At the beginning of 2020, on one of the coldest nights of the year, the planets Saturn, Pluto, and Jupiter conjoined in the sky, a moment that observers of the stars identified as inauspicious, to say the least. Astrologers predicted the year to come would be one of limitation (the archetype of Saturn) and transformation (the archetype of Pluto), together magnified to previously unimaginable intensity (the archetype of Jupiter).

Even for sensible people who reject the premise of predictive astrology, a sense of cosmic proportion follows 2020 like a late afternoon shadow. Every other week now, the year gets a new postmortem. Why did we shut down the schools? Why did we kill the businesses? What did we think posting the black square would do? Why did we allow our grandparents to die alone? Why were pregnant women forced to take the vaccine? Did we collectively kill manners? A profound desire to understand 2020 lingers because, sadly, so do its consequences.

A million throats tightened as a bitter cold swept over the American suburbs. Who was next? Whose son, daughter, sister, or brother would surreptitiously record them saying the unsayable (which was eminently sayable five minutes ago), then publish it, as The Swarm bayed for ever more brutal forms of punishment?

One of the less frequently discussed yet not altogether uncommon experiences of 2020 was intrafamilial “cancellation.” Recall Kellyanne Conway’s daughter, Claudia, 15 at the time, who became representative of the trend as she attempted to expose her mother as “the White House superspreader” on TikTok. This was only one in a series of cancellations via social media, inflamed by BLM mania, where hundreds of inspired teenagers publicly pantsed their parents for insufficient fealty to The Cause du Juor. At the time, Business Insider framed the act of “canceling” one’s family as “modeling the most important tenet of allyship: taking it upon yourself to research, point out, and confront racism, especially when it feels risky or uncomfortable to do so.”

A million throats tightened as a bitter cold swept over the American suburbs. Who was next? Whose son, daughter, sister, or brother would surreptitiously record them saying the unsayable (which was eminently sayable five minutes ago), then publish it, as The Swarm bayed for ever more brutal forms of punishment? Many others faced a similar kind of ostracization in a private setting. The only evidence that remains of their cancellation is estrangement. Which was worse? A public cancellation robs a person of their future. A private cancellation robs a person of their past.

I met Mia while in college; we were sorority sisters. She and I remained in touch in the years following graduation, sharing memes and frustrations as the political climate began to boil over. Donald Trump had recently assumed the presidency. Many of our old friends had succumbed to the pressures of Instagram activism. Mutual trust grew in the shadows of the card castles being erected in our midst; we became confidants. I watched in horror as her family was torn apart under the conceit of political correction. This is her story.

Mia met Louis while she was completing an MFA in New York City in 2017. He, despite that ever-elusive career title “consultant,” was, to her, the most honest, no-nonsense man she’d ever known: “a rare breed.” She, to him, was endearingly whimsical in the way that many artists can be high in openness, sensitivity, and warmth.

A year before their 2019 wedding, Louis moved in with his brother and sister-in-law, who owned a five-bedroom home upstate, to save for a down payment on the future home he hoped to build with Mia. Louis’s brother, Pierre, wrote code for a pharmaceutical company and made good money. In another life, Pierre’s wife, Angela, was a nurse but had retired into the aspirant luxury of the upper-middle-class housewife: Brazilian nannies managed her children while Guatemalan housekeepers managed their home. Angela’s idle time was occupied mainly by tending to her rescue chihuahuas.

Mia lived in the city during the week and stayed with her future husband and in-laws on the weekends. Both she and Louis were grateful for their generosity, and they tried to help fill the household gaps uncovered by hired help. Louis was comfortable in his brother’s presence; he and Pierre had shared a room as children. They shared a similar, irreverent sense of humor, the vestige of a family culture of the late eighties. These factors combined foster a sense of safety in the house, especially for Mia.

Pierre and Angela had been together since high school, having taken a single, five-year break after Angela tumbled into a tragic tryst with his best friend. When Angela came back into Pierre’s life, Louis begged him to reconsider. “How could you trust her after what happened?” he asked. “She’s the hottest girl I can get with,” Pierre responded. Angela’s journey back into the good graces of the boys’ family of origin was rocky, but eventually, not long before Mia entered the picture, she had reached a tenuous status of acceptance. Pierre made his decision to marry her, youthful indiscretion be damned. Louis respected that and never brought it up again.

While Louis and Mia were spending every weekend upstate, Mia believed she was in the process of “forging forever friendships” with Pierre and Angela. They were almost a decade older than she, and the relationship between her and both of them felt safely sibling-like.

“She made a bit of a show taking me under her wing,” Mia says of Angela. “Of course, I never doubted her. She wanted to ‘show me the ropes’ of the family. I thought I needed that. Louis’s family was complicated, by his own admission. She appeared to be a victim of their cold shoulder. The way she acted ... I just thought we were fast friends. She told me deep stuff about herself almost immediately. Crazy, traumatic stuff. Stuff you’d only tell a friend.”

