Meghan McCain, the most hated woman on the Internet
Supercharged middle school politics from the world's most insecure people
There is nobody on God’s green earth that gets Internet hate like Meghan McCain does. Throw a stone in any direction for 5,000 miles and you won’t hit another person, man or woman, who is just so relentlessly hated and despised online. I mean, it was the anniversary of her father’s death this week—her father’s death!—and an affiliate of one of the largest political parties in the country posted to Twitter a mocking photograph of her grieving over her dead dad’s funeral casket:
That’s crazy. Who would do such a thing, and why? But this is de rigueur for Meghan McCain hate. When that photograph was originally taken, people began making a bunch of memes mocking her over it. One dude appeared to threaten to shoot her over the whole thing. A while ago one Buzzfeed writer wrote about feeling a “sadistic glee” in “watching McCain … get dunked on day after day” both on The View and on social media. Last year after the Atlanta spa shootings she took to Twitter to condemn “Asian hatred,” after which John Oliver mocked her as “a wealthy white woman who's dressed like she's about to lay off 47 people over Zoom.” McCain herself has acknowledged the “spoiled, entitled queen of nepotism persona” that people have projected upon her for most of her career.
But of all the signifiers of the Internet’s bizarre fixation upon this woman, none is so potent as McCain’s own Twitter feed: She cannot post a single thing, about anything, ever, without invoking a relentless pile-on over it. A quick review of her feed suggests that the vast majority of her tweets have significantly more replies than retweets—for those who don’t know Twitter etiquette, this is very rare—and the majority of those replies are intensely negative. Here, for instance, are some replies to one of her recent tweets in which she happily remarked on a photo of her mother: “My mom looks so pretty!”
Just pages and pages of this stuff, day after day, nonstop. Nobody brings out the hateful chocks and the fuming, frumpy grouches like Meghan McCain.
The question is, why? Why do people seem to love to hate this woman so profoundly? The haters in question have tried over the years to offer a variety of explanations to justify their own weird obsessions—that she’s a “spoiled, entitled queen of nepotism,” that she whines too much, that she mentions her father too often, whatever—but none of it justifies the 24/7 hatefest leveled against her. I mean, why should anyone care so much about any of that? Where’s the payoff in all the time you invest hating her? Dislike her if you want, disagree with her, ignore her, whatever, but the avalanche of hate suggests something else is going on here.
Here’s what it is: Middle school politics. It is really nothing more complicated than that. “Middle school politics,” of course, is a shorthand for a particularly low-intelligence and uncivilized type of political engagement, one in which the objective is not political dialogue and practical solutions but mob-like out-group antagonism: You pick someone, you make them your enemy, and you do everything you can to break them. That’s a defining feature of so much of middle school social life—pathetically insecure children running hateful little fiefdoms and ruining the lives of anyone deemed the enemy—and it seems quite clearly what is at play here, given the evidence at hand.
When John Oliver mocked McCain last year for her comments on “Asian hatred,” for instance, he did so because in 2020 McCain herself had been supportive of the term “China Virus” to describe COVID-19; Oliver’s suggestion was that McCain in opposing “Asian hatred” was being a hypocrite, and that her advocacy of the term “China Virus” had somehow contributed to the shooting of the Asian victims in some way. Uh, well, that’s obviously false. Connecting the phrase “China Virus” to a mass shooting is low-level, non-thinking politics, the sort of thing you do when you absolutely need to have something to say before your broadcast deadline. Moreover, by the time John Oliver made those stupid remarks, nearly a week had passed since the shooting and authorities had pretty much nailed down that the incident was motivated outwardly by the killer’s own sick, pathological sex addiction, not by Meghan McCain having said the word “China Virus” a year before.
But none of that mattered. Meghan McCain was the mark; she was the lunchroom target, the kid you elbow in the back on the way to homeroom so that her books spill out all over the floor. So much of the political industry is motivated by this insecure and desperate scrabbling for the appearance of relevancy and competency; Meghan McCain, for now, happens to be the totem upon which those fears and anxieties are projected. We all went to middle school and we can all surely remember this.
I myself don’t particularly like Meghan McCain’s politics; she’s too liberal for my tastes on what we regrettably have come to call “social issues,” and I don’t particularly look to her commentary for any insight that’s directly relevant to my life. All of which is to say that she’s pretty much like most of the other pundits I don’t really agree with, neither cosmically good nor bad, just someone who writes things that I don’t read all that often. I know enough people that hold her in good esteem to assume that she’s a decent person, though ultimately I, you know, don’t really care either way, which is how it should be with people you don’t know personally. It’s fine!
I suspect all of Meghan McCain’s haters would find themselves a lot happier and healthier if they calmed down, got offline, went and did something fun and stop investing so much baffling, useless time and energy in hating someone for no reason at all. We’ve all graduated middle school and there’s simply no reason for this level of regression.