Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty
On social media, “dunking” means intellectually devastating an opponent. The metaphor conjures an image of a basketball player mercilessly humbling a defender. But, as on the basketball court, dunking online can alternatively represent unproductive or counterproductive showboating—a display of short-sighted vanity by a player overly tempted to rouse the fans on their side of the bleachers.
Too often, this latter image more aptly captures the sort of dunks that my left-leaning fellow travelers post online. Take, for instance, the recent commotion surrounding Lavern Spicer, a Republican congressional candidate from Florida, on Twitter.
Earlier this month, Spicer published some now-notorious tweets claiming that pronouns don’t appear in the Bible or the U.S. Constitution, and that “Jesus Christ never introduced himself using pronouns.” Considering the truism that pronouns are a ubiquitous part of speech, this supposed linguistic slip presented many online liberals with an irresistible chance to trounce a conservative adversary.