"Keeping Up With the Kardashians" debuted more than a decade ago as a reality sitcom featuring lighthearted shenanigans, not tonally far-off from a number of other family-oriented shows on celebrity suburbanites. Today, both the show and the clan have metastasized into a lightning rod, a cultural Rorschach test aggressively challenging our opinions on fame, family, aesthetics, and merit.

In 2007, "Kim Kardashian, Superstar" was nothing but a leaked sex tape featuring Paris Hilton's stylist and her B-list rapper boyfriend. Today, she's a superstar in earnest, the pioneer of social media-fueled fashion, and married to one of our generation's most influential rappers and producers. Half-sister Kendall Jenner became the highest-paid supermodel in the world, and Forbes just deemed Kylie Jenner the youngest self-made billionaire in human history.

Twelve years ago, the commentariat mocked them as gauche, nouveau riche, and slightly too curvy in a culture that celebrated wafer-thin, perennially childless actresses. Today they loathe them.

While Kardashian haters come a dime a dozen, none is more hysterical than Jameela Jamil, an actress who fancies herself an activist. She has lambasted the family as "double agents for the patriarchy" and a "terrible and toxic influence on young girls." Jamil is particularly obsessed that they built their brand on selling not just scientifically dubious products that promote beauty and weight loss but also their image as a whole.

But the Kardashians refuse to bend the knee to the outrage overlords. In a New York Times profile preceding the 16th season premiere, matriarch Kris Jenner addressed detractors.

"I don’t live in that negative energy space," Jenner told the Times. "Ninety percent of people will be really excited about the family and the journey and who we are."

Predictably, Jamil melted down online, claiming the family's "pockets are lined with the blood and diarrhea of teenage girls."

The one-way feud presents an amusing microcosm of how morality is enforced today: A rogue entity upends standards in a way that first attracts jeers, brewing contempt, and then outright ire, until the mob intervenes to demand fealty to the norms. Like them or hate them, the Kardashians revolutionized not just Hollywood's beauty standards but the business model as a whole, vertically integrating fashion from the factory to Instagram sales.

The Kardashians are happy warriors, as keen to double down in the face of the haters as President Trump or New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Honestly, that's the heroism Hollywood needs, even if it doesn't deserve it, to counterbalance the self-loathing spoilsports.