WHY IS ELLIE KEMPER BEING TARGETED?
What’s really afoot here? You know just as well as Cockburn does. Kemper is being targeted for being cute, white, cheerful and popular in a period where those four facts in combination cause severe stress to America’s most mentally unbalanced individuals, who inexplicably hold power in direct proportion to how deranged they are. Even worse, Kemper has shunned politics throughout her career. Like so many others, she is being punished for not being a time traveler and not spending her entire life anticipating this particular moment of political fanaticism in America.
Of course, nobody is vilifying Kemper for attending Princeton University, even though it was segregated until the 1940s and to this day is far more a bastion of privilege than any Midwestern civic organization could be. Why? Precisely because Princeton is so bound up with the American elite that it entirely reflects its current values and obsessions.
But perhaps it’s only a matter of time. Ultimately, what traumatizes the mob most is the simple fact that America existed prior to 2012 — and despite its flaws was quite successful. The best way to eradicate the uncomfortable thoughts that fact creates is to simply obliterate history completely. It’s why statues are coming down and buildings are being renamed. It’s why the Constitution itself is a target. Who knows what innovations might come next? Why denounce a Southern debutante ball when you can denounce the South entirely? Maybe all Southerners could be canceled for living on former Confederate land?
But even that won’t be enough. In the long run, the woke mob is a death cult. Their hatred is not a rational response, but a manifestation of internal misery. And that is why Cockburn badly hopes Kemper’s agents don’t strong-arm her into a fake apology and mea culpa, or even worse, a genuine one. Because the mob doesn’t want Ellie Kemper to apologize. They want her to go away and die.
While it was “an article by Scott Beauchamp that started the whole canceling of Ellie Kemper (yes, that Scott Beauchamp),” Twitter’s role in pouring gasoline on the fire shouldn’t be ignored: Ellie Kemper and Twitter’s Two Minutes Hate.
What matters is not the details of these stories, the illiterate idiot’s game of internet telephone by which a normal American woman is suddenly accused of having been a ‘KKK princess’. What matters is the familiar shape they take and the familiar source from whence they spring.
What matters is the Twitter sidebar.
Every Twitter user who visits the website is greeted by a list of links, which appear in a sidebar under the headline, ‘What’s happening’. The items on the list are a mixed bag of paid promotions, viral fodder and hot-button politics or pop-culture topics — but what’s important is that they are curated by Twitter independently of what’s actually trending on the website. (For instance: as I’m writing this article, the most-discussed Twitter topics in the NYC Metro area, according to a third-party aggregator, are the LA Lakers, a bunch of banal motivational hashtags like #wednesdaywisdom and #humpday and the recent FOIA release of Anthony Fauci’s emails. Meanwhile, my ‘What’s happening’ sidebar is the Fauci emails, a link to an interview with Kate Winslet, and ‘Tucker’, because someone with a significant following on Media Twitter is mad at Tucker Carlson. Again.) ‘What’s happening’ in your sidebar is not, for the most part, what is actually happening on Twitter. It’s more like what Twitter wants to make happen, by making you curious enough to click.
Exit quote: “Orwellian dystopian analogies come pretty cheap these days, but this one is too obvious not to point out — only instead of Two Minutes Hate, it’s a 24-hour buffet. Twitter’s sidebar points to people who have been declared fair game for punching and the mob gleefully piles on. It’s not just that these stories are born on the website; it’s that Twitter actively nurtures them, promotes them and throws their scapegoats to the wolves.”
