The Washington Post has opened a new front in the cancel culture wars, escalating an already toxic conflict into something far more sinister and dangerous.
On Wednesday, the newspaper participated directly in the ritual shaming of a private citizen when it published a double-bylined, 3,000-plus-word investigation detailing a 2-year-old incident involving a Halloween party and a tasteless costume.
You read all of that correctly.
In 2018, a middle-aged white woman named Sue Schafer attended a costume party thrown by Washington Post cartoonist Tom Toles. Schafer dressed in blackface and wore a name tag that said, “Hello, My Name is Megyn Kelly.” She explained to fellow partygoers, as she explains now, that her ill-advised get-up was supposed to be a dig at Kelly, who landed in hot water at the time for saying of blackface, “When I was a kid, that was OK, as long as you were dressing up as, like, a character.”
The costume caused a commotion, including a heated confrontation between Schafer, who is, by all accounts, an ardent liberal, and another attendee named Lexie Gruber. The blackface episode remained a private affair until now, when Gruber, who is of Puerto Rican descent, decided in the wake of the George Floyd protests to destroy Schafer for what she did that evening in 2018. In her campaign to annihilate this problematic white woman, Gruber enlisted the aid of the Washington Post. She did this simply by informing the newspaper, and Toles specifically, that they were going to assist or suffer the consequences. Amazingly, the Washington Post, one of the most powerful news media institutions in the world, owned by literally the wealthiest man in the world, acquiesced to Gruber’s threats.
You have to read the newspaper’s own account of it to believe it. Pay particularly close attention to Gruber’s manipulative language. She comes across more like an abusive husband than a warrior for social justice:
“In 2018, I attended a Halloween party at your home,” she wrote. “I understand that you are not responsible for the behavior of your guests, but at the party, a woman was in Blackface. She harassed me and my friend — the only two women of color — and it was clear she made her ‘costume’ with racist intent.”
Gruber, a 27-year-old management consultant, told Toles that the incident had “weighed heavily on my heart — it was abhorrent and egregious.” She asked him to help her identify the woman.
“After the killing of George Floyd and the protests, I began reflecting more on this incident,” Gruber said in an email seeking Post coverage of the incident.
“I wanted to know who this woman is. . . . What impact does she have on society? I think this is an important story — that a party full of prominent people in Washington welcomed a person in blackface, danced and drank with her, and watched in silence as she harassed two young women of color.”
[…]
But Toles did not give Gruber the woman’s name, and Gruber reacted sharply: “Hiding her name is a deliberate act of white privilege and cowardice, not friendship.”
In response, Toles offered to connect Gruber with Schafer, who he said wanted “a chance to explain and apologize to you herself.”
Gruber replied that she has “a hard time believing that you are genuine in remorse. . . . I do not feel comfortable reaching out to a woman who publicly harassed me and my friend — simply because we are not white. This happened in public — and so I want a public apology, not a private one.”
She told Toles that he was not innocent in the conflict: “As you well know,” Gruber wrote, “we are an extension of the company we keep.”
The Washington Post on Wednesday published its investigation of the Halloween incident, complete with a glossy photoshoot of Gruber and a fellow anti-problematic crusader, bringing to the attention of its millions of readers an episode involving a woman whom you have never heard of, who has apologized repeatedly for what she did, and a distasteful costume worn at a private party two years ago.
On Wednesday, just before the Washington Post exposed Schafer for her alleged crimes, she notified her employer of the forthcoming news report and its content.
Schafer said she was fired shortly thereafter.
It is worth noting that the Washington Post is the same newspaper that absolved Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam of wrongdoing last year after it was revealed he attended a party in medical school dressed either in blackface or Ku Klux Klan robes (the fact that we still do not know whether he was the one in shoe polish or Klan regalia is just one of the many bizarre elements to the since-fizzled Northam scandal). This same newspaper is now responsible for the reputational destruction of a private citizen over something that happened at a private event in 2018 — and all of this even after she offered apologies that have been far more convincing than anything Northam has ever said.
This is toxic. This stuff is poison for our country, and the Washington Post is going right along with it, likely operating under the delusion that collecting the occasional problematic scalp will protect it from the mob’s wrath.
The cancel culture wars have, for the most part, been fought on social media. They have been waged mostly by small bands of activists, who use their collective influence on social media to whip up mobs against problematic athletes, actors, and even complete nobodies. But by underwriting Gruber’s personal campaign to “cancel” Schafer, the Washington Post, one of the most powerful news operations in the country, has introduced heavy artillery into a conflict whose devastation was at least somewhat limited to smaller, less destructive methods. The Washington Post this week moved the cancel wars off social media and directly into the mainstream, the equivalent of introducing nuclear weapons into a war fought on horseback.
Gruber’s threats should have been rebuffed. The Washington Post article never should have been published. Everyone involved in its creation, most especially Gruber, comes away from this episode looking malicious, if not outright evil. The only possible upside to this sad, sorry affair is that it may so shock and disgust the general public that no news outlet will ever again participate in this type of behavior. But that seems unlikely.
Like Maximilien Robespierre, the Jacobins of the 21st century have their hands on both the printing press and the guillotine.
