The hero we deserve. As the nation prepared for my birthday (which happens, obviously, to coincide with July 4th weekend), a 22-year-old midwestern transplant to New York City made the mistake of posting a jokey, exasperated tiktok about his new neighborhood in the South Bronx, where he couldn’t find a grocery store. He waved his hands around his local bodega — New York City’s answer to the 7-11 — laughed, and declared simply, obviously, casually, that this was not a grocery store. He further made the mistakes of 1) being an attractive gym guy, 2) speaking in a kind of frat boy drawl, and 3) uttering the unforgivable words “Whole Foods.” The internet lost its mind. This was gentrification. This was patriarchy. This was a technically speaking very hot person who made us jealous.

Burn the witch.

A mob formed, and righteous justification for the mob was immediately provided by a TikTok influencer named Dutch, who published a response video about the unknown gym guy to his 1.4 million social justice-obsessed followers (close to a million views by the time he removed the post this morning). The response itself went viral, providing what would become the go-to language invoked by anti-bros for the duration of the mob assault. The problem, Dutch argued, was this foreigner’s attitude. Why wasn’t he integrating into the local “culture,” here insanely defined as shitty stores and dirty streets? And how dare he make fun of the bodegas we rely on (editor’s note: Dutch shops at Trader Joe’s). We can not have some asshole from the Midwest move to our city and complain about the lack of grocery stores, which is an extremely offensive thing to call a problem given the fact that our dearth of grocery stores is, actually, a famously very big problem!