On Pierre, Mia recalls, “we used to talk about politics a lot. He listened to the Daily Wire religiously, despite being an atheist himself. I guess he was hard to pin down. Kind of a chameleon. Voted for Hillary, but he never seemed to have the courage of his convictions. He thought my Trump thing was funny. I look like a leftist, you know. A couple little tattoos, whatever. I wear combat boots.” She laughs. “I guess it didn’t compute.”

Mia’s “Trump thing” began as a quiet appreciation for Camille Paglia and Roger Scruton, fostered in the corners of the art studios, just beyond detection of the reactionary radar of her Ivy League companions. “Being right wing ... not even right wing per se, but something other than a standard issue campus lib ... in a left-wing city, it felt like a secret,” she says. Upstate, Mia felt free to explore political incorrectness with her fiancé, who shared her interests, convictions, and the recentness of his epiphany. So, Mia, Louis, and Pierre frequently broke bread together, talking philosophy, culture, religion, and the rest. Angela wasn’t interested in politics, but never protested the meandering, sometimes fiery, conversations. She preferred to scroll Instagram.

In 2020, just after their marriage, and just before the lockdowns began, Louis and Mia moved to Texas. Louis had recently been assigned to a new project in Austin; Mia was vaguely aware of a conservative enclave there and excited by the prospect of a new art scene. By that time, Mia was glad to be leaving New York, in general, and to be getting away from Angela, specifically.

An initially overwhelming affectation of friendship had curdled over the months leading up to Louis and Mia’s wedding. It came to the fore that Angela had lied to Mia about several seemingly innocuous things; she’d also, acting of her own accord as middleman, shared false information about Mia to the rest of the family. Angela told Louis’s sister, for instance, that Mia hated a pair of earrings she’d received from them as a Christmas gift. However superficially inconsequential, these little lies, as well as some increasingly common passive aggressive remarks peppered into everyday life, had eroded Mia’s trust in Angela as a friend. Louis, having known her for so many years, minimized the dishonesty, saying to Mia, “Angela loves drama; always has. You can’t take what she says seriously. Everyone knows this. Just ignore her.”

The relationship between the two couples waned with distance. Immediately after their arrival in Austin, New York shut down completely. Louis’s sensibility remained as relaxed as ever. His skepticism about the coronavirus narrative endured from the beginning. He refused the mask, citing its ineffectiveness and tacit dehumanizing effect on people. Angela and Pierre, with their background in healthcare and the pharmaceutical world, conformed without hesitation to the state narrative. When it changed, so did they, every time, with great enthusiasm. They disapproved of Louis’s unwillingness to believe the headlines. Pierre was becoming increasingly sensitive in text conversations, accusing Mia and Louis both of “thinking [they] we better than him.” Again, Louis and Mia inhibited their concerns about Pierre’s growing irascibility. “We’re in Texas. They’re in New York. None of this matters, anyway,” Mia recalls telling herself.

In June, after months of lockdown, the video of George Floyd’s death went viral on social media. Pierre panicked. He, Louis, and Mia once agreed about the inconsistencies of the racial narrative in America, as well as the cynicism of the industries built up around the culture of grievance. The infamous image changed his mind; now he opined that Floyd was murdered in cold blood, precisely because he was black, and that this vignette was indeed representative of a great conspiracy to oppress American black men in particular. Louis, having a background in martial arts, had questions about the footage. Louis expressed through text that, once again, he did not believe the narrative emerging about the incident. Louis preferred to wait for further evidence.

Pierre called, shouting Louis down for his unrepentant disbelief in the official position on the death of George Floyd. Louis did not waver, calling the clip a “Rorschach test.” Pierre hung up in a great verbal flourish of solidarity with Black Lives Matter. Louis remained unmoved. Mia remembers a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach, and at the time, warned her husband, “Pierre seems unwell. I think you should be more careful about what you share with him.”

In December 2020, Louis and Mia visited the rest of his family in Ohio for Christmas. Pierre and Angela were there. They wore masks and were utterly cold to the couple, despite almost a year of absence. Mia avoided Angela completely. Over family dinner, Louis’s father asked if he and Mia would ever receive the new vaccine, under any conditions. Louis said, “No. I think it’s poison.” Angela stormed off. Standing to follow her, Pierre reproached his little brother, “That’s so fucking prideful. You think you know better than medical authorities.”

In the following months, Louis and Mia retracted from communication. Then, rather suddenly, in late May, Pierre sent out a message in a group text with twenty-five immediate and extended family members, including Louis and Mia. It read:

“I have been thinking about this for a long time, and it has been weighing heavy on my heart. Louis and Mia are racists. They are conspiracy theorists, and they are dangerous people who have been lying to everyone about who they really are. Mia is a bitch who intentionally hurt Angela by ignoring her after pretending to be her friend for years. Please know, I cannot stand for this. You are not my brother anymore, Louis. Everyone on this text needs to know that they’ve been talking shit about everyone else here, too.”

What followed was a laundry list of lies and half-truths. Pierre took Louis and Mia’s innermost thoughts and feelings, once shared intimately with Pierre and Angela under the obvious pretense of privacy, and over the course of years, and personalized, exaggerated, and mangled them beyond recognition. By peppering in kernels of truth, though, he made the accusations difficult to deny outright.

He signed off: “Fuck you, racists. Burn in hell.”

