Well, I don't know if you've noticed, but the trolls on the left have new marching orders, and man, is it frightening. So I spent the last day or so slapping trolls on Twitter. Now, sometimes I just block them and walk away. But when the trolls get new marching orders and they all come in with the same kind of message, it's a little more interesting, and I tend to engage.

One of the questions that people ask me is because there's an article from Wired. Wired did a big interview with me when I was doing my book *Loserthink* recently, and the Wired interview just dropped. Now, I haven't read it because I'm in so many articles this month I don't read them all, but I tweeted it. The article focuses on really there's no reason to focus on this except it was one interesting part from my book *Loserthink*. And one of the things I focused on was I talked about how to have some new rules for civility on the internet. And I talked about my 48-hour rule for apologizing and my 20-year rule for just letting things go. If somebody did something more than 20 years ago and it wasn't murder or something permanent like that, just let it go because they're different people.

But anyway, the point is the trolls came after me and they were noting that I was insulting my trolls just for fun and entertainment. And people said, "Scott, Scott, Scott, you hypocrite, you hypocrite. How can you say you're in favor of civility on the internet at the very same time you are insulting trolls? Insulting trolls is the opposite of civility."

To which I say, I'm also opposed to murder, but if you break into my house at night, I will kill you. Is that inconsistent? I am opposed to murder, but if you break into my house in the middle of the night, I will kill you. Are those inconsistent? I don't think so. I don't think so at all.

If a troll comes after you on Twitter, you have a free punch. You can be as awful as you want. There's no rule of civility that says you need to be nice to rude people. That's not it. Is there any form of manners that suggests you need to be nice to an asshole? There's no rule like that either. I don't suggest that anybody do it. Now, you might want to know why they're being the way they're being. If there's something wrong with them, it's like a mental problem, well then maybe you want to walk away. But if a troll is coming in for political purposes or just to be a sociopath and just to hurt a stranger, those people are just a free punch. Why would you not take a free punch on somebody who completely deserves it? So I do it for fun and entertainment and fuel.

But the newest batch, I'm trying to figure out where they're getting their marching orders because if you noticed in the last 24 hours or so, maybe a little bit sooner than that, they're coming with the same approach. And there are lots of them and they're all trolls. You can tell by their accounts. Now, they may not be paid trolls, but they're obviously organized because they're coming with the same messages.

So the messages against me always take the same form. There's always the sincere guy. I like the sincere troll. The sincere troll is, "Hi, I used to love your comic, but now because I know you're a terrible person, I can never enjoy it again." So I call those the sincere trolls. They try to hurt me with sincerity. Now, I don't believe they were reading Dilbert yesterday. I'm sure none of it's true. So that's one flavor.

The other flavor are the people who are asking me if I support kids in cages and/or Stephen Miller in the White House. So apparently there's some kind of general instruction that trolls will go after whoever they think is a Trump supporter, and they're going to ask them those questions: Do you favor kids in cages or Stephen Miller? And it's sort of a "do you still beat your wife" kind of thing because they want to concentrate the entire Trump presidency into one personnel question that I don't know much about. I mean, I couldn't tell you everything that Stephen Miller does or thinks. Same with all the rest of his advisers. I don't know much about it. I know people say bad things. What are the odds that bad things said about people on the internet are true? Low, you know what I mean? Could be true, could be not true. So I don't have an opinion about something I'm uninformed about, and I really don't have a way to become informed.

But that seems to be the new attack, is going after Trump supporters directly. One of the people who is supporting this idea of going after Trump supporters — so remember in 2016 one of the worst mistakes that Hillary Clinton made was the "deplorables" comment. But even Hillary Clinton limited the deplorables to a subset of Republicans. So even Hillary was saying, well, you've got your Republicans that we just disagree with — in essence, I'm paraphrasing — you know, the ones we just disagree with politically, but then there are the deplorables, you know, a percentage of them that are irredeemable horrible people.

Now, that didn't work out for her because people correctly or incorrectly took "deplorables" to mean she was really talking about all Trump supporters. She wasn't, but it was easy to twist it into that as a political attack. So calling some percentage of Trump supporters deplorable turned out to be one of the worst political moves of all time. So they've decided to double down. Instead of saying that some portion of Trump supporters are deplorable, the newest attack is that anybody who voted for or ever says good things about Trump is supporting kids in cages and white supremacy. So they've doubled down on the thing that didn't work. That's so typical.

Now, there's a fellow who works as a senior correspondent for Vox. Now, if I introduce a topic by saying that it came from a senior correspondent for Vox, what's your first thought? Well, here's some hot mess of thinking right here. So whatever I say next, you know it's just going to be so batshit crazy that I almost don't even have to say it. I could just say a senior correspondent for Vox said some things that are batshit crazy. The details probably don't even matter, but I'm going to give them to you anyway.

So he said basically he was in favor of going after people as voters. So he said that the days of not going after people for having bad opinions should be over, and that you should shun people socially and you should go after them socially and otherwise for having bad opinions. And I responded and I said, remind me who gets to decide which beliefs are abhorrent? So the word that he used was "abhorrent," and he said that you should shun people with abhorrent opinions and you should ostracize them and be bad to them. And so I said, who gets to decide which beliefs are abhorrent?

For example, I don't know this to be true, but I'm guessing that a senior correspondent for Vox is in favor of abortion. Now, I stay out of the abortion question because I would rather recuse myself and let women work it out. Then I'll support whatever they come up with. So I don't have a dog in the fight per se, at least in terms of arguing about it. But it is nonetheless an objective statement that half of the country believes that someone who supports abortion has an abhorrent belief. So if we were to use his standard, half of the country should, by his own standard, shun him and try to drive him out