Chaya Raichik, the industrious conservative gadfly who infuriates the Left by posting the most ridiculous and self-indicting TikTok videos by unhinged progressives, definitely has a nasty side. Exposing public figures, celebrities, local officials, scholars, professors, teachers, corporate execs, prominent athletes, “influencers,” Hollywood stars and would-be activists is an admirable (and useful) pursuit—after all, they post the stuff that makes them look ridiculous or sinister and know that what they say gets noticed. Such statements also often demonstrate why they should not continue in their chosen professions. Siccing the social media mob on a typical working American who posts something dumb on Facebook is very different. It is cruel.
Recently Raichik’s Libs of TikTok account has expanded its target range to private Facebook posts that included ugly comments on the near assassination of Donald Trump. (I could point her to some by my Trump-Deranged friends.) “To bad they weren’t a better shooter!!!!!” was the witty if ungrammatical retort Darcy Waldron Pinckney posted on Facebook to her modest number of FB friends. She worked at Home Depot, but not after the influential anti-woke warrior launched her (also misspelled) “quip” into cyberspace hyperdrive. A week ago, Raichik posted a screenshot of Pinckney’s comment with her photo (above) and wrote, “Hi @HomeDepot! Are you aware that you employ people who call for political violence and the ass*ss*nat*on of Presidents? Any comment?”
Sure Home Depot is aware. The company employs typical Americans regardless of race, creed, religion, education level or political sophistication. It also employs alcoholics, drug abusers, domestic abusers, anarchists, communists, and people who can’t name four Presidents—-Home Depot doesn’t care, as long as they do their job. Good. That’s how it should be.
But if an employee’s unwanted publicity brings negative attention on the company, Home Depot can’t tolerate that. It fired Darcy…for a private Facebook post, probably shared with Libs of TikTok by a vicious creep the clerk had foolishly “friended.” Now she’s out of a job.
Reason, which follows LOTT (my sock drawer prevents me from doing so) correctly noted, “Cancel culture comes in different forms. But this is arguably its purest. We’re not talking about someone who wielded considerable influence over society, whether in Hollywood or on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. We aren’t even talking about a public school teacher who said this to a classroom full of students. We are talking about a woman who worked at a big box retail store, whose ability to pay for housing and food is potentially now up in the air for saying something gross on the internet.”
Reason also reveals that Riley Gaines, the courageous college swimmer/activist who has made herself a leading voice against allowing biological men to compete in women’s sports, cheered another example, and even more egregious one, of Raichik gratuitously wounding someone’s life for expressing an obnoxious political opinion. Tony Bendele, a local firefighter, posted of Trump’s brush with death, “Too bad it didn’t hit him square,” on his Facebook page. Again, someone leaked it to Raichik, who posted a screenshot to her Libs of TikTok account. Soon the firefighter was getting hate mail and being harassed.
“Please accept this as my resignation from the firehouse. I can’t do this,” he posted on Facebook.”I have been threatened. My family has been threatened. My friends have been threatened. I have never felt so unsafe in my life….It’s one thing to ruin my life, I accept that. But to put everyone else in danger around me, to shut down everyone’s daily life, this is not ok.”
Gaines, who has decried “cancel culture” as she has been attacked, shunned and punished for her views, tweeted her satisfaction at Bendele’s fate.
Reason flagged the hypocrisy. “It’s ironic that the people leading this mob are some of the same individuals who have repeatedly—and rightly—decried mob justice over the last several years. In some cases, their careers and fame are grounded, at least in part, in that very concept,” it continued in part. “Those on the left just deserve it, the thinking goes, because they’ve used these tactics for years…that is plainly contradictory to the definition of a principle, which is not a principle at all if you decline to apply it when it’s inconvenient. ‘They started it’ is not a justification that has much currency past elementary school.”
Exactly. “Tit for Tat” is one of Donald Trump’s favorite unethical tactics, but that doesn’t make it ethical to adopt the rationalization (#7) to punish regular Americans—okay, okay, in many cases morons—who are undiplomatic or uncivil in expressing their views about him.
Raichek’s a bully as well as an ethics dunce.
Ethics Alarms 
I’m torn on this one. I deplore cancel culture, and wish it were not part of our society. Tit for tat is a lousy rule to live by – an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind. But rules for thee but not for me is also a lousy principle. Equality and fairness do have serious ethical weight. So long as no one on the left experienced the pains of being publicly humiliated and shunned, the left was going to be delighted to pick up that weapon time and again. I’m sad that these people need to learn restraint and circumspection in such a harsh manner. I hope they do learn it, I wish they had learned it before now. They aren’t really public figures, and the punishment far outweighs the crime. But the same should be said of Jack Phillips, who is now in his 12th year of court battles. Friendly but Fair is a defensible tactic. But do unto others as they have done unto you is a pretty lousy rule, too.
Do you remember this?
https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-over-alleged-racist-gesture-says-he-was-cracking-knuckles/2347414/?fbclid=IwAR0vW8kv0b8QwSCPpWdlVjTfIxFtrLRTqtC4VpexK3BtJrTgAFZHFYnNGUU
It all started about two weeks ago near a Black Lives Matter rally in Poway when Emmanuel Cafferty, a San Diego Gas and Electric employee, encountered a stranger on the roadway.
The stranger followed Cafferty and took a picture of him as his arm hung out the window of his company truck.
The picture made the rounds on Twitter accompanied by a claim Cafferty was making a “white power” hand gesture made popular by white supremacists groups.
According to the Anti-Defamation League, the gesture — made by forming a circle with the thumb and index finger, and extending and separating the other three fingers — has been used in recent years by white supremacists to form the letters W and P, but has also long been used as a sign signifying “OK” or approval. Therefore it shouldn’t be assumed to be a white supremacy symbol unless there is other evidence to support those claims, according to the ADL.
