Anna Wintour giving in to the Twitter mob means we’re in for a long four years

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Anna Wintour no longer edits Vogue. Twitter does.

After the wokerati had a collective grand mal seizure upon seeing Vogue’s Kamala Harris cover last week, Vogue announced on Tuesday it would replace that cover.

The overall criticism was that Vogue treated the first female, black, South Asian to become Vice President in a manner that was disrespectful at best, racist at worst.

This is ridiculous. To believe this, you have to believe that Anna Wintour — who has always made her left-leaning politics clear, from putting Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama on the cover to endorsing Joe Biden in her editor’s letter to working as one of Obama’s top bundlers in 2012 — has no interest in staying in Kamala Harris’ and Joe Biden’s good graces. You’d also have to believe that Harris is unlike every other major politician in that she is not stage-managed, handled, and highly aware of her public image.

To that point, Harris’ team was intimately involved with the photo shoot, selecting everything from the backdrop (pink and green, her sorority colors), to her hair and make-up. Harris and her team also selected her wardrobe, which included a high-end designer blazer, a pair of black jeans and her trusty Converse sneakers. In fact, Harris refused to have Vogue style her in any way — a privilege that Anna rarely, if ever, affords.

“Vogue selected the image for the print cover that we felt captured her personality and authenticity,” a magazine source told Page Six. Yes, another cover image had been shot — one with Harris in a pale blue Michael Kors suit — but Vogue (a k a Anna) decided the Converse shot, the most un-Vogue shot, was the right image for this moment: Approachable. Devoid of riches and trappings of power. One crafted by the actual cover star — giving her agency, in the current vernacular.

Those Converse that Harris wears, by the way, practically became the running mate’s running mate, proof of this lifelong politician’s essential character as cool, grounded, youthful.

“They do send a message about who she is and her approach to politics,” O magazine said last November. “Her choice of footwear not only indicates that she understands and relates to the average American, but she’s also — literally — down-to-earth.”

Maybe she is. But as anyone who rises to the executive office, Harris is also a ruthless politician, one who all but called future running mate Joe Biden ancient and possibly racist during a presidential debate, one who, as Vogue reported in 2018, demanded everyone get to their feet as she entered a room.

So, you know, maybe dial back the outrage. Are we to pretend that most of the mainstream media won’t be slathering the Biden-Harris administration with Pavlovian praise for the next four years? And by the way, a recent, fawning CBS “Sunday Morning” profile of Harris devoted part of its segment to her famed Chuck Taylors, though she blanched when her husband said she had “several closets full of them” — definitely not relatable.

“He’s exaggerating,” Harris said.

Moving on: Why would Vogue backtrack now? With a news cycle on hyper-warp speed-overdrive, who can remember what happened last week, let alone yesterday? Who even remembers that Hilaria Baldwin isn’t Spanish? Why not let this latest subject of faux-outrage burn itself out and be replaced by Armie Hammer’s cannibal fantasies or whatever fresh derangement is heading our way?

Social media has collapsed many boundaries and membranes, the concept of gatekeepers among them. But if Anna Wintour — who once made Oprah lose 20 pounds! — gives in so easily, it bodes ill for the next four years. The Twitter mob will come for every news article, every blurb, every photo they consider unfair. And the media, terrified of upsetting progressives, will fold.

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