Ben Shapiro coins a new term at National Review Online to describe a recent interaction between the vice president and his predecessor.
It’s never a good feeling to get Duplassed.
The term “Duplassed” comes from the actor Mark Duplass — a talented actor and director who contacted me sometime last year, asking whether I could give him any guidance on the pro–Second Amendment position regarding gun control. I was happy to help; he showed up at our offices, where we spent an hour and a half chatting over the issue. As he left, I warned him that if he let his leftist friends know that we had met, he might face a backlash. He blithely assured me he wasn’t worried.
A few months later, Duplass tweeted, “Fellow liberals: If you are interested at all in ‘crossing the aisle’ you should consider following @benshapiro. I don’t agree with him on much but he’s a genuine person who once helped me for no other reason than to be nice. He doesn’t bend the truth. His intentions are good.”
This, it turns out, was a rather large mistake. It prompted spasms of outrage from the Left, which brutally ratio-ed him on Twitter; Duplass quickly deleted his tweet, then issued a quasi-apology, calling his original tweet a “disaster on many levels,” adding that he “in no way endorse[s] hatred, racism, homophobia, xenophobia or any form of intolerance.”
Being Duplassed sucks, to put it mildly. To have a person address you as a human being and acknowledge your basic good nature is inherently rather heartwarming. To have that judgment summarily rejected thanks to political blowback is just as stomach-churning. Suffice it to say, then, I have some sympathy for Vice President Mike Pence, who got Duplassed by former vice president Joe Biden this week.
