The NYT recently ran an approving story about a white girl who had her admission to a college revoked because she used the N-word in a Snapchat video. Take heed, because this is the Orwellian police state the left wants to impose on all of us.
The girl, Mimi Groves, apparently made a 3-second video where she exclaimed “I can drive, n—as!” after getting her learner’s permit and sent it to a friend over Snapchat.
Ms. Groves said the video began as a private Snapchat message to a friend. “At the time, I didn’t understand the severity of the word, or the history and context behind it because I was so young,” she said in a recent interview, adding that the slur was in “all the songs we listened to, and I’m not using that as an excuse.”
So, she made a video as a high school freshman where she spoke the forbidden N-word. Not to insult a person or a race, but as a shout-out to her friends just like all the cool people in rap culture do. To be clear, this was a culturally insensitive and unwise thing to do. The kind of dumb thing pretty much every 15-year old kid on the planet does. But it is hardly evidence she is a racist person. It must be part of a larger pattern of behavior, right?
“It honestly disgusts me that those words would come out of my mouth,” Mimi Groves said of her video. “How can you convince somebody that has never met you and the only thing they’ve ever seen of you is that three-second clip?”
Nope. That’s it. No other quotes. No accusations from classmates or friends. Nothing. That 3-second slice of her life, never even intended for anyone but her friend, is the entire justification for ruining this poor girl’s life. But how could a trivial 3-second video have such dire consequences? Enter the “hero” of the story.
Jimmy Galligan was in history class last school year when his phone buzzed with a message. Once he clicked on it, he found a three-second video of a white classmate looking into the camera and uttering an anti-Black racial slur.
Most people would delete something like that and not think twice about it. Others might tell the person who sent it to knock it off. Or, if you were really upset by it, confront the person who made the video. But that’s not good enough for the “Woke!” They demand justice: swift and brutal. Alert the authorities!!!
He had brought the issue up to teachers and administrators but, much to his anger and frustration, his complaints had gone nowhere.
The article doesn’t say what sort of redress Mr. Galligan was seeking, but a couple days in the pillory seems like a bare minimum. Luckily, our hero doesn’t give up so easily. Heads needed to roll.
“I wanted to get her where she would understand the severity of that word,” Mr. Galligan, 18, whose mother is Black and father is white, said of the classmate who uttered the slur, Mimi Groves. He tucked the video away, deciding to post it publicly when the time was right.
So, instead of dropping the matter, Mr. Galligan decided to hold on to the video to release at a later date when it could do the most personal damage to Ms. Groves. A sane person might find this to be sadistic, creepy, and stalker-like. To the “Woke!” left, this is what justice looks like. To conceal how completely arbitrary Mr. Galligan’s vindictiveness really is, the NYT author goes on for several paragraphs about how backwards and racist the schools in Leesburg, Virginia are. So while Mimi Groves might not have done a damn thing to Jimmy Galligan, he has a legitimate beef with all of society and was completely justified in exacting his small amount of revenge on her. Or so the Times would have you believe.
Mr. Galligan, who had waited until Ms. Groves had chosen a college, had publicly posted the video that afternoon…
By that June evening, about a week after Mr. Floyd’s killing, teenagers across the country had begun leveraging social media to call out their peers for racist behavior.
And so an online mob, already whipped into a frenzy over the George Floyd incident, came after a teenage girl they knew literally nothing about.
“We just needed it to stop, so we withdrew her,” said Mrs. Groves, adding that the entire experience had “vaporized” 12 years of her daughter’s hard work. “They rushed to judgment and unfortunately it’s going to affect her for the rest of her life.”
That’s a steep price to make someone pay for 3 seconds of indiscretion. Was it really worth it?
For his role, Mr. Galligan said he had no regrets. “If I never posted that video, nothing would have ever happened,” he said…
“I’m going to remind myself, you started something,” he said with satisfaction. “You taught someone a lesson.”
Maybe Mr. Galligan is right? Maybe this was the only way to get Mimi Groves to see the error in her ways? Yeah, not so much.
One of Ms. Groves’s friends, who is Black, said Ms. Groves had personally apologized for the video long before it went viral. Once it did in June, the friend defended Ms. Groves online, prompting criticism from strangers and fellow students. “We’re supposed to educate people,” she wrote in a Snapchat post, “not ruin their lives all because you want to feel a sense of empowerment.”
BTW, “you taught someone a lesson” is how the Times ends their story. It sure seems like Mimi had already learned the “lesson” that Mr. Galligan claims he was trying to teach her. Could it be his real motivation was social justice brownie points, and maybe a sadistic desire to wield power over someone and inflict pain?
Awww… poor little white girl. She still has her privilege. She’ll be fine.
anonymous Twitter commenter on this story, demonstrating that famous leftwing compassion
Never once does the Times’ article question whether Ms. Groves deserved the pain, humiliation, and hardship heaped onto her. It is fascinating how differently the “Woke!” left and conservatives/classical liberals see this story. In the classic liberal view, this story exposes a horrible injustice where a random person arbitrarily had their life ruined to satisfy an online mob and create an atmosphere of fear and intimidation. Woke leftists see this as an overdue reckoning for a white person who has unjustly enjoyed a life of privilege at the expense of people of color and a message to society that change must occur.
I personally find the “Woke!” view disgusting and antithetical to everything this country is supposed to stand for. If we are ever to achieve the classical liberal dream of a colorblind society, we need to end the toxic identity politics of the left.