When Kim Kardashian West first burst out of the D-list as Paris Hilton’s assistant to an inexplicably popular reality television star, critics derided her as “famous for being famous.” In a little more than a decade, she went from a no-name Angelino with a leaked sex tape to a multimillionaire running a media and makeup empire, the muse of one of the most influential artists of our time. She’s even become a criminal justice advocate, using her access to President Trump to pass the most groundbreaking criminal justice reform in generations.
As Kim herself once quipped, “not bad for a girl with no talent.”
The joke, of course, is that perhaps like the president himself, Kardashian West’s talents aren’t easily quantifiable, but her understanding of branding, entertainment, artistry, and now a specific skill-set of criminal justice activism, is extremely valuable. Love her or hate her, there’s a market for whatever it is that she’s serving.
Many people seem inexplicably famous at first, but those without much there under the surface tend to fade into obscurity. The Beto O’Rourkes of the world can only fail upward for so long before people realize he was only palatable in a Senate election because his opponent was Sen. Ted Cruz. His political career dies not with a bang, but with increasingly desperate messaging and single digit presidential polling. To the hacks, social media giveth, and to the hacks, social media taketh away.
Seeing her 15 minutes coming to an end is another hack, Lauren Duca. If you’re over the age of 45, that name probably rings a bell because Tucker Carlson murdered her on live television. If you’re younger, it’s because BuzzFeed reporter Scaachi Koul did it again online.
In a piece meant to profile Duca in advance of the release of her book, Start a Revolution: Young People and the Future of American Politics, Koul broke the news that Duca faced a series of formal complaints from the students of her New York University class on “feminist journalism.” The alleged offenses included her targeting an ESL student, discussing her personal life in inappropriate detail, and taking 45-minute breaks during the class. The entitlement described both by Duca’s students and demonstrated in her demands of Koul was par for the course for anyone who’s followed her relatively short career, but to have Koul reveal it in a succinct and objective news feature, rather than Tucker Carlson goading her into a public meltdown, stoked the widespread mockery of the internet.
Some even fear that Duca’s being preemptively and unfairly “canceled.”
I immediately got blocked by Maza when I asked him about this in the replies, but this nicely sums things up: “This behavior is psychologically traumatizing, and I am in favor of it as long as the target is deemed Bad by me.”
Maza is far from the only person who thinks this! pic.twitter.com/ivkQ2s1aqY
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) September 19, 2019
Yes, people like Carlos Maza — who appears to have lost his Vox job over attacking political adversaries — promulgate a dangerous wave of so-called cancel culture that threatens civic order. The practice of digging into people’s past with the sole intention of using their worst faux pas to destroy them dissuades all but the most shameless and deplorable from entering public life, and refusing to allow people to evolve and grow and improve encourages the worst of them to double down on whatever position is at fault.
But Duca’s not being canceled here. She’s just not very bright, and it’s not unfair to point it out.
Duca’s first adult job was at the Huffington Post, where she was seemingly ousted after repeatedly harassing her co-workers online, both publicly and via email. While subsequently freelancing, she wrote one blog post for Teen Vogue, “Donald Trump is Gaslighting America,” which won the praise of #Resistance Twitter, and then kept a column with deep reads like “Fox News is Undermining American Democracy” and “Sean Spicer’s Emmys Cameo Wasn’t a Joke — It’s Dangerous.”
In the past year, Duca’s bylines at other outlets have waned and at Teen Vogue, they’ve fully ended. She then had her NYU class, which presumably won’t be renewed — she dismissed her students’ complaints with the defense that “It’s okay if I’m not a great teacher because I’m great at lots of other things.” Now she has her book, which, as Koul notes, manages to be both overly simplistic and riddled with factual errors.
There are thousands of 20-something journalists vying for coveted bylines and readership. Thoughtful liberals can flourish in the age of Trump in the opinion sphere, and as much as conservatives can mock cable news pearl-clutching over the president, real reporters have uncovered vital stories throughout the administration.
Thing is, Duca fits neither of these categories.
The BuzzFeed article didn’t trend on Twitter because if focused on Duca’s bad tweets from half a decade ago. It went viral because it exposed the vapid, Twitter troll-fueled rise of someone with no talent. You don’t have to be a partisan to see that. The very left-wing Elizabeth Bruenig is just a few months older than Duca and a Pulitzer-nominated Washington Post commentator. For better or for worse, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hustled at Duca’s age and became a United States congresswoman. The original “famous for being famous” celebrity, Kim Kardashian West, has literally freed people from prison.
As an author writing about “How To Start a Revolution” from her Brooklyn apartment, what has Lauren Duca ever done?
There’s a greater societal question about the institutions that legitimized someone of so little intellectual depth in the first place, but the gripe posted by Maza requires this explanation. It doesn’t count as “getting canceled” if you lose your audience just because they finally come around and realize you weren’t worth the attention in the first place.
