Well, it’s come time for my final column of the year. It seems I have talked about everything: an adulterer, an Anti-Semitic rapper, even to a man who produces a seemingly impossible number of babies. 

But when it comes down to it, what was the point?

Society has chosen to hold celebrities to an impossibly high standard, and I have, month after month critiqued them. Some of them may have been deserving of it, some of them maybe not.

I’m not the only one who does this either. It feels like — especially today — people are hypercritical of celebrities. Take for example Mr. Beast, who I talked about a few months ago; he was receiving harsh criticism for curing 1000 people’s blindness. All I could wonder is what someone could extrapolate from what he did to believe he had malicious intentions.

And I don’t mean to be hypocritical either, because I wrote a whole piece about a YouTuber’s extramarital affair. The point was for it to be lighter and more comedic, but it still comments on what might have been a difficult time in his life in a way that may not really reflect the severity of the situation (though it was the consequences of his own actions).

Celebrities have turned into scapegoats for people to take out their anger. They are the ones to be condemned by the public. Over time we’ve built up a pedestal for celebrities to stand on, and we don’t realize that they are human just like us at their core. We expect them to be their best: their best performance in a movie, their best song in an album. It’s just not realistic. We want to see a faultless human, but the truth is they don’t exist.

Does this mean we should forgive people like Ye (Kanye West—did his name change even accomplish anything besides making people more confused)?

Well, no. We got it right with Ye. He deserved it. However, there are a lot of other times when we grab our pitchforks and go after someone for making a human mistake. We have to learn how to separate major from minor offenses (i.e. James Charles sending explicit photos to minors SHOULD get him arrested and we SHOULD NOT be talking about the validity of someone being transgender).

My columns are titled “Celebrity Stupidity” because the topics revolve around something stupid surrounding a celebrity. This isn’t going to change going forward. But what will change is my focus. Instead of writing about pettier topics, I am going to focus on what I believe matters.

This means I am going to write a lot more stories critiquing the internet when they are wrong (they are wrong a lot). I have already started this by defending celebrities like Mr. Beast and Chris Tyson, but I plan on continuing this. Not only just criticizing the internet but also criticizing celebrities who truly need it: like our Kanyes of the world.