In 1954, Joseph Welch asked Sen. Joseph McCarthy, "Have you no sense of decency?"  Someone needs to ask this of leftists regarding their cancel culture.  The latest example of their revered cancel culture is a New York Times article approvingly profiling a boy who destroyed a classmate's aspirations because, four years before, in a private video, she used a racial slur common in that generation's music.

The Times went to Leesburg, Virginia, a place that had slavery 155 years ago, before anyone named in the Times story was born.  Two residents are Jimmy Galligan, 18, who has a black mother and a white father, and Mimi Groves, 19, who is white.

Four years ago, when Groves was 15 and had just gotten her learner's permit, she sent a friend a three-second Snapchat video in which she said, "I can drive, n-----."  That word is a staple in the rap music kids listen to and is associated with "cool" rappers.  A preening 15-year-old would feel cool using it.

A word about young teenagers: Their brains are unformed, and their impulse control is limited.  As they near 18 or 19, they start gaining genuine maturity, and with it comes sympathy, empathy, and self-control.

Here's something else about teens: in packs, they're mean, and high school is all about pack dynamics.  Teens desperately want to fit in, and, because the pack mentality has a feral edge, they gain popularity and form allegiances by putting others down (a staple of every teen drama on TV for decades).  Teens attack anything "different," whether looks, race, religion, sexual identity, etc.

My generation learned to be tough and to give as good as you got. We all have battle scars, some more than others, but that's life.

In this generation, if you belong to a politically correct victim identity group, social media give you the nuclear weapon to destroy opponents who are not part of the politically correct victim identity group.  

Galligan detonated that weapon on Groves.  Last year, someone sent him that three-second video she sent to one friend.  "He tucked the video away, deciding to post it publicly when the time was right."  In other words, Galligan didn't act impulsively when he received a video he deemed offensive.  He didn't talk to Groves.  Instead, he planned to destroy her.

In May, Groves achieved her dream: admission to the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and a place on its champion cheerleading team.

In June, Groves, more mature and indoctrinated than in 2016, went on social media to urge people to support the Black Lives Movement.  To her surprise, though, people started insulting her and calling her a hypocrite.

Galligan, who had held on to the three-second video for months until Groves got her college admission, had posted it.  It went viral, and hundreds of people allegedly began to demand that the University of Tennessee revoke its admission offer.  Think about that: hundreds of people tried to destroy someone about whom they knew nothing because of a four-year-old three-second video.

The U.T. administration acted with all the compassion and decency we've come to expect from leftist academic institutions.  The U.T. cheer team dropped Groves, and then the university, rather than revoking its offer, told Groves not to accept it.  Groves agreed to that corrupt diktat.

The Times explains that students at Galligan's and Groves's chi-chi suburban school routinely said mean things to black kids.  I'm not condoning saying racist things, but let me refer you to my point about teenagers: they're not nice.

Galligan, apparently having been mocked by one cohort of students, cold-bloodedly decided to destroy another.  He's proud that he "taught someone a lesson."

Those Times readers who support Galligan all make the same points.  Reviewing the comments, we learn that Groves's life isn't ruined because she's "white and her family is well off"; she's older than Emmett Till and Trayvon Martin were, so it's fine for her to suffer; she didn't publicly apologize for a word she used four years before in a video sent privately; and she "perpetuated a hostile environment" with a four-year-old private video.

Some people, however, had the decency to note that, regardless of Groves's behavior, Galligan's was worse: unforgiving, spiteful, immature, and vengeful.

Galligan has a YouTube channel, which is a reminder that he, like many teenage boys, is very immature.  A healthy society would chastise him for his cruelty, not celebrate and validate it.  We don't live in a healthy society.

I hope, very much, that when Galligan's brain finally does mature, he has the decency to feel guilty about the terrible wrong he did someone who said a stupid thing in private when she was 15 but who never harmed him and had clearly matured beyond that kind of thinking.

(For more people whose lives the social media mob ruined, check out this John Hawkins post.)

Image: Jimmy Galligan.  YouTube screen grab.