If there is any sincere person left in America who still claims that cancel culture is a myth, they may want to seriously consider the case of Cara Dumaplin. The popular baby sleep training expert has been ruthlessly attacked, boycotted, doxxed, and smeared recently after someone (more on that “someone” in a moment) went through FEC records and discovered that she’d donated to Donald Trump. Many media outlets have reported on the story, eager to amplify the news of a non-political person’s private campaign contributions. Most of the coverage has been along the lines of this post from The Cut, a New York Magazine publication: “A boycott is brewing against formerly beloved child-care consultant Cara Dumaplin, who has reportedly been funneling some of the profits from her pricey classes into the Trump campaign’s coffers.”
This is disgraceful, of course, and also not true. Not only are they straining to make the donations sound sinister by using a phrase like “funneling the profits,” but they assume that the money came from her child care consultant business. We have no way of knowing that. And it doesn’t matter anyway. Cara Dumaplin offers advice on how to care for infants — very good advice, I’m told — and has never chosen to publicize her personal views. The small amount of money she donated to a political campaign (about $1,000 over the course of three years) is of no one’s concern but her own. This is not a case of a public person choosing to air their political views and then experiencing the divided response that any sane person must expect in this environment. This is, rather, a woman in a completely apolitical line of work whose financial records, along with her address, have been dug up and published in order to personally destroy her in an act of collective ideological vengeance.
Hit pieces in the media claim that moms across America have somehow been “betrayed” because a woman who gave them advice on how to help their infant sleep happens to hold political views that don’t align with their own. Sophia Tesfaye in Salon openly admits that this is another case of cancel culture but says that it’s “good” because it holds Dumaplin accountable for the sin of possessing a mind and forming opinions of her own. The guy who seems to have gotten the cancel ball rolling, Jamie Grayson, is a fellow “parenting influencer” who quite clearly saw this as an opportunity to kneecap his Instagram competition. He first published Dumaplin’s FEC records, which include her address, along with a lengthy screed promising that he is a “very liberal homosexual male” who does not hold any of her heretical views. Other vultures from the mommy and daddy blogger world have also swooped in to get a piece of the carcass.
This is one of the primary hallmarks of cancel culture, and how you differentiate it from your average boycott or a genuine case of holding someone accountable. The former is always vindictive and contemptuous, and often the bus is being driven by someone who stands to personally gain from the destruction of the person thrown under it. That is not to say that the average member of the outrage mob — the moms claiming to feel “betrayed” and vowing never to use Dumaplin’s child care programs again — have self-serving motivations. In their case, it is more accurate to say that they are emotionally unbalanced, driven to the edge of insanity by hatred for their fellow Americans and fear of people who think differently from themselves.
Just consider for a moment what they are actually doing here, assuming they follow through on their boycott threats. Dumaplin, by all accounts, is a miracle worker in the field of baby sleep training. Anyone who has had an infant who struggles to sleep knows that it can just about wreck your life. Sleep is a rather crucial human need, it turns out, so when you are being deprived of it, you will find yourself very quickly in a state of desperation. There’s a reason why sleep deprivation is considered a form of torture according to the Geneva Convention (whether infants are therefore guilty of human rights abuses is a legal question for another time). What all of this means is that these “betrayed” mothers will choose now to suffer with a sleepless baby rather than use the methods and advice of a woman who donated to Donald Trump. They are choosing ideology over their own health and sanity — and they don’t have much of the latter to spare, it would seem. One wonders whether these people would intentionally die of thirst if a Trump supporter recommended they drink water.
It is clear that cancel culture itself is not the underlying problem. It is just a symptom. The disease is a worldview that cannot tolerate any form of dissent from anyone. It sees all things in a political light. It sees all people as political entities. It sees anyone outside of its tribe as an enemy worthy of condemnation and worse. It clamors for diversity but seeks a world of sameness. It demands tolerance but never returns the favor. Cancel culture emerges inevitably from this hateful ideology. And no one is exempt from its wrath.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.