Reply to Harvard Rescinds Admission for Parkland Student Over ‘Offensive’ Comments

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Everyone who is alright with this should have all of their writings, going back to their mid teens, scrutinized for anything offensive.

The only way some people learn is taste their own medicine.[/quote]

Look, the flip side to being a high profile person is that your stuff gets more attention. So this kid decided to become a conservative pundit who advocated for gun rights and joined controversial right wing groups, and hung out with Trump and Melania. He built himself a pretty big platform.

The good thing about having a big platform is opportunities open up to you, and you get to have some influence on causes you believe in. You get into Harvard!

The bad thing about having a big platform is that people dig into your past to look for stuff and then write newspaper articles about it. The easy way to be able to say dumb stuff as a teenager is not to go be a big time public figure, with all the attendant opportunities that comes with it. But once you go out and become a public figure, you have to understand that things you've done may be excavated - and if one of the things you've done is say horrible things in order to be provocative and offensive with your friends, then you'd better d*mn well have a good explanation. You'd better be prepared to help people see why these don't disqualify you from the glories that you thought were yours.

By and large, people don't care about the dumb things that most people have said and done. Those who open themselves up to the public eye are in a different situation.

I would say this story is somewhat comparable to Trump's defense sec nominee - whose domestic violence allegations probably would have stayed pretty quiet had he not accepted the nomination: https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/trumps-defense-nominee-addresses-violent-incident-between-ex-wife-son-amid-fbi-vetting-process/2019/06/18/e46009de-190b-11e9-a804-c35766b9f234_story.html?utm_term=.499b6a624bde

You can avoid a lot of your past by not walking out on the public stage. If you do walk out on the public stage, people will care what you've done.[/quote]

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