Earlier this week, The New York Times published a story about a biracial teen who held onto a video of a then 15-year-old White teenage girl saying the “N-word”, then released it to destroy her life right as she was getting accepted into college. Of course, the weak, feckless college rescinded her admission.
There are so many issues with this entire thing. First of all, why is the New York Times in essence providing free PR for a teen who is basically destroying another teen. Why is this worth noting for the “paper of record?”
As the great Robby Soave says in Reason:
Everyone roughly 25 and older should thank their lucky stars that they completed adolescence before the age of social media and ubiquitous camera phones, because the country’s most important newspaper apparently thinks it is appropriate to shame teenagers over their juvenile behavior. This is the very worst aspect of cancel culture—the burning desire to hold people accountable for mistakes they made as kids, even if they have long since learned their lesson and grown past them—and the Times has fully embraced it.
As I said on Fox News earlier this week when I commented on this story, this is not about racial slurs, or racial reckonings, or any other buzzwords the left will try to throw out to justify their monstrous behavior: this is about how far cancel culture has brought down our collective morality as a country.
It’s not right to destroy people for mistakes they made as teenagers, and thank GOD I got through my teen years before social media. We all make mistakes. We should all be given the opportunity to move forward and move on. But the cancel culture mob will not stop until everyone is destroyed and the ground is salted on the collective earth of our American empathy. The story itself is sad, but that our culture made it into a national obsession is downright scary.
