The Patriot Post® · Witch Hunter Hoisted by Own Petard

Carson King was just a regular guy. He held up a sign asking for money via Venmo to replenish his “Busch Light supply.” ESPN’s cameras picked it up during a Game Day broadcast, and he ended up with a million bucks … that he then donated to a children’s hospital in Iowa. Anheuser-Busch matched his donation.

But proving that no good deed goes unpunished, Aaron Calvin of the Des Moines Register decided to dig up old racist tweets from King’s account — tweets that a then-16-year-old kid had never deleted but that a now-24-year-old man held a press conference to publicly apologize for when he knew they’d be made public by the Register. No surprise, but that was too late for the wokescolds. Anheuser-Busch severed ties with King, though it upheld its donation promise.

Still, what goes around comes around. In the wake of Calvin’s intrepid journalism, other folks found racist and bigoted tweets on his account. He apologized for “not holding myself to the same high standards as The Register holds others,” but it wasn’t long before the Register fired him.

He insists, “I don’t think people’s past social media statements should be made to make blanket characterizations about them.” That’s a humble and wise sentiment, but then why did he choose to publish King’s old tweets rather than discreetly advise that he delete them? Calvin had to know exactly what would happen to King once those comments were made public.

Calvin certainly hasn’t learned his lesson, though. He now regrets his apology and blames not the Left’s cannibalistic social-justice movement for his plight, but … conservatives. “This whole campaign was taken up by right-wing ideologues,” he complained. “It was just a taste of what I assume that women and journalists of color suffer all the time, but the kind of locality and regional virality of the story made it so intense.”

Quite the contrary, it is conservatives who have been raked over the coals, losing jobs and reputations for not bowing to “progressive” dogma. We can understand that Calvin finds a dose of his own medicine to be distasteful, but his self-righteous arrogance is the epitome of what leftists insist is “social justice.”