Cancel Culture Hits Rock Bottom
Just when you thought Cancel Culture could not stoop any lower, the Des Moines Reigster crashes through the wall like the Kool-Aid Man and says “Hold My Beer.”
The DMR decided it would be a worth their while to run a profile on Carson King, the Iowa State fan who made a sign for ESPN’s College GameDay saying “Busch Light Supply Needs Replenished” followed by his Venmo account. His account was flooded with over $1 million in donations to this beer fund. Instead of keeping this newfound fortune for himself, King donated the money to the University of Iowa Stead Family Children’s Hospital. Busch Light and Venmo have agreed to match he makes by the end of the month.
In their profile of King, which I will not link to because they do not deserve the clicks, the DMR reports that King had some racist social media posts from his days as a 16 year-old high school student. Busch has disassociated themselves from King as a result. King, for his part, when confronted with the posts, got out in front of the DMR story and apologized. He took the high ground with the DMR story and the DMR has used that as cover to excuse their own misdeeds.
King is only famous because he turned a joke into a million dollar donation to a children’s hospital. He could’ve kept the money for himself, paid off any loans he had, and done any number of things the average young person only dreams of, but instead donated the money to a worthy cause. And the DMR decided it was appropriate to dig up dirt from his past life.
In their tweet attempting to justify the matter, the DMR only made matters worse. They said reporter Aaron Calvin (more on him in a minute) conducted “a routine background check” as part of this profile. Why was a background check necessary? He is not running for office, he is not applying for a job at the CIA, he’s just a college football fan who, like all of us, has done something he regrets, but because we’ve never donated a million dollars to a children’s hospital, our dirty laundry does not get aired for the whole world to see.
The DMR also tried to justify their decision by saying King agrees with them and that he held a press conference prior to the story being run. Again King took the high road, that’s no excuse for both Calvin and his editor deciding to run this and the only reason King held that press conference prior to the DMR’s story was because he knew this information would be in there, so he got out in front of it.
They concluded by saying, “Reasonable people can look at the same set of fats and disagree on what merits publication. But rest assured such decisions are not made lightly and are rooted in what we perceive as the public good.” No. What is “the public good” that was served here?
Now to the contemptible Calvin. Immediately, Twitter started digging through his old tweets as part of this new form of Mutually Assured Destruction. Revealed in the retaliatory strikes were various racist, misogynist, and homophobic tweets from his past. And the media wonder why they are so despised. Calvin later deleted the tweets and apologized.
Mutually Assured Destruction is built on a paradox. During the Cold War it was said the only way to save human civilization from a nuclear war was to to build and maintain a credible nuclear deterrent that would ensure that no sane actor would ever dare start a war with you. The best way to maintain a credible nuclear deterrent is to design your nuclear weapons as if they would be used in war, but the paradox is that if it ever got to the point where you had to use them in a war, they where by definition not a credible deterrent.
We see this in the culture wars. Mutually assured destruction was not enough to prevent the DMR and Calvin from going after Carson King, so the anti-cancel culture forces fired their weapons in response. Time will tell if Calvin survives the counter-strike, but his credibility is shot forever and so is the DMR’s. May God forgive us, for we can’t seem to forgive each other.
