BULLYING IN THE NAME OF SOCIAL JUSTICE: A Sign of the Times.
First, the background. The Times article focuses on two high school seniors – Mimi Groves, who is white, and Jimmy Galligan, who has a white father and African American mother – who grew up in the well-to-do Northern Virginia town of Leesburg. Groves thought her years of hard work had paid off last May when she earned a spot on the University of Tennessee’s national champion cheerleading squad.
Her world crumbled a few weeks later when, ironically, she joined the social justice caravan by urging her Instagram followers to “protest, donate, sign a petition, rally, do something” in support of Black Lives Matter following George Floyd’s death.
Groves’ Instagram post infuriated Galligan, who commented: “You have the audacity to post this, after saying the N-word.”
Later that afternoon, the Times reports, “Mr. Galligan, who had waited until Ms. Groves had chosen a college,” posted a three-second video Groves made in 2016, as a 15-year old, upon receiving her learner’s permit. “I can drive, niggah,” she said joyfully into the camera, echoing the idiom of hip-hop culture so familiar to her generation.
A national controversy ensued. The Tennessee cheer squad booted Groves, who subsequently withdrew from the university under mounting pressure. She is now taking remote classes at a community college.
The Times does not tell its readers that this is a textbook case of cyberbullying, which the U.S. government defines as “sending, posting, or sharing negative, harmful, false, or mean content about someone else … causing embarrassment or humiliation.”
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The tragedy of Mimi Groves is alarming because it reflects the dangerous mindset the radical left that is ascendant in America. The punishment meted out to her by the University of Tennessee and others demonstrates the triumph of ideology over reason and compassion. The efforts by the Times to legitimize these actions provide further proof of how many of our nation’s most influential institutions have embraced bullying as a form of justice.
Flashback: NYT Publisher Cautioned Trump in Meeting That ‘Enemy of the People’ Label ‘Will Lead to Violence.’ And as we’ve since discovered, the enemy of the people wasn’t kidding around:
