REALITY REPUDIATES THEIR IDEOLOGY (profanity alert):

On 19 January, the Chicago Reader revealed that 36-year-old Pericles "Perry" Abbasi -- a campaign attorney, who was running for office in Chicago's 25th police district with the backing of the Fraternal Order of Police -- had a history of posting bizarre and unseemly content on social media. He had, among other things, retweeted a photoshopped image of himself as the police officer Derek Chauvin, with one knee on George Floyd's neck. In a leaked screenshot from a group chat, he had written that "the horrible black diet" was the reason for "13/50", referencing a common internet meme about Black Americans' percentage of the population (13%) and supposed share of violent crime they commit (50%).

Abbasi denied these accusations of bigotry. He claimed he didn't remember everything he was alleged to have written (without necessarily denying his authorship, either), while also offering a second more general defence of his behaviour: this was the internet, he argued, and if he thought of something funny, he'd immediately post it. If this meant writing a tweet about how a relationship with a 36-year-old woman led him to conclude that child porn sentencing is far too long, then so be it. If it meant "making up insane things to stir s[***] up", then it meant just that. Abbasi admitted he couldn't even remember what he posted 48 hours ago; it was all just a blur of posting, retweets, engagement, and likes. He has posted nearly 104,000 times over the past four years, averaging roughly 70 tweets per day (one can also assume he retweeted hundreds of replies each day). In a sense, Abbasi was telling the truth: he was lost in the sauce, living from post to post.

Many of Abbasi's clients were less than impressed by this. The original report in the Chicago Reader was quickly amended to insert various statements from political figures whose campaigns had him, each stating his comments were unacceptable. But Abbasi doubled down, posting a series of tweets about how being cancelled "was a choice", that he was an "alpha male" and thus above apologising for things out of principle, and that Osama Bin Laden himself taught us that people will always prefer a "strong horse" to a "weak horse." Then, he received a "like" on one of his tweets from Elon Musk and declared that the era of his cancellation had ended.

At first glance, this appears to be a fairly mundane story. Political candidates and semi-public figures have their improprieties revealed in the press all the time, and careless millennial posters have been ruining their careers for years, as people who remember the case of publicist Justine Sacco know. The story of Pericles Abbasi, however, deserves a second look. It shows a crash between two different worlds, and reveals what happens when millennial online culture collides with reality.

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