Last year, writer Nancy Rommelmann wrote a widely shared Quillette article entitled “The Internet Locusts Descend on Ristretto Roasters,” in which she described the mob-fueled social panic that had enveloped her husband’s Portland, Oregon café. The mobbing had been set off by a single former employee who’d resigned after seeking to implement a “Reparations Happy Hour,” an event that “would involve stationing white people at the front door to buy patrons of color a coffee.” The resulting ordeal lasted for months, damaged the company’s brand, and ultimately contributed to Rommelmann’s decision to move to a less politically radicalized locale: New York City.

It may seem odd to think that New York would offer the author a respite from progressive sentiment, as opposed to an overdose. But as Rommelmann told Quillette podcast listeners during our conversation, it actually makes sense: In many New York neighbourhoods, there is an organic, longstanding atmosphere of multiculturalism that allows for candor and viewpoint pluralism. In Portland, on the other hand, progressive political culture is dominated by small cliques of largely young, largely white newcomers who are more likely to take their cues from brittle online subcultures than from humane, geographically-rooted civic norms.

Rommelmann also was eager to move to a city with a vibrant national media presence. For all the sporadic attention that Portland gets when local political gangs (we’re no longer allowed to call them “antifa,” apparently) beat up a journalist or try to burn down public buildings, the day-to-day reality is that the city is a media backwater. And this fact clearly contributed to the strength of the mob campaign against her husband’s business: If you Google “Ristretto Roasters,” you’ll find that coverage of the 2018 mobbing was dominated by a handful of tiny blogs and local outlets, most of whose writers seemed deeply enmeshed in the same shrill call-out subculture that spawned the campaign against Ristretto Roasters in the first place.