Mother Jones Editor to Vox Blogger: Put a Gun in Your Mouth and Pull the Trigger

January 14th, 2016 6:43 PM

A sampling of headlines from the venerable left-wing magazine Mother Jones --

Here's Obama's New Plan to Tighten Gun Laws

How a Loophole in US Law Helps Drug Cartels Sneak Guns Into Mexico

Hillary Clinton Will Never Let Bernie Sanders Live Down This Vote

7 Myths About Gun Violence in America, Debunked 

Rubio Slams Obama on Guns -- But He Once Backed 'Reasonable Restrictions' on Firearms

The Firearms You See in Cloud Patterns Are All Too Real

Yes, I made up the last one. As for all the others, they've run in Mother Jones in the last two weeks alone. Point being, the people who toil there really hate firearms.

Well, apparently not all of the scribes at MJ. One of those employed at the mag, an "engagement editor" named Ben Dreyfuss, took exception to a post at the liberal policy wonk site Vox. The post's title -- "I became a millionaire overnight -- and quickly realized that extreme wealth is overrated."

Its author, a Danish programmer named David Heinemeier Hansson, described coming into considerable wealth a decade ago when Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought a stake in his startup.

Even though Hansson grew up "lower middle class" and dreamt that becoming rich would be "utterly awesome," he discovered it was a mixed blessing. It wasn't until after he bought a yellow Lamborghini that Gatsbyesque disillusionment set in -- "primarily because I think it's scary to think This Is It." 

"We humans acclimate to our surroundings incredibly quickly," Hansson writes. "The buzz is not going to last. Until you realize the next rung of the ladder isn't where salvation hides, the siren song will keep playing."

An interesting take, one that I'd never seen. But something about the post rubbed Dreyfuss the wrong way, and he tweeted these in response --

@voxdotcom shut the f*** up

@voxdotcom i mean for real shut the f*** up

@voxdotcom take a gun and put it in your mouth and pull the trigger

What is it about liberals and their death fantasies for people expressing opinions they don't like?

You'd think that those ostentatiously aligned with a political philosophy dedicated to peace, love and understanding for all, regardless of immigration status or jihadist inclinations, would refrain from uttering such sentiments, at least publicly.

Dreyfuss's troubling response would be more readily understood if Hansson offered a different take on extreme wealth -- for example, that water-skiing behind yachts is everything he imagined. For those heavily steeped in the doctrine that Property is Crime, these would be fighting words, or at the very least, more than ample justification for wishing someone dead.

Dreyfuss has since deleted the tweets and offered this sheepish, semi-plausible explanation to The Blaze -- 

It was a joke -- the insane level of vitriol rising to new heights in three mere tweets -- intended for people who follow both me and Vox which is why I didn't add a period at the start of the tweet or anything. I just thought it was an obviously annoying headline. But I certainly wasn't directing the tweets at the actual dude who wrote the piece. I was just making fun of Vox. Vox is a brand. It does not have a mouth or a finger with which to pull the trigger of a gun. Still, I've deleted the tweets and I'm sorry this has turned into a thing.

Well, that clarifies matters, especially for those of us under the impression that the Vox does have a mouth and an annoyingly vocal one at that.   

Dreyfuss, it's worth noting, is the son of actor Richard Dreyfuss, who presumably enjoyed a windfall of sorts after appearing in the Spielberg blockbusters Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and winning an Oscar for his role in The Goodbye Girl.

(Image source: Screen grab via The Blaze)