It’s over. It’s really over. After a week of dominating the internet, bringing glory back to the white Vans, and even capturing the heart of Ellen, ‘Damn, Daniel’ has gone from fun meme to viral sensation to painful wreck we need to let die so that the teens at the center of it can go back to living normal lives. Sure, the marriage proposals and lifetime supplies of shoes are nice, but Josh Holz — the video’s creator — has also been subject to some pretty awful things.
First, his house was swatted, and now racist hackers have taken over his Twitter, deleted the original video he posted (don’t worry, you can still see it up top!) and then sent out messages of hatred to his legions of followers (more than 160,000), inundating them with all sorts of hate speech. Holz, who got some flack from followers thinking that he was the one posting the awful messages, apologized to everyone as soon as he got his account back, tweeting that there are some sick people out in the world.
got my account back. they're are some really sick people out there and I'm sorry you guys had to see all that.
— J O S H (@Josholzz) February 29, 2016
Unfortunately, there are some things not even an apology can fix, like the original video being deleted from the account. Holz is trying to start a trend with a #getthevideoback hashtag, but it’s unlikely that he and Daniel are going to go viral a second time, so it’s probably time to let this dream go.
— J O S H (@Josholzz) February 29, 2016
Daniel himself, by the way, hasn’t tweeted for days, probably due to the fact that as mentioned previously, he looks like he’s just about done being a footnote in Internet history.