Piers Morgan defends former Teen Vogue editor who stepped down over anti-Asian tweets

Piers Morgan has defended former Teen Vogue editor Alexi McCammond in a rant about the "woke mob".

McCammond, 27, departed the fashion magazine last month before officially starting her role after tweets she posted 10 years ago resurfaced.

Asian Americans have suffered an increase in hate crimes during the coronavirus pandemic, and a group of 20 staffers at the title said in a statement that, during a time of “historically high anti-Asian violence”, the team “fully reject those sentiments”.

One of the magazine’s advertisers also reportedly pulled out.

In a TV interview with Tucker Carlson on Monday, Morgan, who left Good Morning Britain last month, defended McCammond.

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“The editor of Teen Vogue was fired before she could even start.  She apologized for years about stuff she tweeted as a 17-year-old kid, but that wasn’t enough. So, apologies don’t ever get you anywhere,” Morgan said.

The tweets first resurfaced in 2019, at which point McCammond deleted them and apologised for the comments, which she called “deeply insensitive”.

Morgan continued: "This woke mob want to cancel people who do not follow their narratives and it’s got increasingly dangerous. I look at that poor young journalist who got fired before she even started and I ask myself, so what about the other members of that editorial team?"

"Should we go back to their tweets when they were 16, 17 and see what’s lurking there? We already know about one of them, that didn’t live up to the holy level that they were setting for this woman. But this young woman’s career has been completely trashed and burned by the woke bonfire because she was not allowed to be contrite," Morgan added.

"She wasn’t allowed to express a sincere apology for stuff she spouted when she was a kid. It’s ridiculous."

Morgan said bosses should "stand firm" in cases like McCammond’s.

"Bosses have to stand firm. And if they don’t this will get worse and worse," he said.

"When this woke mob comes again, like they did for this young Teen Vogue editor, who lost her job before she could even start, you need people at Condé Nast to go, ‘Nope, not having this, sorry, off you go Wokies,’ and she keeps her job."

On 18 March this year, McCammond, who was set to begin her new job on 24 March, announced that she’d no longer be joining the magazine, and said that her “past tweets have overshadowed the work I’ve done”.

“My past tweets have overshadowed the work I’ve done to highlight the people and issues that I care about – issues that Teen Vogue has worked tirelessly to share with the world – and so Condé Nast and I have decided to part ways,” McCammond wrote.

In the statement, McCammond said she takes “full responsibility” for the tweets and acknowledged that she should “not have tweeted what I did”.

Last month, a new study by California State University found that, despite an overall decrease in hate crimes, hate crimes against Asian Americans had risen 150 per cent in the US, especially in New York City and LA.