The New Yorker referred to Lauren Duca, the editor of the now-defunct Teen Vogue, as the “Millennial feminist warrior queen of social media” in 2021 after she penned an editorial for her publication titled, “Donald Trump is Gaslighting America.”
Duca was on top of the heap, a bona fide leader of “The Resistance” to Donald Trump. She spent the next two years writing ever-more inflammatory editorials in opposition to Trump that were quoted from one end of the left-wing internet to the other.
Earlier this week, Conde Nast announced that Teen Vogue would be merged with Vogue and its politics section would be eliminated. It was the inevitable end to a youth-centered publication that reflected a different era in American history.
Duca represented a time where emotion and hysteria drove politics to extremes; the political theorist Anton Jäger coined a label for it: hyperpolitics. It was “the fusion of celebrity, entertainment, and politics, in which breathless outrage and the expression of your personal and political identity online become a kind of civic participation,” writes UnHerd’s Ryan Zickgraf.
Duca left Teen Vogue in 2018, but her imprint proved to be lasting on both the publication and the culture.
“I was Little Miss Resistance, an image supported by the mainstream media,” she told Zickgraf on Thursday. “I was so young and completely emotionally immature and just obsessed with screaming my opinions at the top of my lungs and thinking that that was, like, helping democracy.” She adds: “Sometimes it feels like that whole period was a blackout.”
Most of the rest of us see that period, which featured “MeToo” madness, as well as the heyday of “microaggressions” and other cultural idiocies, as a nightmare.
In the era of hyperpolitics, it only seemed strange at first when Teen Vogue went woke. The publication began life in 2003 as a spinoff of Vogue, aimed at teenage fashion consumers under the Condé Nast umbrella. In the wake of Trump’s rise, the magazine that once printed stories such as “Ten Ways to Slay at Prom” was suddenly publishing op-eds on climate justice and white supremacy under headlines such as “9 Climate Activists of Color You Should Know.” Executives at Condé Nast were happy with their brush with relevance among young women, even as critics sneered.
Zickgraf notes, “the Teen Vogue audience was the kind of economically and culturally ascendant urban, single Millennials soon to become both the Democrats’ most loyal bloc and the Right’s favorite scapegoat.”
Only 1.7% of Teen Vogue readers in 2018 were actually, you know, teens. That didn’t stop Teen Vogue from becoming the center of the resistance to Trump. “Overnight, a magazine built to sell eyeliner became a hub for #Resistance politics; its 25-year-old writer got half a million Twitter followers; and cable-news hosts came calling (she became MSNBC’s Millennial whisperer),” writes Zickgraf.
Reading about Duca’s influence is a shocking indictment of the left’s choice for the public face of Trump resistance. The most viral moment of her life and one that discredited her with even some on the left was her appearance on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show.
Her subsequent showdown with Tucker Carlson remains one of the strangest artifacts of that era. Carlson had invited Duca on his Fox News show to discuss her tweets about Ivanka Trump. Duca barely knew what Fox News was, and even less about the channel’s fiery prime-time pundit.
“I just thought he was that guy with the bowtie,” she recalls. The conversation quickly imploded into mutual contempt — Carlson sneering that she should stick to writing about Ariana Grande’s “thigh-high boots,” Duca rolling her eyes. As her microphone faded out, she mouthed the words “You’re a sexist pig.”
Duca recalls: “my kind of fundamental reaction was, like, is this middle-aged man bullying me on TV? I was just like, ‘Are you serious?’ ” The debate went viral instantly, and within hours, the clip had been viewed millions of times.
How could she talk about politics intelligently without knowing who Tucker Carlson was and what he was all about?
In the end, Duca was, herself, an illusion. “The idea that posting, educating, and ‘raising awareness’ could amount to transformational change of national politics was the central illusion of the era — and Duca, like her publication, embodied it at the time.
Living in a leftist fantasy world perfectly illustrates why America will continue to reject the fantasy that left-wing dogma offers.
The Schumer Shutdown is here. Rather than put the American people first, Chuck Schumer and the radical Democrats forced a government shutdown for healthcare for illegals. They own this.
Help us continue to report the truth about the Schumer Shutdown. Use promo code POTUS47 to get 74% off your VIP membership.
