I read carefully this essay, the point of which seems to be... don't be mean for the sake of meanness. Almost immediately after you advanced this thesis, you called Elon Musk a deliberately insulting name because you don't like him. You also made a claim about twitter which roughly half the country would call utter nonsense. So be it.

Then you move on to Rush Limbaugh and the comments at the time of his death, which you first criticize and then pivot and say basically... well, he deserved it. Again, half the country sees his life in an utterly different light than you do. Including me. I was his spokesperson for close to twenty-five years, and am one of the people you would hurt with these comments, if I hadn't heard them so many times as to be completely unmoved by them. These kinds of remarks speak only about their maker, not their target.

The real problem here is not the insults per se... they are the fruit of a poisoned tree, which is the idea that one set of political partisans or another have some kind of monopoly on "truth." The reality is that people live according to their beliefs, and people like you (and me) must start respecting the idea that in most matters, there is no universal truth, just people with different and valid beliefs. Like yours, and like mine. It is the sacrifice of this basic human value of mutual respect that empowers people to act like jackasses hiding behind a veil of anonymity.

As for Rush, if you dedicated a few days of your life to reading origin material, in his own words, instead of how various partisans characterized them, you still wouldn't agree with him, but you would have a new appreciation of the fact that you were manipulated into believing he was someone he most decidedly was not.