This week, I covered a lovely piece in Marie Claire, about the Altadena Girls charity which was set up in the wake of the Southern California wildfires. The MC piece had interviews with the teenager who started the charity and her stepfather, and they both spoke about how much it meant to them to have the Duchess of Sussex’s support, not to mention the Archewell team helping them out behind-the-scenes. I wrote, in that post: “The criticism of Meghan for volunteering in her hometown during a huge natural disaster was always unhinged, and it never had any basis in reality. It was actually a test case of the virulence of Deranger hate – they exposed themselves as unreasonable people who lost their sh-t over absolutely anything involving Meghan.”

I maintain that the “negative reactions” to Meghan’s volunteerism and do-gooding have completely exposed the Derangers for being completely and utterly unreasonable. Well, they just keep exposing themselves. Now they’re mad because Meghan made an Instagram video thanking Billie Eilish for sending merchandise to a teenage wildfire victim. The Daily Mail’s headline: “Should Meghan Markle learn how to do a good deed without broadcasting it on social media? Fans point out neither Adam Levine nor Billie Eilish have shared how they ALSO helped the same 15-year-old wildfire victim.” We haven’t seen this kind of panicked Daily Mail headline since the Sussexes popped up in Jamaica unexpectedly last year.

Meghan Markle has drawn criticism for posting a ‘nauseatingly contrived’ and ‘actressy’ social media post which seemed to congratulate herself for helping a 15-year-old LA wildfire victim. The Duchess of Sussex, 43, uploaded a video to Instagram on Tuesday which detailed how she helped the girl after she met her when visiting the burnt-down area of Altadena a few weeks ago. Appearing candidly in jeans and minimal make-up, she described how the only thing the young music fan had been looking for in her destroyed home was a T-shirt from the singer Billie Eilish – but it had been turned to ‘ash’.

Meghan ended her short video with a big smile and the comment she was going to email the young fan’s mum to tell her the good news. But some commentators have questioned the motive of Meghan sharing her minor good deed on social media in the backdrop of such tragic effects.

A check of the Instagram pages of Billie Eilish, 23, Adam Levine, 45, and Behati Prinsloo, 36, revealed that none of those stars felt the need to share their efforts to help the young girl. However, Meghan’s decision to share her efforts with her 1.6million followers led to a slew of news articles around the world about her philanthropy.

Author and editor Alexander Larman wrote in The Spectator: ‘The disaster has attracted a small but vocal number of people who ostensibly have offered their time and resources to provide much-needed assistance – but in reality seem more interested in creating #content to share on their social media. Meghan Markle, predictably enough, belongs to that category.’

The writer later added: ‘Yet there is something so nauseatingly contrived, so fake – so actressy – about the little smiles to camera, the faux-excitement, the casual name-dropping of famous friends and, finally, the idea that some signed trinkets can in some way compensate for a truly epochal disaster. It screams of consumerism and fakery: both things, by now, that the Duchess has intimately associated herself with.’

Nile Gardiner, a former aide to Margaret Thatcher and foreign policy analyst, chimed in on Twitter/X: ‘Somehow Meghan Markle manages to turn the tragic LA wildfire disaster into a story about herself.’

[From The Daily Mail]

Just so we’re clear, when Harry and Meghan volunteered at an evacuation center and were only seen on camera in one local-news report, they were called “disaster tourists” and people had meltdowns because how dare H&M volunteer. Then Meghan volunteered with Altadena Girls and the CHARITY posted videos of Meghan, and she was once again criticized for… something something, making it all about Meghan. And now she’s being denigrated and insulted for making a simple thank-you video to Billie Eilish. If you listen to her story, you understand why she made the video – she clearly doesn’t have Billie’s contact info! She had to go through various third-parties to get a voice memo to Billie! The bit about “why did Meghan post this but Adam Levine didn’t??” Get a f–king life, OMG. They’re just totally crashing out over this, which shows that they’re hellbent on crashing out over every single thing she does and says.

Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Instagram.