Kids have always done stupid things they’d later regret. The difference is that only recently have the tender-yeared’s youthful indiscretions been documented on video so that three seconds of puerility could become three million via viewer repetition. But what’s more immature, a 15-year-old who records a few seconds of foolishness or a society that would scuttle her academic career path over it?
This is an apropos question after just such an incident has occurred involving a now “cancelled” college-age woman; a teen boy who catalyzed the cancelling; the New York Times, which glorified it; and a mob that effected it. As American Thinker reports:
The Times went to Leesburg, Virginia, a place that had slavery 155 years ago, before anyone named in the Times story was born. Two residents are Jimmy Galligan, 18, who has a black mother and a white father, and Mimi Groves, 19, who is white.
Four years ago, when Groves was 15 and had just gotten her learner’s permit, she sent a friend a three-second Snapchat video in which she said, “I can drive, n—–.” That word is a staple in the rap music kids listen to and is associated with “cool” rappers. A preening 15-year-old would feel cool using it….
My generation learned to be tough and to give as good as you got. We all have battle scars, some more than others, but that’s life.
In this generation, if you belong to a politically correct victim identity group, social media give you the nuclear weapon to destroy opponents who are not part of the politically correct victim identity group.
Galligan detonated that weapon on Groves. Last year, someone sent him that three-second video she sent to one friend. “He tucked the video away, deciding to post it publicly when the time was right.” In other words, Galligan didn’t act impulsively when he received a video he deemed offensive. He didn’t talk to Groves. Instead, he planned to destroy her.
Now, “Groves, a championship-winning cheerleader, was planning to attend the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, whose cheer team were reigning national champions. She was accepted into the team in May,” writes the Daily Mail, providing more detail.
“Weeks later, following the Memorial Day police killing of George Floyd in Minnesota … Groves urged people to ‘protest, donate, sign a petition, rally, and do something’ to help support the Black Lives Matter movement” in a June Instagram post, the paper also informs.
Much to Groves’ shock, what followed was that people began calling her a hypocrite and condemning her for having used the term “n***as” four years earlier. “As it would later transpire, Galligan had publicly posted the Snapchat video from four years ago to Instagram earlier that afternoon, having waited until she had selected a college,” the Mail tells us.
Within two days, Groves “was kicked off the university’s cheer team and forced to withdraw from UT under pressure from admission officials, citing hundreds of emails and phone calls from outraged former and current students,” the paper further writes.
(Surely, these lynch-mob members must themselves be paragons of virtue.)
As for Galligan, he’s very satisfied. “‘I’m going to remind myself, you started something,’” the Times quotes him as saying. “You taught someone a lesson.”
Of course, there is hypocrisy here, but the worst of it isn’t on Groves’ part. First, when used within the context in which the girl uttered the term, n***as is not meant as a slur. We’ve certainly been lectured about this enough by rap thugs and various black figures, who point out that in such a context the word means “bros” or “dudes.” Remember, Groves directed her comment at her friends.
This brings us to Groves’ remark, addressing the controversy, “that the slur was in ‘all the songs we listened to, and I’m not using that as an excuse.’”
Yeah, well, I am. As a non-white fellow I knew for a while in the Bronx once said, “If you don’t want white kids using the word, don’t put it in songs.”
Kids are sponges, soaking up whatever their culture inundates them with, even if moral effluent. I saw, for example, white teens in rural areas 25 years ago wearing baggy pants as they mimicked “gangsta’” subculture. So should it surprise anyone that they’d embrace the words with the wear?
(Some will now say that it’s different when blacks use the term, but, sorry, “We’re going to advance a race-based double standard” isn’t an argument.)
Yet while kids will instinctively absorb the culture, they also aren’t very culturally savvy and perhaps won’t understand every politically correct imperative. Yet, and this is where the true hypocrisy lies, the record companies and rap stars are a different matter.
They make countless millions off trashy songs replete with the n-word, and their careers and fortunes don’t get cancelled. But then the mob wants to destroy some young person, a “little guy,” who was simply emulating what these cultural influencers were modeling. Disgusting.
So if Galligan wanted to accomplish something, he should have aimed his fire upwards at the rich and powerful culture-destroyers, not their victims.
Yet while his multiple face piercings attest to how the n-word is the least of his problems, he’s not the biggest villain here. The cancelling was effected by not just a mob, but cowardly and callow pseudo-elites at the University of Tennessee and elsewhere who are more than happy to sacrifice another little lamb on their “woke” altar — so they won’t have to sacrifice anything (but their integrity).
Note also as they value-signal, that these are the same people who are fine with 300,000 black children killed yearly in their mothers’ wombs; with kids being told they can be the opposite sex; with illegals streaming across the border and committing crimes; and with a Sexual Devolution that ravages youths’ minds, hearts, and souls. So perhaps society’s moral compass is a tad askew.
But here’s a lesson from this story the pseudo-elites should learn, since it involves them. Leftists always eat their own. Note that Groves’ advocacy of BLM (and she once again was just embracing what was “cool”) didn’t save her. Politically correct pandering won’t save you, either, pseudo-elites, when the next wave of wokeness finds sin in your past.
There can be a price to be paid tomorrow for cowardice today.
