Once the must-read print magazines for then-middle school millennial girls, Teen Vogue has long been a shadow of its former self. Glossy print spreads boasting Marc Jacobs and Betsey Johnson merchandise for the (upper-middle class) younger set have been replaced by angry drivel lambasting capitalism and Israel and teaching “How To Masturbate If You Have a Penis.” What used to be a print magazine catering to actual teenage girls with flirting and fashion tips now clearly desires to be an ethno-Marxist manifesto for bitter, unwed thirty-somethings living with two roommates and a cat in Bushwick.
So it should come as no surprise that Condé Nast’s latest attempt to boost both the blog’s brand and woke credentials backfired spectacularly, with an experienced black political reporter ousted by a staff mob in the name of racial correctness.
Teen Vogue‘s complete pivot into political screeds was succinctly signposted by its final print issue, a 2017 finale guest-edited by Hillary Clinton. Given that the blog hasn’t pretended to care about anything related to fun or fashion in some time now, and that actual teenagers comprise just about 5% of its readership, it would make sense to hand the reins to an actual political reporter, in this case, Alexi McCammond. The former Axios reporter was put into a bit of a bind by her boyfriend, since-ousted Biden official TJ Ducklo, who sexually harassed another journalist investigating the then-undisclosed relationship between Ducklo and McCammond. The conflict of interest and ensuing scandal from Ducklo’s actions made McCammond’s role at Axios seemingly untenable, providing Condé Nast an easy opportunity to poach her to become Teen Vogue‘s new editor in chief.
And as happens in too many of our increasingly stupid media sagas, the mob immediately moved to cancel McCammond for old, bad tweets.
The bad tweets in question include obviously racist stereotypes about Asians and homophobic slurs. McCammond, who is black, also evidently wrote them a decade ago, when she was presumably a 17- or 18-year-old high school student. She had already apologized for them in 2019, and in her adult life, there hasn’t been any other allegation that McCammond engaged in or expressed racism, homophobia, or any other kind of bigotry.
And yet, more than 20 staffers at Teen Vogue called for her ouster before McCammond even began the job. In less than a month, she announced that she “decided to part ways with Condé Nast.”
Yeah right.
I can’t claim to know McCammond’s work too well, and based on Ducklo’s horribly sexist treatment of a female journalist doing her job, I can’t say much about her taste in men. But if Teen Vogue, given its likely limited resources amid its terrible traffic and editorial performance, wants to commit to its position as a political site, McCammond seems like the sort of young, proven journalist you would want to up the ante for actual reporting and analysis.
But canceling people for decade-old tweets comes to woke mobs as involuntarily as breathing or sleeping. It’s a fundamentally unserious reflex, and if Teen Vogue staffers really wanted to prove they weren’t problematic, they’d quit their classist company and stop enriching the outfit that represents everything they claim to stand against.
If you really believe that wealth inequality is the bane of our existence, racism the scourge of the Earth, the gender binary an “archaic” social construct, fur the antithesis of “sustainable” fashion, and all of these relics of elitism are all intertwined in the dogma of intersectionality, then you cannot possibly work at Teen Vogue in good conscience.
Consider that few people on the planet are more responsible for transitioning and empowering the American aristocracy into the 21st century than Anna Wintour, the global chief content officer of Condé Nast, who oversaw the creation of Teen Vogue. A trust fund baby from a landed gentry family, Wintour was placed in a journalism job first by her father, despite never actually being a reporter or a writer. In her post at Vogue, she (reportedly) has kept black models off of fashion’s most important cover and black journalists out of her newsroom. She famously refuses to hire fat people and single-handedly revived the fur industry.
Wintour, worth some $50 million, doesn’t just specifically cater exclusively to wealthy women in her magazine, where her staff has notoriously balked at her refusal to platform normal working women in news stories. She also runs the increasingly gaudy gathering of the Met Gala. If Condé Nast really cared about the values it espoused in Teen Vogue, wouldn’t the tens of millions of dollars accrued by the Met Gala each year go to New York City’s schools or homeless population rather than the Costume Institute at the Met, which already has an endowment of $3 billion and receives tens of millions in taxpayer funding?
The mob’s cancellation of McCammond is obviously a microcosm of the tragedy of illiberalism, and she surely deserves solidarity against the wokes. But just as importantly, her fate illustrates the fundamental unseriousness of the keyboard warriors attempting to hold our culture hostage. It’s easy to make a 27-year-old black woman a scapegoat to prove how woke you are. But if these staffers believed in one word of what they preached, they would quit their disgrace of a blog.
