Newspapers like New Year issues. It gives them a chance to fill column inches with commentators' predictions for the next 12 months, detailed annual horoscopes and an assortment of trends.
It's meant to be a bit of light relief from the doom & gloom of climate activism, populist advances and imminent global police actions. Take the Times' predictions, for example:
But that's no longer good enough for the Offendorati, those eagle-eyed social media addicts who have nothing better to do with their drab and wretched lives than to find somebody to mob.
Cue a pack on the prowl on December 31 2019, as Owen Jones, beloved gay far-left pundit of the UK's metropolitan Wokerati, gets a Google alert, heads for the Times website and discovers that he's made the predictions column. And not in a good way, from his point of view.
From the point of view of most of us, who've scrolled through suggestions that Mark Francois will explode, and Boris will go bald so he can channel his inner Churchill, the suggestion that the Absolute Boy might spend his twilight years in the Lords as a fat bluffer waddling after trim interns, was bordering on eldritch, let alone outré. Not to be taken seriously. At all.
But Owen is a sensitive flower, who has form for storming out of TV interviews if there's half a chance of getting extra victim points. So he took to Twitter and activated the mob.
And the mob responded with glee. There were demands that The Times sack Giles. Tweets and columns written by Mr Coren were dredged up, willfully misinterpreted and spun. There was a rapid promotion from merely homophobic to include racism, sexism and the P-bomb.
Standard #Offendonomics tactics, in other words.
And then it got ugly.
Some charmers traced Giles' address and chose to harangue his wife and kids while he was at work.
And another voice is driven off social media by the Offendorati.
This isn't Owen Jones' fault. He's not responsible for the actions of his followers. If we are to have free speech, it has to apply to everybody. Including those who want to virtue signal or stock up on intersectional Brownie points.
But there is a dark, malevolent streak in some people, who seem to be inexorably drawn to totalitarian extremes on all parts of the political compass. The Absolute Boy knows this; he works & campaigns with far-left and Pomo identarians against far-right identarians.
So you might think it ironic that a self-declared champion in the fight against anti-semitism set in motion events that led to a mob getting shouty outside the home of a Jewish journalist. We couldn't possible comment.