TheAtlantic | A beautiful illustration of the difference between Twitter and the real
world is the viral status of Michael Harriot’s attack on Mayor Pete
Buttigieg in The Root as a “lying MF.”
theroot | I don’t enjoy fighting. I don’t
even fight very well. In fact, if I combined my amateur fist-fighting
record, my jiu-jitsu sparring, all of my slap-boxing exhibitions, and
the time Zevalon Jackson slapped me for talking smack while running a
Boston on her in spades, my winning percentage is well below .500. But I
believe fisticuffs are a legitimate way to settle disputes while
arguments are usually pointless exercises to get one party to proclaim
why the other party is wrong. I’d rather you beat me up.
So when I received a text message from South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign about an article
I wrote, I genuinely hoped that he was going to send four or five of
his thugs over to rough me up and that would be it. (And if you don’t
believe there are Pete Buttigieg supporters out there willing to throw
hands, then you probably aren’t on Twitter. I think they should call
themselves the “Pete Patrol.” Or the “Buttigang.”)
I
figured one of his surrogates would argue with me for a few minutes and
I could continue my day trying to be a thorn in the side of white
supremacy (The third thing you should know is that I actually keep a
small photo of the mouse from Pinky and the Brain beside my bed that says: “What are you going to do today, Michael?” The answer is always the same: “Fuck with white people.”)
Luckily,
as soon as I agreed to take a phone call, the phone rang. The voice
sounded vaguely familiar and I knew it wasn’t a surrogate or a campaign
volunteer when the person said:
“I don’t think I’ve ever been called a ‘lying motherfucker’ before.”
It was Pete Buttigieg.
Well, I thought. Maybe he does want to fight.
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