In the moment, the men’s mother immediately offered a series of platitudes about love, mercy, forgiveness—an attempt to placate the accuser without addressing either the content of Pierre’s accusations or the fact of his outburst. Louis offered to answer every point privately with whomever found themselves offended by Pierre’s accusations. Crickets.

“I used to have a good relationship with my brother, John. John married a single mom, a black woman. When Pierre said what he said, John pretended he was unbothered, but I know it hurt him and his wife. Pierre made it seem like I didn’t think their biracial child should exist. This he extrapolated from a conversation we’d had many years ago about domestic violence in the black community—which had nothing to do with John, let alone his baby. How do you respond to something like that? He was trying to hurt us both. He succeeded, clearly, and in the same blow made it basically impossible to heal. ‘Sorry’ wouldn’t have cut it, but I wasn’t even sorry, because I didn’t say the thing! I ended up texting John directly after opening myself up to the group, saying he could ask any questions he wanted for straight answers. He didn’t ask.”

Initially, Louis had hoped that by making himself an open book to anyone who wanted to parse the details of the accusations, he could restore his reputation and preserve his relationships. But he met an unexpected and frustrating obstacle in their silence. “Pierre has always been prone to rage. And every single sibling has said politically incorrect stuff around each other. I’m sure they were just doing the math, not wanting to be next in his line of sight. Maybe it was fear, but also, he basically stabbed me in the back. Those kinds of accusations ... in 2020, it was a potentially life-ruining attack. In retrospect, it’s like, how does everyone pretend that didn’t just happen? My mom was immediately equivocating, trying to move on before anything was dealt with. They were all so evasive. Like, can’t they see this knife in my back? How can they pretend and expect me to pretend like this didn’t happen?”

Perhaps similarly jilted by his intended audience’s apparent lack if interest, Pierre followed up a few days later with an equivocating text of his own: “I feel like the victim and the aggressor. Maybe I was too harsh and too emotional, but doing the right thing is hard to do. I have to protect my family.”

Louis wondered, “Was this meant to be an apology?”

Months later, their mother ended up tragically comatose in the hospital (she eventually recovered). Again, Pierre put his siblings on yet another group chat, saying: “I think it’s time we all come together and move past our differences to support mom. We’ve all hurt each other. Everyone is guilty of something. It’s time for unity.”

By mid-2022, journalists at legacy media institutions began to toe a new line on the narrative of 2020 and its consequences. Writing for the Washington Post in July, Alyssa Rosenberg opined that it is “not useful” to focus on the things we did or neglected to do that hurt children, rushing the read to consider “The better question: What can we do for them now?”

The Atlantic published a piece by Emily Oster titled “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty,” in which the author wondered whether we can all simply forgive and forget about it all: what we said and did to one another during the COVID-19 pandemic, whether it was masks, school closings, or vaccines. Endlessly litigating the details of the specific who, what, and whom is a useless distraction, she insists. It’s time to move on.

Oster took for granted that forgiveness should happen even in the absence of justice or accountability. Her extolment of the virtue of forgiveness fell flat for its failure to recognize the real victimhood of the victimized. Instead, she tacitly allowed the victimizers to develop their own victimhood narrative, as victims of circumstance, automatically absolving themselves in their role in betraying the laws of decency and civility, legitimately ruining other people’s lives through cancellation. As she wrote: “The thing is: We didn’t know.” Ignorantia juris non excusat.

In the years since Louis and Mia’s intrafamilial cancellation, every relationship Louis had with his seven other siblings has tapered to a cool, distant civility. A dull heartache remains, but he concludes that “good riddance” is a better policy than engaging with slander. Louis says, “if the relationships were that flimsy to begin with, they probably aren’t worth having.” He feels it was a matter of divine protection that Pierre did not escalate to a more public setting. Not only has Louis kept his career, but he’s also thrived in it, despite it all.

Mia, a child of divorce, grieves the loss of an extended family. Ever since the cancellation, she felt herself being made into the family’s new scapegoat, conveniently relieving Angela of her own previously tenuous status. “On the surface, it’s hard to tell whether his original message was about racism or about his wife being ignored. It seems he was grasping for whatever he could to paint us in the worst possible light. The more time that goes by, the more I think it was all personal, petty stuff just pretending to be ‘social justice’ or whatever. I admit that I did ‘ghost’ Angela. I didn’t know how else to deal with someone who lied like that—about earrings! It was creepy. I would have handled things differently today. I would have tried to be more direct.”

No one wanted to choose a side between brothers who had each been one another’s best man, she says. Perhaps it made more sense that Pierre’s hysteria, and Louis’s “racism,” would both be the fault of a strange woman.

The only thing that cushions the pain that Pierre meant to inflict on the brother he once called his best friend was the irony that Pierre did not believe in God or hell at the time he sent the message. “What does it mean to be damned to hell by an atheist?” Louis wonders, smiling.

Helen Roy is an opinion contributor for Blaze News and a staff writer for Align. She is also a contributing editor at the American Mind, host of the podcast “Girlboss, Interrupted,” and a fellow at the Claremont Institute for Political Philosophy.