How "cancel culture" changed these three lives forever

Try to make it look like an accident so my children wouldn't have that shame, but at least they'd have the money back and take me — the failure, the mistake — out of the equation." About two years after Smith's video went viral, his family qualified for food stamps. "I felt very fueled by my emotions at this time, and I used them to focus on getting Adam Rapoport fired as editor-in-chief of Bon Appétit."So she tweeted out the screenshot of Rapoport in "brownface." Within hours, he resigned, acknowledging that the costume was "extremely ill-conceived" and admitting that he'd had "blind spots as an editor."Some held him up as a high-profile victim of cancel culture. In the New York Post, Kevin Williamson wrote about it in an opinion piece titled "Social justice warriors are waging a dangerous 'Cancel Cultural Revolution'." But Teclemariam disputes that view."I think that when any social justice movement develops a very easy moniker, it helps other people deride that movement or diminish that movement," Teclemariam says. "I would be impossible for me to pursue a real job opportunity, something that would give me enough money to actually have a life or start a family or think about anything bigger than just paying my rent if these people are still in power." Since tweeting out the photo, Teclemariam has gained more than 13,000 followers on Twitter and has continued to use her platform to hold powerful people in food media to account. I didn't know her personally, but I saw the mob just converge upon her."Sixteen days after Templar's blog post, Tusken released a YouTube video condemning the calling out of Templer. "After a couple of days, these people online, the mob that went after Karen came after me."Some who felt the knitting community needed to reckon with its racist tendencies pointed to her video as an example of "white fragility." Tusken began to receive messages denouncing her; she was called a Nazi and a white supremacist. She released a new collection of yarn called "Polarized Knits" that poked fun at political correctness and cancel culture, with products named after terminology she'd heard during the controversy: "Gaslight," "Virtue Signaling," "Othering," "Wrong-Think."Tusken's new yarn collection began to attract attention and garnered support from fellow critics of the social justice movement. "I felt like I was being proactive and just trying to make light of what these people had done to me and to others."Despite the challenges that followed, she isn't sorry she took her stand."I didn't apologize for anything, and I think that's what you have to do to fight this, because if you apologize like Karen Templer did, now she is sort of owned by them.