Actual Soldier Responds To Gwyneth Paltrow's Foot-In-Mouth Comment. And He's Not Happy

Gwyneth Paltrow’s recent talk at a tech conference earlier in the week might have been completely well meaning, but it resulted in one of the biggest PR blunders of the year so far. When Paltrow compared coming across online hate to the experience of being at war, you can bet a whole lot of people were offended. A quote from Paltrow’s talk, as published by Page Six, goes: “You come across [online comments] about yourself and about your friends, and it’s a very dehumanizing thing … It’s almost like how, in war, you go through this bloody, dehumanizing thing, and then something is defined out of it.”

It’s easy to see why people would question this – particularly people, who have actually served in the military and actually fought in real-life wars. One of Paltrow’s most vocal critics was Sergeant First Class Bryan Sikes, who suffered a broken neck and back in a 2008 IED explosion in Afghanistan. Here are some choice quotes from Sikes’ scathing critique, published on The Clash Daily: “I can only imagine the difficulty of waking up in a 12,000 square foot Hollywood home and having your assistant retrieve your iPhone, only to see that the battery is low and someone on twitter (the social media concept that you and all of your friends contribute to on an hourly basis to feed your ego and narcissistic ways), has written a mean word or 2 about you. You’ve hit the nail on the head, war is exactly like that. You should receive a medal for the burden you have carried on your shoulders due to these meanies on social media.”