In a viral and impassioned video, Lex McMenamin, the former politics editor of Teen Vogue, laments the mass firing of her staff. She frames this event as a sinister purge of "queer and trans workers, black workers, people of color" by a corporate media bowing to political pressure. But in her defense of her team, she inadvertently exposes the hollow core of the modern Left's worldview. She provides a perfect case study in how the obsession with Identity Politics has destroyed the very possibility of a shared, rational, and successful public life.

Her statement is a manifesto of Nominalism. In the classical and Christian tradition, a person's worth is grounded in their inherent nature as a human being made in the image of God. Their professional worth is grounded in their virtue and their competence -- their ability to do good work. But for McMenamin, these universal categories have vanished. There is no "good journalist"; there is only the "trans journalist" or the "black journalist." She validates her team's worth not by citing their professional excellence or the quality of their prose, but by cataloging their racial and sexual identities. This is the new caste system. A person's value is determined by their location on the intersectional grid. This is not a path to justice; it is a descent into a primitive tribalism where "what you are" matters more than "what you do" or "who you are."

Furthermore, she reveals the death of journalism itself. She proudly claims that Teen Vogue was engaged in "campus organizing" and advocacy for specific political causes like "trans rights" and "Palestine." She has erased the distinction between the Observer and the Activist. In the classical view, the journalist serves the Truth -- a reality that exists outside of their own will. They are humble servants of the facts. In the new view, the journalist serves the Narrative -- a political story constructed to gain power. When a publication stops reporting the news and starts preaching a niche ideology to children, it ceases to be a newspaper and becomes a tract. It abandons the "common good" of a shared public knowledge for the private good of a political tribe.

And finally, her reaction to the layoffs reveals the Left's profound disconnection from reality. She claims they are "bringing reality to their doorstep," but she cannot see the most obvious reality of all: market failure. Teen Vogue was not "shut down by fascists." It failed because it alienated its audience. It preached a radical, divisive, and niche gospel to a broad public that simply stopped listening. The "identity verticals" she mourns were not windows into the world; they were mirrors in a closed room.

When you replace the Universal (shared humanity, objective truth, professional excellence) with the Tribal (identity groups, political activism, subjective narrative), you do not build a better world. You build a small, angry, and ultimately irrelevant echo chamber. And when the walls of that chamber finally collapse under the weight of economic reality, the inhabitants are left standing in the ruins, blaming everyone but themselves. They are martyrs to a faith that has forgotten the world.