within the darkest parts of our brains—and it grows until some people can’t distinguish the voice of manufactured hate from the voice of their own supposed reason.
This very criticism should be levied at me too. I have been under a relentless and ruthless attack on Twitter for merely reporting on this story. But I am showing you all my flaws, all my concerns. I am human, and I naturally switch between objectivity and subjectivity. I toggle between reason and doom. Hope and despair.
We have encountered a gang of leeches here that suck at the skin of a machine they can’t comprehend the full scope of because they are so lost in their own narcissism—or, perhaps even worse, they are conscious of a symbiosis between them and the destruction orgy—carrying torches and pitchforks and masquerading through the internet—our perpetual trauma machine. These people are digital cannibals. They care more about their names getting lumped into stories the same way tumors grow in a body. They worship fame.
I realized at this point that it wasn’t even worth it to seek quotes from these people because they merely exist in the distant margins of this entire story—but in their narcissism they see themselves as the center of the story. These content creators, who livestream for hours and hours every day about Eliza, had also already said everything they had to say. They will probably read this and continue to speak out of both sides of their mouths—saying they don’t want a war, but also insidiously antagonizing their audience to believe they have a firm handle on this whole situation. And this is no shade at their audience. We probably share some of the same audience—but the audience most likely has real jobs and doesn’t have the time to spend sitting in front of a computer, digging into this story as much as we all have in our various ways.
The audience has learned to trust all of us for our different perspectives—and we have all been right and wrong throughout the years on some important topics. But these content creators, as of this exact moment, have tripped over their lynch-mob-brain as they perform pseudo-intellectual pole dances on their webcams. And now, as I started to look deeper into this entire smear campaign, which seemed to initially be rooted in genuine concerns, it made sense to me that these people were screaming just to be heard.