TikTok star Brooke Schofield is having a moment. Or, at least, she was.
Schofield recently went viral for her series exposing musician Clinton Kane, and she co-hosts one of the most popular podcasts in America, the ironically named Cancelled podcast. But her success has not gone unnoticed, and now haters are digging up dirt from her past to try to “ cancel ” Schofield and knock her down a peg.
The cancel campaign, as is so often the case, is rooted in some old posts from when Schofield was a teenager.
In 2012, when Schofield was 16, she posted that she had “nappier hair this morning than most African Americans.” She also repeatedly used the slur “f*****” to refer to friends in her online posts. She also joked, “What do you call a Mexican baptism? Bean dip.”
In 2013, when Schofield was 17, she referenced the infamous killing of Trayvon Martin: “guarantee if [George] Zimmerman shot a white guy this wouldn’t even be a story. Newsflash this wasn’t a crime of racism it was self defense.”
In 2015, when Schofield was 19, she posted that she “said so many accidentally racist things last night I don’t even know how I made it back to America.”
There are a few others, but you get the idea. These days, Schofield, now 27, is a good liberal who supports the Black Lives Matter movement, but that hasn’t stopped TikToker after TikToker from tarring her as racist and calling for her cancellation over the last week.
Finally, this weekend, Schofield publicly apologized for her posts, saying she was “very sorry” and calling them “horrible.” She explained that because her parents were drug addicts, she was adopted and raised by her grandfather, who was ultraconservative and played Fox News and Rush Limbaugh in their house all day. She said that as a teenager, she was simply parroting the things about the killing of Martin that she had heard from these right-wing media sources.
“That is not how I think [today],” she concluded. “That is not what I believe, and I am 27 years old now. I’ve had so much time to learn and grow and formulate my own opinions, and they are nothing like they were when I was 17, 18 years old.”
Naturally, her TikTok critics accepted her apology. Just kidding. It went over like a fart in church, with many accusing her of weaponizing “white women tears” and doing too much “explaining.” Many commentators said something along the lines of “when I was 16, I still knew racism was wrong.”
It remains to be seen how this will affect Schofield’s long-term career. But we have certainly seen enough to conclude that this cancel campaign is utterly absurd and coming from a dark, toxic place.
First and foremost: Schofield never hurt anyone. The random, racially insensitive posts she put out as a teenager were seen by nearly no one and almost all received zero likes. She was a dumb kid who probably watched too much South Park. There were no “victims,” and no one was harmed by her posts.
Second, no one should be defined for life by the idiotic things said or believed as a teenager. While many of the TikTok witch hunters may have grown up in wealthy liberal families and been taught their anti-racist ABCs from birth, Schofield grew up differently. It is entirely understandable that she had some ignorant views and lacked the perspective to understand how inappropriate some of the things she was saying online were. If anything, it’s a testament to her character that, unlike many, she cast off the views she was raised with and formed her own identity as an independent adult.
More importantly, Schofield is a gossip podcaster. She is not a politician or political figure. She is not a police officer or a judge or someone wielding power over racial minorities and affecting their lives. She is a vapid influencer who makes videos with trending TikTok sounds.
It’s hard to put into words how absurd a notion it is that having been ignorant as a teenager should bar one from hosting a gossip podcast decades later. This perspective, which so many on TikTok have embraced, leaves no room for growth, grace, or redemption. And frankly, it seems transparently motivated by resentment.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
None of the people trying to ruin Schofield’s life right now were her high school classmates or are coming forward about how their lives were actually negatively affected by her, for example. They are a bunch of nobodies who have seen her success in recent months and have decided to make themselves feel better about their own inadequacies by joining a virtual mob and tearing someone else down.
Engaging in this kind of vindictive mob behavior is far, far more embarrassing and disqualifying than having posted insensitive things online more than a decade ago as a high schooler. But there is one small upside: At least now, Schofield has a story that lives up to the name of her podcast.
Brad Polumbo ( @Brad_Polumbo ) is an independent journalist, YouTuber , and co-founder of BASEDPolitics.
Most Popular
Comments / 0