A Culture Cold War?
Unpacking the post-woke world
A 2010s-style controversy recently erupted online, if in the reverse: a right-wing activist, by digging up old tweets, hoped to embarrass and cancel a left-wing writer. Christopher Rufo, who’s risen to prominence battling DEI initiatives and aiming to unravel the post-1960s consensus around civil rights law, unearthed posts New Yorker writer Doreen St. Felix had made in her early twenties, before she joined the magazine. The St. Felix tweets, from 2014, referred to white men as “the worst.” She told them to “go nurse your f–king Oedipal complexes and leave the earth to the browns and the women.” In another post, she simply stated “I hate white men.” She also wrote she would be “heartbroken if I had kids with a white guy” and referred to “the holocaust gesture,” writing that “it’s tricknological, when white people invoke the holocaust” because it “allows them to step out of their whiteness and slip on fake oppression.” Rufo shared these deleted screenshots to shame St. Felix for writing an essay in the New Yorker critical of the Sydney Sweeney American Eagle campaign, which has come under fire for its effective nod to eugenics.
The controversies themselves—the Sweeney ads, the nature of St. Felix’s old tweets—are all rather enervating and pointless, a great deal of shouting into various voids. The most interesting aspect of them is how meager, for both liberals and conservatives, the victories might have been. Those who decried Sweeney and American Eagle found they were unable to cause any reputational harm to either. Sweeney is more famous than ever, and American Eagle stock has remained strong. She is now, perhaps, the most bankable Hollywood star under thirty, and this culture war clash will only enhance her in the eyes of producers who are hungry for a genuine A-lister to front their next project. At the same time, Rufo—who is used to bending liberal institutions—failed miserably in his quest to cause damage to St. Felix and the New Yorker. The staff writer was not fired or even publicly reprimanded. David Remnick, the white male editor who hired St. Felix, said nothing. Twitter, now X, was a cauldron for a few days and now most people have moved on. For the conservative activist, this might be a bit disorienting: a 2010s playbook, executed in Trump’s America, was supposed to work. But it did not.
That’s because we may be entering a Culture Cold War.