Cafferty claims he was just cracking his knuckles.
Soon after the encounter, a supervisor of Cafferty’s told him he was suspended and that further action may be taken after an investigation. A few days later, he says he was fired.
Cafferty maintains he was unaware of the hand gesture until the whole controversy started.
The best course of action in reaction to this is to have a zero-tolerance anti-snitching culture.
Snitching is always wrong.
No exceptions.
Snitches always get stitches.
No exceptions.
This is the only way out of this.
By the way, I wonder why Priya Sridhar 9the author of the article) did not reveal the name and address of the stranger who “followed Cafferty and took a picture of him as his arm hung out the window of his company truck” nor the name and address of Cafferty’s supervisor. Is that not information that the public needs to know?
Game theory shows that tit for tat is optimal only when combined with occasional forgiveness. At some point, forgiveness must run out.
https://x.com/monsterhunter45/status/1814409604471894446
Libs of TT certainly had it’s share of tats, as has Larry above. The indiscriminate retaliation can only lead to unending and escalating feuds though, and the mass ‘us verses them’ tribalism is amplified by the Internet.
I’m having a real tough time with this one. On the one hand, yes, tit for tat is an unethical rationalization. On the other hand, Sir Arthur Harris, commander of RAF Bombing Command during WW2 said it best while the RAF and the US Army Air Force were pulverizing Germany, that the Germans, who had bombed France, the Low Countries, and many other places should logically have expected that they were going to get bombed themselves, as their own tactics were turned against them, and the blitzkrieg boomeranged.
It’s a fact that the left has been calling Republicans Nazis and worse since George W. Bush’s administration. It’s also a fact that the left has been beating the right over the head with accusations of racism since the death of Michael Brown. Things really took off with the Trump administration and BLM, Antifa, and so on started to, among other things, rely on doxing and personal destruction of those they disagreed with. They not only relied on it, they advocated it as a desirable thing, since those they sought to expose were evil and racist and it was good that everyone know that they were evil and racist so they would be exiled and shunned. Many suffered as a result of these tactics, and honestly, no one did a thing to stop it.
Now it looks like all of this is about to boomerang on the left. It shouldn’t come as a surprise if their own tactics are used against them. They justified their tactics by saying it just plain sucks to be a Nazi and a racist. Well, now they’re finding out that it can also suck to be a bully, a thug, an anarchist, and a criminal. They wanted to be the untouchable hanging judges, and now it’s their turn in the dock. It’s not unreasonable for those hurt before to now seek to visit the same hurt on those who harmed them first, and those who were merciless once, should not now seek nor expect mercy.
Harry Truman called Tom Dewey a Nazi.
Harry Truman is damn lucky his mouth didn’t get him in more trouble.
On this one I’m going to say that rank and file Democrats who support the current party leadership and did not raise a word when right-of-center private individuals were being “canceled” are analogous to Palestinians putting Hamas into power. They will be victims in the current round of the culture war until they choose leaders who oppose cancelations on principle, rather than out of convenience. I did not start this conflict, but I know enough people who paid the price for it (including a former Disney employee, doing run of the mill data analysis who used his expertise to question the Covid narrative) that I believe it won’t stop until the side that started it suffers the consequences.
Regarding bombings, it appears that bombing solely to demoralize or avenge doesn’t work. From: https://acoup.blog/2022/10/21/collections-strategic-airpower-101/
Also, when it comes to tit-for-tat, you can’t always expect the target of the “tat”, to go, “Alright, I had it coming, I won’t ask for more trouble.” Just today I read a post from Holly Mathnerd (whom I discovered thanks to our host), where she describes doctoring up a friend who’d gotten beat up in retaliation for beating up a guy that got too handsy with his girlfriend: https://hollymathnerd.substack.com/p/sweet-summer-children
So even if you want to go by sheer utility, straight up retaliation is no guarantee the conflict will be over.
I also remain a bit torn on this one, but she posted it for all to see because she likely hoped it would upset Trump supporters. Some people are naturally vindictive.
I have no issue with publicizing the original post. However, this went over the line when she was accosted at her work. The original comment was not associated with her employer so linking Home Depot with her speech is unethical.
Had Richie simply reposted the FB post it would been only informative about one person’s thinking. What was done was vindictive and designed to inflict harm. I cannot condone such acts.
Bingo.
It’s fair to call someone out for saying something like that. Posting to her employer crosses the line.
Of course the line they’re crossing is the very essence of cancel culture, which makes it unethical in its entirety.
Posting someone speech — it’s an integral part of a free speech culture. This goes beyond.
I hate that he did this to her, but I wonder if this is the only way this behavior ends. If one side can cancel people with impunity and has no fear that the other side can engage in the same conduct because it is ‘unethical’, than unethical wins. When one side can rob and destroy and assault people without consequence…you get NYC, and San Francisco, and LA, and Seattle, and Portland…and the KKK. The Department of Justice was founded by President U.S. Grant because the freed slaves were being robbed and attacked and killed by the KKK and nothing could be done about it because the Democratic police and prosecutors and judges refused. Something had to be done about it and the DOJ was formed. Now, the DOJ is the very thing they were formed to prevent. During the Civil Rights Movement, the civil rights activists were getting the same treatment as they were during Reconstruction, but the DOJ refused to get involved. The activists had to arm themselves and fight back. Numerous members of the KKK were shot while attacking black neighborhoods. If you could zoom out of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s marches, you would find a line of men with rifles protecting the marchers. Only when both sides face consequences can you get civility.