I have a bone to pick with Andrew Sullivan.

My problem with Sullivan is nearly ten days old. In this digital age, that’s practically a lifetime. (And those of you who listen to my podcast, This Week in Blackness, have likely already heard my oral rant against him.) But I really needed to commit this particular subject to paper, so to speak. So bear with me while I retread week-and-a-half-old territory.

Earlier this month, Women, Action, and the Media (or WAM!) announced that it would be launching “an unprecedented collaboration with Twitter to address the online harassment of women.”

In the wake of the announcement, the earth immediately collapsed into itself, groaning under the weight of feminists demanding that women not be required to run a gauntlet of harassment simply for daring to express their opinion online.

Actually, that’s not true: The earth didn’t collapse into itself (obviously, because here we are ten days later). The announcement did, however, cause Andrew Sullivan to regurgitate some thoughts and feelings that should have been left to rattle around in his head until a tiny crack in his skull would have allowed sunlight to expose those thoughts and feelings for the utter pablum that they are, potentially saving us all the horror of having to read the unbridled musings of a blogger who would sooner squirt his opinions directly from his brain to his keyboard to the world than do any real reporting.

I thought it near impossible to get as many factual details wrong as Sullivan did in response to the collaboration between WAM! and Twitter. But then I recalled his stalwart defense of The Bell Curve and his insistence that the attempts to study the correlation between I.Q. and race had been strangled by “p.c. egalitarianism,” and remembered that when it comes to matters of race and feminism—two matters which are close to my heart by virtue of the fact of my very existence—Andrew Sullivan frequently travels down the righteous path of fact-free bullshit.

And so it was with his hysterical claims that WAM! is in cahoots with Twitter and trying to stifle the speech of the poor oppressed straight white male.

If it sounds like nonsense, that’s because it is.

The WAM! reporting tool is a simple concept. A Twitter user can report harassment and abuse using WAM!’s harassment form. That form is then transmitted to Twitter, for Twitter to do with it what it will.

WAM! has no power to suspend Twitter users. WAM! has no power to even decide what sorts of online interactions qualify as harassment, abuse, or stalking. WAM! simply acts as an intermediary between Twitter and Twitter users who are being subjected to online harassment.

There’s nothing nefarious about it.

But to Andrew Sullivan, it’s a sign that “The SJWs Now Get To Police Speech On Twitter.”

Yes, those are words that he actually wrote.

For those of you not in the know, “SJW” stands for social justice warrior, a term popularized by GamerGaters who use it as a slur to describe feminists, liberals, and anyone else who values social justice as a means of fighting oppression on the basis of race, gender, and sexual orientation.

To Sullivan—who recently announced his kinship with GamerGate—SJWs are evidently little more than nattering nabobs of negativity intent on shutting down the precious freedom of speech of anyone who doesn’t agree with basic social justice principles. And much to Sullivan’s chagrin, these SJWs have found legitimacy in an organization’s collaboration with Twitter to curb online abuse.

The horror.

A close reading of Sullivan’s article reveals that it is filled with irresponsible journalism and snide insinuations.

Sullivan’s characterization of WAM! grew more and more ominous as his piece carried on. In the opening bars of Sullivan’s “Somebody Done Somebody Wrong” song, he referred to WAM! as a “left-feminist activist group.” OK, sure. I guess.

Later, he accused WAM! of wanting “gender quotas for all media businesses.” Where he got this notion from is anyone’s guess. He certainly didn’t get it from WAM!’s website.

He then went on to state—without basis—that “WAM!’s goal is to police and punish others for their alleged sexism.” Nope. That’s not even a little bit true.

And finally, at the end of his jeremiad, Sullivan called WAM! a “radical activist group bent on social transformation.” Uh … what?

The “social transformation” WAM! seeks in its collaboration with Twitter, as WAM! describes it? Assisting Twitter in curbing online harassment. Sullivan’s characterization of the social transformation sought by WAM!? “Policing the speech of white straight males.”

Really.

You see, Sullivan has apparently assumed the mantle of spokesperson for straight white men. He is concerned that straight white males are being “disparaged as a group.”

As a group! How dare anyone disparage straight white males as a group. That sort of group disparagement can lead to stereotypes. And stereotypes aren’t for straight white men, they are created by straight white men to characterize other people. That’s how the world is supposed to work.

Notably, this wasn’t the first time Sullivan expressed concern for straight white males: In a recent pro-GamerGate screed, he lamented that there’s “an atmosphere in which it has somehow become problematic to have a classic white, straight male identity, and a lot that goes with it.”

Suffer the poor white men, right? For they shall inherit the earth. Oh wait—they already have.

For that matter, Sullivan’s advocacy for straight white men has apparently made reading comprehension an elusive endeavor. He complained that “Twitter has empowered leftist feminist to have a censorship field day.”

No. Not at all, actually.

As WAM!’s executive director Jaclyn Friedman explained to me, “We are getting reports. We are taking a look at them and seeing if they look legit, and if they do, we are passing them on to Twitter, so that they can get looked at more quickly.”

“And then we’re keeping track of how Twitter responds,” she continued. “We are not the deciders here. We have none of that power.”

Friedman, too, reiterates that WAM! is acting as a middle point between users and Twitter as a company. “We made it pretty clear in the press release, in our announcement, and in all of our press interviews that we are not deciding what Twitter does with any of their users,” she said.

Sullivan even quoted some of that press coverage in his post. As such, his seemingly purposeful mischaracterization of WAM!’s pilot project, along with his snide descriptions of WAM! itself, demonstrated that Sullivan has a serious axe to grind when it comes to “left-feminism.” So much so that he’s apparently willing to throw sense and reason to the wolves in order to stick it to those identity politics-loving SJWs.

In fact, in a follow-up post, Sullivan cited the Twitter suspension of Breitbart editor and GamerGate hero Milo Yiannopoulos as proof that the Left-Feminist Plot is working.

Does Sullivan know that Milo’s account was specifically suspended for ideological reasons, as a result of a report filed with WAM!? He sure doesn’t. Does he assume that’s the case, though? Of course he does. His proof? A Twitter user bragged about it:

[T]he tweeter who bragged of getting Yiannopoulos banned was quite clear why of another reason: @nero opposed marriage equality, and is therefore allegedly homophobic (especially because he’s gay). So the standard for banning people from Twitter is now homophobia.

Hey pal? You don’t know what the standard for banning people from Twitter is. Because rather than do any sort of research, you’ve picked a random post from a random person on Twitter and held that up as evidence.

When I asked Friedman if she knew whether or not Yiannopoulos had been suspended for the reasons that Sullivan conjured, she said, referring to the random Twitter bragger, “I can’t comment on any of the cases [Sullivan] cites, but I don’t know why he would take the poster at their word.”

In general, Friedman won’t confirm or deny whether a given suspension is WAM!-related, because to do so would risk the privacy of the person making the report and potentially subject them to retaliation.

Unfortunately, this means that opportunists can complain that they were banned because of those p.c.-loving “SJWs” rather than because of their own abusive behavior. And Sullivan, in turn, will duly report on them.

And as Friedman pointed out to me, “It is deeply irresponsible to take the word of people who have been suspended from Twitter about why they’ve been suspended from Twitter as fact, and present as fact that ‘these people didn’t harass anyone because they’ve told me so.’” She’s right, of course. It is no surprise that suspended Twitter users may view their suspension as unjustified, and any responsible journalist or blogger would not report users’ complaints that they were suspended for ideological reasons and not harassment when there’s no confirmation either way. 

But Sullivan has an agenda, and facts are not going to deter him from it.

Talk about ethics in journalism.