The proximate cause of the latest battle in the Cancel Culture War: Teen Vogue.
Look, I don’t make the rules or decide where the next battle is waged. We don’t live in the world we want, we live in the world we have. I report, we all deride.
And so it is that a new Teen Vogue editor’s old, racist tweets resurfaced a couple of years after she’d already apologized for them, but lost her job anyway. Alexi McCammond was all of 17 when she fired off the offending tweets. Now 10 years later, those tweets are firing her.
There’s a twist in this case. The Teen Vogue staffer who apparently led McCammond’s social media beheading has some past racist tweets of her own. That staffer’s name is Christine Davitt. So that’ll be interesting to watch play out. From the outside, it looks like going after McCammond may have been opportunistic, in which case, if there’s no staffer around who’s as ruthless as those were in going after McCammond, Davitt may be safe. She should watch her six nevertheless. Teen Vogue’s in-house Khmer Rouge may have more on its agenda.
What that says about all things and where we are as a people, let the reader discern.
Parents, it may be worth talking with your kids about the dangers of social media. It’s like turning on a mic that can be heard worldwide, and will never stop playing whatever you say into it. It will echo ten years hence, even 20, providing opportunities to your worst enemies. So is it really worth tweeting that thing that just popped into your head? When the goalposts move by the minute?
Bill Maher took to his Real Time show Friday night and went after cancel culture, calling it “Stalinist” and insisting that we cannot live this way. Watch the clip.
Taking on “woke” demands. @BillMaher says it reminds him of Hollywood’s “blacklists” where now “people go to parties” and “don’t want to talk, they are like ‘can I talk? I don’t know your girlfriend, she might be woke.’” It’s “so Soviet” and “Stalinist.” #RealTime pic.twitter.com/zdHxOEqzdN
— Brent Baker (@BrentHBaker) March 20, 2021
“People, this informant thing, it’s not just what you do but what you don’t report,” Maher said after noting that people at parties don’t feel free to speak freely anymore. “I don’t know your girlfriend, she might be woke,” he said to nervous chuckles. He slammed former Mumford & Sons banjo player Winston Marshall for apologizing after wokes trashed him for liking Andy Ngo’s book about antifa, Antifa Unmasked.
Former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp was on the show with Maher and attempted to blame Republicans. Maher didn’t take the bait. “Yeah, they’re snowflakes, too,” he said, “But they don’t control the media the way these brats do. That’s the problem. I don’t think that it was Republicans who got Alexi.”
Or Marshall, who went from being a rock ‘n roller to having a struggle session on Twitter in the span of a few days.
— Winston Marshall (@MrWinMarshall) March 10, 2021
There was a time, shortly after 9-11, when the left fretted publicly and endlessly that they might end up on some list because of the books they read. Now they’ve put that banjo player out of work for a book he read.
Maher’s comments aren’t a one-off. Just a week prior, he blasted cancel culture and how it’s leaving us vulnerable to China.
“You’re not going to win the battle for the 21st century if you are a silly people. And Americans are a silly people,” Maher stated. “Do you know who doesn’t care that there’s a stereotype of a Chinese man in a Dr. Seuss book? China. All 1.4 billion of them could give a crouching tiger flying f**k.”
“Because they’re not a silly people. If anything, they are as serious as a prison fight,” he explained.
I can’t say I agree with Maher on everything, but that’s really the point. Until recently we were free to disagree about pretty much everything. Now, the cancel mob is just looking for the next career, reputation, and life, and family, to destroy. They really are moral monsters.
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