The Internet Locusts Descend on Ristretto Roasters

Camila worked for Ristretto Roasters, my husband Din’s coffee roasting company in Portland, Oregon, for five years. She received regular promotions and by 2016 was earning a mid-five figure salary. In October of last year, Camila resigned. The end.

Or, the end until last month, when she sent an email to more than two dozen former and current Ristretto Roasters employees, alerting them to the YouTube series, #MeNeither Show, that fellow journalist Leah McSweeney and I launched in December 2018. In three half-hour episodes, we had discussed, among other topics, celebrities who have exploited the #MeToo movement, and the difference between sexual predators and those swept-up in the excesses of the current moment. The show’s “about” page reads, “#MeNeither is an almost-weekly conversation about the cultural issues of the day, and an attempt to create a space where people can find ways to think out loud through uncomfortable topics.”

In her email to Ristretto employees, Camila described our show as “vile, dangerous, and extremely misguided” and announced her intention to “take this information to [local newspapers] Willamette Week and The [Portland] Mercury.” She went on to explain that, “it could be really powerful to have a formal letter singed [sic] off by as many RR employees as possible so that the community at large knows that the people who actually keep RR running do not stand for this.”

We believe it is a business owner’s responsibility to create a safe and supportive working environment for their employees. Invalidating assault survivors throws into question the safety of Ristretto Roasters as a workplace and has the potential to create a demoralizing and hostile environment for employees and customers alike. This cannot be tolerated.

Dismay seems to be the very sustenance of these campaigns. The digital activists swarm like locusts, descending and leaving the earth shorn before moving on to the next field. But what lasting satisfaction can there be in forcing a small business to close and its employees out of work? Do the people leading these crusades picture themselves as admirable figureheads? If so, they seem to be steering into perpetually unhappy waters, full of hazards real and imagined, with the pervasive fear that everyone and everything might harm you so you must harm them first.

Which is exactly how millennials were brought up by their helicopter parents. Whether nuts or wheat or trophies only to the winners, anything deemed harmful was loudly eradicated from their environment. That is the lasting satisfaction for the digital millennial bullies who are out to sterilize the world of everything they don't like.

Prof. Heying was close to the truth but like a good “liberal” was afraid to cross over to it.

The attacks on Din, Weinstein, etc, are specifically aimed at causing trouble for imagined capitalist/misogynist etc. acts against “people of color, feminists, gays, etc”. It is an old Marxist tactic to pick on a “small” vulnerable person or organization and destroy them after having made them into Satan of Capitalism and Male chauvinism, etc.

The reds and their progressive, socialist, oh-so-liberal friends, dupes and stooges are the new “vanguard of the revolution” (if you like old Marxist terminology). In modern terms, they are psychotics, filled with imaginary hate and bile, sometimes along with a good dose of anti-Semitism (Prof. Weinstein, though I don’t think he has recognized it yet), hated of white men (by women who will never successfully marry or marry at all, their hatred of men destroying them within their souls and hearts).

The best way to handle this is for Din’s to sue the shit out of Camila and those who forced one of his best customers to cancel their working relationship, for harassment (calls, threats, vocal attacks, etc), for slander, defamation and liberal, and for infterfering with a legally established business.

Their employees should also sue the bastards for costing them their jobs, and for threats of harm if they didn’t quit.

Since this is in Portland, I doubt if you can find an honest, morally sound, and stand-up type of lawyer to defend these people. The reds run the city (from the City Council/Mayor downward, the police being led by a chickenshit chief), and they are in the process of ruining it.

If there was such as thing as a “domestic travel threat alert”, it would start with Portland, Oregon, Seattle, Washington, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Oakland, Houston/Austin, Albuquerque, New Orleans (another deadly shooting there today), Philadelphia, Baltimore (the Charm City shooting gallery), parts of Rhode Island, Connecticut, and even Maine.

Damned, I felt safer in Saigon and Pnom Penh than I would in some US cities. That is a damned shame. I blame it on the ahole liberals who are blind to reality, the Marxist/progressives who are well funded and attack everything good and functional, including education, as well as law enforcement, who never met an MS 13 gang they didn’t like (as undocumented immigrants), and those who want to takeover America in the name of “socialism, progressivism, and plain old totalitarianism”. In other words, Democrats, commies, psychos, black extremists and reparationists, Hispanic irredentists, cowards, druggies, and the followers of false gods.

To: Larry Lucido and Gene Eric

Gentlemen,

Posting an entire linked article on Free Republic is probably a copyright violation.

“Quillette” - the source for this essay - is a for-profit online magazine. Posting their work on FR deprives them of web site hits and eyeballs for their ads.

Please check with the Free Republic Administrator about removing your giant excerpt in Comment #7.

Thanks.

“The person who started this campaign against my husband’s business may not have known what sort of assault she was initiating, or maybe she did and did not care. For Camila, and for the people who answered her call to arms, ideology is prioritized over the lives and welfare of individuals. Maybe it is because young people do not yet have much to lose that they struggle to empathize with those who do. Maybe the rush of feeling part of something, or of bending others to one’s will, proves irresistible. Maybe calling all of my husband’s vendors and telling them to drop Ristretto feels like progress—but to where, and for whom?”

People who do this are religious zealots in the church of Progressivism.

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