Why Is Lindy West Getting Cancelled?
24th March 2026
Most people — even people who follow politics closely — never figured out that the Great Feminist Boom of 2014-2017 was not a coincidence. All the institutions of academia and media did not suddenly decide to the embrace and promote #feminist brand by accident. No, that cultural moment was organized to support the Right Side of History™ crusade to make Hillary Clinton America’s First Female President.
Having examined the reasons for the failure of her 2008 presidential bid, Team Hillary recognized that being identified as a feminist was a net negative for her and, in war-gaming her 2016 campaign — a process that began as soon was Obama got reelected in 2012 — they saw the importance of creating an “Astroturf” project to make it seem as if feminism was a mainstream grassroots movement. Young women who were targeted by this effort were generally too naïve to comprehend the cynical partisan calculatIons behind it, and sincerely believed that they were part of a spontaneous emergence of feminist consciousness, a belief that was much more flattering to their egos than to recognize they were pawns of a multimillion-dollar P.R. operation in service to the selfish political ambitions of one very wealthy and powerful woman.
All of which is to say that only a fool would have thought it was a coincidence when, in September 2015, Guardian columnist Lindy West “encouraged other women to share positive abortion experiences online using the hashtag #ShoutYourAbortion in order to ‘denounce the stigma surrounding abortion.’” Nor was any intelligent person surprised when, a few months later in May 2016, Lindy West published Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman, which was universally praised in the liberal media and immediately became a bestseller. The TV rights to Shrill were then bought by Hulu, which turned it into a 22-episode series.