If it’s true that Macy’s is dropping Chrissy Teigen’s cookware line over 10-year-old tweets for which she’s apologized, that meets the definition of “cancel culture.” Does that mean she deserves to be saved? No. Teigen is being asked to live by the standards she helped set.
Let us not forget, Teigen’s cultural leftist social “justice” ideology is crucial to her brand, earning her uncritical and fawning media coverage that made the Chrissy Teigen brand higher profile and more attractive to companies like Macy’s. She made money off being woke and attacking our social fabric.
According to the Daily Mail, “Chrissy Teigen’s Cravings kitchen line of cookware has been dumped from retail giant Macy’s website after she admitted she bullied Courtney Stodden when she was just a teen. Teigen, 35, has come under fire over the past several days, after tweets in which she told a then 16-year-old Stodden, now 26, to take their own life, resurfaced.”
Here’s more:
In 2011, Teigen published a barrage of tweets telling then-16-year-old Stodden to ‘go to sleep forever.’
Stodden said this was only part of the picture, saying Teigen would also ‘privately DM me and tell me to kill myself.’
Teigen responded last Wednesday posting a lengthy apology on Twitter saying she was ‘mortified’ by her past behavior and had tried to reach out to Stodden to apologize.
Stodden claims Teigen did not privately apologize for her bizarrely aggressive bullying of a teenager. None of this is the least bit surprising. Teigen’s obnoxious conduct has been on full display on Twitter for a decade.
The principle of yanking deals over bad 10-year-old tweets is wrong. When corporations and celebrities make these decisions, they enhance cultural norms that affect people with less power and money than John Legend’s wife. Those norms include the standard that apologies and grace are insufficient. They also include the standard that brief news cycles induced by social media mobs are bad for business. Both are wrong and dangerous.
Macy’s move, in this case, will empower those destructive cultural norms. I think the principle is deeply wrong, but Teigen should be happy to live by her own bad standards, which, again, helped make her a lot of money and power. Supporting — perhaps even enjoying — the attempted cancelation of Teigen is not the same as supporting cancel culture more broadly since the sad reality is that elites will only revoke their own support for these bad standards when they affect elites.
What’s both much more outrageous and interesting is actually Macy’s decision to work with Teigen in the first place. She’s a sanctimonious political extremist, hypocrite, and a frequent jerk who appeals to the small slice of cultural leftist America that populates coastal newsrooms.
Even from a business perspective, she’s polarizing. But the media’s extreme cultural leftism warps our country’s self-image to the point where businesses and the broader public don’t recognize each other. Further, the niche-ification of our economy and culture means that the slice of the public that inexplicably finds Teigen appealing can exert outsize power over corporations and media outlets.
Shed no tears for Chrissy Teigen. She did this to herself. Worse yet, she did this to our culture.
