As a person who likes joking around on the internet, I’ve long since grown used to being targeted for cancellation by humorless outrage junkies from left and right alike. There was the time the entire Democratic establishment called for my head after I compared Joe Biden to a bowl of gruel, or the time MAGA came for me over a meat loaf joke—or the time, just last week, when a bunch of very serious media figures tried to cancel me for racism. My crime: poking a tiny bit of fun at a fellow journalist’s obsequious praise of the latest Ta-Nehisi Coates essay, which was decidedly not his best work, and which I suspect he wrote in a bit of a hurry.
I won’t trouble you with further details because they’re both ridiculous and unimportant. And for the most part, these pile ons always play out the same way: The outrage lasts a day or two, and while it does, it’s rarely worth engaging with. But in the midst of this latest one, something unusual happened. A prolific journalist named Hamilton Cain—who I have never met nor interacted with—publicly announced that he was privy to some truly salacious information about my alleged racist proclivities, courtesy of my most trusted colleagues and family friends.
“I’m friends with her editor and one of my former publishing colleagues is best friends with her mother—dang, the stories I’ve heard,” he wrote on X. “Blech, racist af.”
