Teen Vogue, victimhood Top Trumps and the coming race war 

Just two weeks ago, Alexi McCammond was wheeled out as the new editor-in-chief of Teen Vogue, which uses the brand of a teenage fashion magazine to sell Bolshevism and anal sex (please don’t click that) to unmarried 30-year-old white women.

Now, McCammond has been laid low before she could even begin. She fell prey to one of the sorriest Twitter cancellations on record, with enemies highlighting tweets she made a full decade ago as a college freshman.

‘Give me a 2/10 on my chem problem, cross out all of my work and don’t explain what I did wrong…thanks a lot stupid Asian T.A. you’re great,’ said one tweet.

‘Googling how to not wake up with swollen Asian eyes,’ said another. There were a few other archaic remarks of the ‘that’s gay’ variety, and… that’s it! Cockburn was badly hoping for something much worse, but it was not to be. Previously, the press canceled public figures for being shockingly hilarious. Now, it cancels them for being mundane.

McCammond had already apologized for her tweets in 2019, but Infatuation editor Diana Tsui explained this was no defense at all. McCammond did not self-incriminate herself and then admit wrongdoing in a public struggle session. Instead she merely apologized after being reminded of the tweets. Not only that, but she described her tweets as ‘deeply insensitive’ instead of ‘racist.’ She may as well be Goebbels.

Condé Nast initially stood by McCammond, but Teen Vogue staff are nothing if not a collection of Mean Girls, and they rebelled by publishing a letter of protest. Nast then lost a seven-figure ad campaign with cosmetics retailer Ulta, and that was that.

At first glance, this might just seem like another bog-standard cancellation, the kind we’ve seen dozens of in the past 10 months.

But that glance is wrong. This cancellation is far more interesting.

Why? Because Alexi McCammond is black, and just got successfully canceled by aggrieved Asians. That’s against the rules! In the Woke Era, all people may be equal, but some are more equal than others, and they can be organized into a rigid hierarchy based on how oppressed they are. That’s why we must endure the ‘BIPOC’ neologism, meaning ‘Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.’ Because blacks and Amerindians are higher on the oppression totem pole, they do not want their more oppressed (thus more noble) blood commingling with mere Hispanics and Asians.

This so-called ‘progressive stack’ dominates progressive politics in America. The only way to ascend the victimhood hierarchy is to acquire more victimhood. Some invent American Indian heritage. Others pretend to be black. For affluent Anglos, the only viable path is to come out as gay, or trans, or mentally ill, and Teen Vogue readers do all three with gusto.

Sometimes, there have been skirmishes about the exact ordering of the stack. Who wins, gay men or straight women? Muslims or blacks? Are the transgender on top, or only when they are trans women of color? These Victimhood Top Trumps battles are common. But McCammond’s fall was very different. Nobody on the left puts Asians above blacks in the Oppression Olympics. In the past, McCammond’s predicament would have ended with a horde of progressives swooping in to explain that her tweets were simply a frustrated cry against the Asian community’s historical failure to show solidarity with the Black Community blah blah blah blah. This time, nobody swooped in.

What changed? Cockburn has a guess. For years, multiculturalism has been able to extract enough prizes to keep everyone happy just by prying jobs, money, and status from acceptable targets like stale pale males. As long as everybody got a cut, it wasn’t so bad if blacks went first and Asians last. But now, the easy forage has been exhausted. The progressive groups must compete with one another directly for elite magazine jobs and grievance-based handouts. And so they will compete, and the competition will be vicious.

The ruination of McCammond, then, is a frightful glimpse at where multicultural America is headed. Progressives imagined the future as a blended quilt of minorities united around a shared antipathy for déclassé whites. Instead, it will be a Hobbesian race war of all against all.