Imagine moving your family across the country for a new job just to be fired within weeks for something you didn’t do.

That’s the fate that journalist David Josef Volodzko met after starting a role as a columnist for the Seattle Times. In a new piece for the Free Press, the experienced writer recounts one of the most harrowing and unjust instances of cancel culture I’ve seen yet.

Volodzko is now jobless after being fired by the paper for what critics have called — and unfortunately burned into his Google search results — a tweet “defending Hitler.” There’s just one problem: he never did anything of the sort.

In his first column , Volodzko wrote about the city of Seattle’s notorious statue of Vladimir Lenin that is a subject of local controversy (and practical jokes). He accurately recounts Soviet history and decries Lenin’s “secret police raids, gulags, mass torture, extrajudicial killings and public executions,” as well as his “genocidal killing or deportation of up to half a million Cossacks and execution of millions of prosperous peasants and their families.” Volodzko asks why a city that would never accept or support, say, statues of Confederate-era leaders somehow feels differently about Lenin.

One might agree with the column or not, but it’s undeniably well-reasoned, insightful, and interesting. Yet it’s a tweet promoting the column that got Volodzko in trouble.

He wrote: “In fact, while Hitler has become the great symbol of evil in history books, he too was less evil than Lenin because Hitler only targeted people he personally believed were harmful to society whereas Lenin targeted even those he himself didn’t believe were harmful in any way.”

Twitter critics pounced. They accused Volodzko of “defending Hitler,” and local media outlets such as the Stranger ran with this narrative . In a follow-up tweet, he clarified: “Hitler was more evil than Lenin if we’re looking at what they did to people and that’s a pretty important metric for assessing evil!”

It didn’t matter. Nor did the fact that Volodzko’s grandfather literally escaped a Nazi concentration camp or the fact that he himself had spent some of his career reporting on the danger and lies of neo-Nazism. One poorly worded tweet, which he later apologized for, and boom, that’s it.

The Seattle Times put out a statement announcing his termination and apologizing for “any pain we have caused our readers, our employees, and our community.”

Give me a break.

Volodzko probably shouldn’t have phrased the tweet the way he did. Yet the general idea he was trying to express, that Vladimir Lenin was an evil, genocidal maniac who should be viewed in the same light as the Adolf Hitlers of history yet isn’t, is not only correct but morally compelling. And to argue that one genocidal dictator was worse than another is not in any meaningful sense a “defense” of either dictator.

What’s more, the idea that anyone out there had “pain” inflicted upon them from an unartful tweet is ludicrous beyond belief. If random historical arguments that come across your timeline that aren’t even directed at you can cause you pain, you need to log off the bird app and go see a therapist, because you lack the emotional resilience of a functioning adult.

This is the worst form of cancel culture. It’s part of a pernicious pattern in which internet mobs sic themselves on a target over one relatively minor transgression and then entirely discount that person in favor of their digital bloodlust. The examples of people who have faced this kind of ruthless cancellation are seemingly endless. And it’s all accomplished … well, absolutely nothing.

Zero Seattle residents’ lives were actually meaningfully improved because Volodzko — who, for whatever it’s worth, is not some conservative but rather a self-described “democratic socialist” — got fired. Zero societal ills were ameliorated.

But the Twitter mob claimed its latest scalp, and its insatiable hunger for “social justice” can now move on to its next target. Those who gleefully participated in Volodzko’s cancellation should pray that they’re not next.

Brad Polumbo ( @Brad_Polumbo ) is an independent journalist, YouTuber , co-founder of BASEDPolitics , and a Washington Examiner contributor.