Carson King wanted to use his newfound fame for a good cause. Then, cancel culture came for him.
On Sept. 14, King appeared in the background of ESPN’s College GameDay pregame show. He held up a sign directing viewers to his Venmo account, asking them to send him beer money. King received thousands of dollars, yet only kept what he needed for one case of beer, and decided he would donate the rest to the University of Iowa Stead Family Children’s Hospital. He continued raising money even after that Saturday, and both Venmo and brewing company Anheuser-Busch offered to match the donations. In total, the effort has raised more than $1 million to date.
King sounds like a great guy, right?
Well, Anheuser-Busch will no longer have anything to do with the fundraising effort after tweets written by King when he was 16 years old resurfaced. Although many originally thought the Des Moines Register was the one to resurface the tweets (because they dug through his old tweets for their profile of King), the beer company apparently knew about them earlier in the day.
Ultimately, the incident shows the perils of cancel culture. Now, a children’s hospital is losing out on money because Anheuser-Busch bowed down to outrage mobs when they shouldn’t have.
Although King’s controversial tweets have been deleted and the general public did not see them, the Des Moines Register wrote, “A routine background check of King’s social media revealed two racist jokes, one comparing black mothers to gorillas and another making light of black people killed in the holocaust. The joke tweets date back to 2012, when King was a 16-year-old high school student.”
The Register reports that King thanked them for showing him the tweets, which he said made him “sick.”
“That’s not something that I’m proud of at all,” he told the paper. King also claimed his tweets were quoting segments of the TV show Tosh.0.
Is this kind of language acceptable in polite society? Absolutely not. However, there is a reason why children are treated differently than adults in society, and King was just a teenager at the time. And why does a viral act of charity require an exposé into someone’s personal past? It’s not like King is running for president.
Ironically, Twitter users then found old tweets from the Des Moines Register reporter who wrote the story, Aaron Calvin, in which he used racist and homophobic language.
I think you’ll discover that the internet already finished your investigation for you pic.twitter.com/qnpm4ewdrE
— Cooper Kupp SZN (@reddsix) September 25, 2019
Since he wants to dig past social media posts, let’s do the same thing about him and all the offensive stuff this Des Moines Register editor Aaron Calvin has posted in the past pic.twitter.com/VEBiq7ShzK
— Austin (@Austin_712) September 25, 2019
If everyone in America was judged by everything they did or said when they were 16 years old — both on and off social media — then in all likelihood, there would not be many people left in polite society.
The real loser in this situation is the University of Iowa Stead Family Children’s Hospital, which won’t receive further donations from Anheuser-Busch, although the company has committed to fulfilling the original donations it agreed to. The hospital does important work, including providing lifesaving treatment for micro-preemies which include viable babies which would be legal to abort in many states. Instead, these babies grow up to live full and happy lives thanks to the medical care they receive.
Hopefully, another beer company partners with King to match his donations, and he continues fundraising for such an important cause. Even if, for some bizarre reason, people don’t want to forgive King for what he said when he was a minor, everyone should still be supportive of his efforts to make the country a better place.
Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a freelance writer who has been published with USA Today, the Boston Globe, Newsday, ESPN, the Detroit Free Press, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Federalist, and a number of other media outlets.
