In an op-ed published Saturday, Fox News contributor and The Hill columnist Joe Concha slammed Teen Vogue staffers and “the social media mob” for forcing the resignation of the magazine’s new editor in chief over tweets she posted as a teen that she later said “perpetuated harmful and racist stereotypes about Asian Americans.”
The backlash against 27-year-old Alexi McCammond started soon after Teen Vogue announced her hiring last month and intensified after a series of spa shootings in Atlanta that left eight dead, including “six women of Asian descent,” according to The New York Times.
Concha, for his part, argued that most people had written insensitive or inflammatory things when they were teenagers, because teens are still figuring out what they think and believe.
“Perhaps you were in high school when social media didn’t exist or was in its infancy, so there is no record of your rhetorical or written ‘crime’ and, therefore, no ramifications,” the columnist wrote for The Hill. “But an African American journalist named Alexi McCammond didn’t have that luxury.”
Apologies aren’t good enough
McCammond had already apologized for the tweets in question, which included one expressing anger at an Asian teacher assistant who gave her a low grade without explaining what she did wrong on an assignment, according to the U.K.’s Independent. Another tweet reportedly read: “Now Googling how to not wake up with swollen, Asian eyes…”
Before her resignation, she apologized again. But as Concha noted, it just wasn’t good enough to satisfy the “woke” mob.
“[H]ere’s the most amazing part: The tweets in question were broached by McCammond proactively when interviewing for the Teen Vogue job. The powers that be told her they wouldn’t be an issue,” he wrote Saturday. “But the powers that be at many news organizations and publications no longer are powerful. It’s the woke staffers who run the asylums now.”
“The mob won”
Concha also recalled the firing of New York Times reporter Donald McNeil, Jr., a 45-year veteran of the paper who experienced a similar fate after it came to light that he had repeated a racial slur back “to a student who asked him a question about it while attempting to understand the context.”
“The Times‘s executive editor, Dean Baquet, originally ruled in favor of McNeil, arguing that the reporter hadn’t used the slur with any intentions that ‘were hateful or malicious.’ That should have been the end of it — but it wasn’t,” Concha wrote Saturday.
“More than 150 woke staffers at the Times wanted his scalp, regardless of his more than four decades at the paper or the context or intent of his words. Said staffers sent a scathing letter about Baquet to the newspaper’s publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, who ruled that McNeil had to go,” Concha said. “The mob won.”
A bumpy ride
Indeed, it’s become clear that no one really cares about anyone’s intent or context anymore. If you violate social norms, you risk angering the mob and having your reputation destroyed until you are finally fired or forced to resign.
To put an end to this cancel culture nonsense, it’s going to take some editors and producers with the courage to stand up to the woke mobs and their stranglehold on pop culture. Until then, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
The post Columnist rips ‘social media mob’ following Teen Vogue editor’s ouster first appeared on Conservative Institute.
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