Why is Ellie Kemper being targeted? 

Comedienne Ellie Kemper is in trouble! What for? Well, it’s a bit hard to understand. Let Cockburn go and take a couple of hours to figure it out.

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OK, Cockburn is back — and more confused than ever. Apparently, Kemper, 41, is in trouble because she won a local St Louis beauty pageant 22 years ago, when she was 19. Why is that bad? The pageant was the Veiled Prophet Ball, put on by the Veiled Prophet Organization of St Louis. OK — and why is that bad? Well, the Veiled Prophet Organization was founded by white people, and didn’t admit black members until the 1970s. Also, sometimes its members dress in goofy outfits befitting organizations founded in the 1800s.

And that’s it! Kemper won a beauty pageant put on by a group that racially integrated before she was even born. If that’s a calamity, then the same criticism applies to the Miss America pageant, which was segregated until the 1950s. But the wolves smell blood. A self-identified ‘woo-woo sister’ described Kemper as a ‘KKK princess’.

Ellie Kemper the actress who played Erin Hannon on The Office and starred in The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt has been outed as a KKK Princess. pic.twitter.com/NPsuLIuyDi

— Chômeuse (@HereIsMySpout) May 31, 2021

What’s really afoot here? You know just as well as Cockburn does. Kemper is being targeted for being cute, white, cheerful and popular in a period where those four facts in combination cause severe stress to America’s most mentally unbalanced individuals, who inexplicably hold power in direct proportion to how deranged they are. Even worse, Kemper has shunned politics throughout her career. Like so many others, she is being punished for not being a time traveler and not spending her entire life anticipating this particular moment of political fanaticism in America.

Of course, nobody is vilifying Kemper for attending Princeton University, even though it was segregated until the 1940s and to this day is far more a bastion of privilege than any Midwestern civic organization could be. Why? Precisely because Princeton is so bound up with the American elite that it entirely reflects its current values and obsessions.

But perhaps it’s only a matter of time. Ultimately, what traumatizes the mob most is the simple fact that America existed prior to 2012 — and despite its flaws was quite successful. The best way to eradicate the uncomfortable thoughts that fact creates is to simply obliterate history completely. It’s why statues are coming down and buildings are being renamed. It’s why the Constitution itself is a target. Who knows what innovations might come next? Why denounce a Southern debutante ball when you can denounce the South entirely? Maybe all Southerners could be canceled for living on former Confederate land?

But even that won’t be enough. In the long run, the woke mob is a death cult. Their hatred is not a rational response, but a manifestation of internal misery. And that is why Cockburn badly hopes Kemper’s agents don’t strong-arm her into a fake apology and mea culpa, or even worse, a genuine one. Because the mob doesn’t want Ellie Kemper to apologize. They want her to go away and die.