Hijack

His voice is gone and the world is better for it. Like the Kumail Nanjiani joke, I don’t even need to say his name. But for the past five years his voice has poisoned everything.

Those five years taught me that power is no longer about money but about reach as well; true power is the ability to climb into someone’s mind, hijack their attention, and traumatize them. And for every single day of those five years, that's what he did.

It didn’t matter where we were; we might’ve been watching a movie or playing a game or trying to read a book, on the subway or on a plane or at the park. Somehow his voice would find his way in and take hold of our minds.

But now that he’s banned from Twitter, that power begins to wane. I’ve noticed how over the past week that my mind has been mostly free of him—he hasn’t reached inside my head and said something immeasurably stupid and cruel. Of course, he's still dangerous though, and of course he's still a threat. Events at the Capitol earlier this month shows us that this problem is far, far from over.

But if this ban holds I think we'll mark this moment as the one where his dominion over our minds was finally let loose. And we should celebrate that with fireworks and high fives and wild, drunk screams of absolute delight.

However, if the first stage is never hearing his voice then the second stage is no longer hearing his name. In fact, I had this idea the other day for a bot that would crawl the NYT front page and then update a website to say SWEET HEAVENS YES when his name was no longer to be found on it.

Because that will be a wondrous day. And it’s one I cannot wait to see.