Kyler Murray won the Heisman Trophy Sunday, which means his hard work has just made his biggest dreams come true, and that even bigger dreams are right around the corner.
Murray is only 21, and on the biggest day of his life, rather than celebrate this achievement, the media instead threatened his future by publishing a tweet Murray wrote as a child, as a 14 and 15-year-old.
His unpardonable sin?
Six years ago the teenager described someone as “queer.”
The media’s threat to Murray was obvious: Hey, that’s a nice football career you got there, be a shame if anything happened to it.
The blackmail was just as obvious: Apologize sincerely, do it right now, make us believe it, or we will ruin your future and probably take that trophy away from you.
Murray ended up apologizing, apologizing for something he did as a child, apologizing for using the word “queer” as a high school kid.
Welcome to the media’s moral Puritanism at its very worst — welcome to the High Religion of Woke, where the uptight assholes are in charge, where there is no forgiveness, where there are only threats of ruin and forced apologies.
We are all victims of — or will soon be victims of (because no one is safe) — a horrible generation of parents who failed to teach their now-horrible grown children one of life’s the most important lessons, and it goes like this: “Sticks and stones will break my bones but names can never hurt me.”
When people, even elite journalists, believed in free speech and free expression, we taught our children that for a whole host of reasons, but mainly so that they did not grow up to be uptight, unhappy, vindictive assholes.
You see, the simple but profound lesson of “Sticks and Stones” took away the power of others to hurt you with something as meaningless as words. This in turn prepared you for the real world where a thick skin, the ability to laugh at yourself, and the gift you give yourself by letting things go led to a much fuller life.
But look at what terrible parenting has created in the Woke Media Generation — a generation of journalists who confuse pretending to be offended with a sense of moral superiority, of tattletales running loose in a world where tattling is now considered a virtue, of merciless and malicious moralizers who equate their own self-worth to their ability to force an apology or threaten to take away everything someone’s worked for — even a young black man.
And let me be the first to welcome Kyler Murray, Kevin Hart, and all black men to the lower rungs on the victimization ladder.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.