Getting a Home Depot Employee Fired for Calling for Trump's Assassination Is Still Cancel Culture

Chaya Raichik, the woman behind the popular Libs of TikTok social media accounts, has complained in the past about the efforts to "cancel and silence" her. It appears she is taking a page from the playbook she supposedly hates.

Raichik's online operation reposts TikTok videos of left-leaning content creators saying things that often border on the absurd. She has recently upped the ante, amplifying Facebook posts from random people making crass comments about the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, blasting them to her 3.2 million followers on X, and tagging their employers in hopes they are rendered jobless.

In some cases, it has paid off. "To [sic] bad they weren't a better shooter!!!!!" Darcy Waldron Pinckney posted on Facebook. You probably don't recognize her name because she is not a public figure. She is not a lawmaker or a bureaucrat or someone in any position of power. She worked at Home Depot.

The past tense here is key. On Sunday, Raichik posted a screenshot of Pinckney's comment, along with a video of someone confronting her at the store and an admonition to her employer: "Hi @HomeDepot!" Raichik wrote. "Are you aware that you employ people who call for political violence and the ass*ss*nat*on of Presidents? Any comment?" The company promptly terminated her. 

Whatever your feelings on the former president, cheering on his assassination attempt is, in fact, wrong. It is also wrong to weaponize your millions of followers to turn a random woman into a national pariah, siccing a mob on her and rendering her unable to support herself—and possibly her family—because she made a tasteless comment on social media. These two things are true at the same time.

Cancel culture comes in different forms. But this is arguably its purest. We're not talking about someone who wielded considerable influence over society, whether in Hollywood or on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. We aren't even talking about a public school teacher who said this to a classroom full of students. We are talking about a woman who worked at a big box retail store, whose ability to pay for housing and food is potentially now up in the air for saying something gross on the internet.

It's ironic that the people leading this mob are some of the same individuals who have repeatedly—and rightly—decried mob justice over the last several years. In some cases, their careers and fame are grounded, at least in part, in that very concept. "Cancel cancel culture," Riley Gaines, the swimmer and activist who has pushed back on biological men competing in women's sports, said in August of last year. Gaines, who has been the target of some illiberalism herself, was singing a different song this week, celebrating the termination of a man whose firing also came at the behest of Raichik.

"Too bad it didn't hit him square," Tony Bendele, formerly a small-town firefighter, posted on his personal Facebook page with a popcorn emoji. Raichik got ahold of it and, again, posted a screenshot to her Libs of TikTok account, with a rallying cry to her following on X (where Bendele does not have a footprint). It didn't take long for him, too, to become a national story. As of this writing, Raichik's initial post excoriating Bendele has been seen 11.7 million times.

"Please accept this as my resignation from the firehouse. I can't do this," Bendele, whose department also received a bomb threat, later posted on Facebook. "I have been threatened. My family has been threatened. My friends have been threatened. I have never felt so unsafe in my life….It's one thing to ruin my life, I accept that. But to put everyone else in danger around me, to shut down everyone's daily life, this is not ok."

Gaines counted that as a victory on Monday. "This wouldn't have happened without @elonmusk purchasing X and @libsoftiktok exposing it," she posted on X. Is this what winning looks like?

The online defenses of these firings fell mostly into two camps. The first: People like Pinckney and Bendele aren't actually victims of cancel culture because what they said is bad. I take no issue with the latter—what they said is bad. But using that as justification to gleefully destroy their lives is as classic a definition of cancel culture as any. Past victims of cancel culture, after all, weren't always angels; such backlash often comes after legitimately unsavory or cringeworthy remarks. To take these random people's personal Facebook posts and exile them from society is to invoke a mantra from some left-leaning activists: "It's accountability culture, actually."

"It's exactly how America should work," wrote Zach Dean for OutKick, the right-leaning publication typically dedicated to sports news. "Checks and balances, folks….Shoutout to the Home Depot for quickly nipping this ugly human in the bud." Perhaps it is unsurprising that the publication has repeatedly railed into cancel culture. 

The second line of pushback doesn't appear to deny that this is cancel culture. Those on the left just deserve it, the thinking goes, because they've used these tactics for years. While I appreciate the honesty, there are a few issues here. For one, there is no proof that these specific individuals ever participated in online mob justice—once again, we are not talking about people who are public figures or who have even a semblance of a following. More importantly, that is plainly contradictory to the definition of a principle, which is not a principle at all if you decline to apply it when it's inconvenient. "They started it" is not a justification that has much currency past elementary school.

For now, Raichik is undeterred. She has turned her ire toward several others—a chef at a restaurant in Michigan, a program manager at Uber, and more—in hopes that she can claim their scalps, too. You don't need to endorse their repugnant political statements to hope she is unsuccessful.