The Rest of the Story: I’m reposting this essay from almost exactly a year ago because the Free Press has a disturbing update on Holden Hughes (“He Was Falsely Accused of ‘Blackface.’ It Derailed His Life.”), one of the boys whose 2017 selfie was used by an unidentified woke ethics villain to have the children tarred as racists during the George Floyd Freakout in 2020. That ethics villain was an ideological compatriot of my friends who are raving about MAGA and Trump today. That is their “side.”

He’s an adult now, but Holden’s life plans were seriously derailed when the private school he was attending expelled him, not because he really was wearing “blackface” in that photo (he and his friends were smeared with green anti-acne facial masks) but because the woke head of the school believed that appearances mattered more than reality. Last year, a successful law suit by his family against the school ended in a one million dollar verdict for him and another one of the boys. That was just money, however, the damage remained

Everyone should reflect on this cautionary tale (which the mainstream media scrupulously avoided reporting on, and you know why) when the Trump Deranged claim that progressives defend democratic values and deplore ideological bullying. The piece ends,

Last year, shortly after the lawsuit was settled, he started dating a girl he liked. On their second date, he told her about his past and after that, he said, she stopped responding to his texts. He told me that it’s hard to accept that “something completely out of my control kind of inhibits that relationship from going farther.” But he can’t change the past.

“It’s my life, and there’s no avoiding that. It made me who I am today.”

Throughout the entire ordeal of the last five years, Holden told me he would remind himself: “I know who I am. I know my values. I know the real story.” He knows the other story—the one that isn’t true—will continue to haunt him. “I don’t think it’s ever gonna leave me,” he said. But he wanted to speak to me because he believed that putting his story in print, knowing it would be on the internet forever, would be cathartic. For him, it is a chance to finally set the record straight, after trying to hide the lies for so long.

“I am not ashamed of anything that happened,” Holden said. “I have made a lot of mistakes in my life. I make them every single day, but doing an acne face mask in eighth grade was not one of them.”

Here is the post, from May 11, 2024:

Now get this: In 2017, three 14-year-old California teens, two of whom, Holden Hughes and Aaron Hartley, were about to begin attending St. Francis High School, a Catholic private school in Mountain view, were modeling anti-acne medicinal face masks that involved smearing dark green goo on their faces. (One of the boys had severe acne and his friends put the stuff on their own faces in an act of support). The teen who wasn’t headed to the private school snapped a selfie because the boys thought they looked funny. A similar photo taken a day earlier indicated that they had tried white medicinal face masks as well. 

A student at St. Francis found the image online and uploaded it to a group chat in June 2020. Not only was the George Floyd Freakout in full eruption, but the photo was circulated on the same day that recent SFHS graduates had posted on Instagram a satirical meme pertaining to Floyd’s demise, so the school was “triggered.” The gloriously woke student who decided to publicize the greenface photo claimed that the teens were using blackface; “another example” of rampant racism at the school, he posted, and urged everyone in the group chat to spread it throughout the school community—you know, to cause as much anger, division and disruption as possible.

I can’t find the name of that charming kid. He’ll probably be Governor of California some day.

Soon after this seed was planted, the Dean of Students at St. Francis Ray called the Hughes’s and Aaron Hartley’s’ parents to ask them if they were aware of the photograph. They explained that the teens had applied green facemasks three years earlier, long before the non-racial Minnesota incident that had no demonstrable racial significance and definitely no relevance to blackface. The parents added that the teens’ use of the acne medication had “neither ill intent nor racist motivation, nor even knowledge of what “blackface” meant.”

Never mind. The parents were contacted again the same day and told their sons were not no longer welcome at the school. When one of the boys’ fathers again insisted that his son was not wearing blackface, Principal Katie Teekell responded that her decision was not based on “intent,” but “optics” and “the harm done to the St. Francis community.”

Well will you look at that! A pure Niggardly Principle violation! [The First Niggardly Principle: “No one should be criticized or penalized because someone takes racial, ethnic, religious or other offense at their conduct or speech due to the ignorance, bias or misunderstanding by the offended party.”]

Later that month, the school’s attorney told the school’s families that the photograph projected “disrespect…so severe as to warrant immediate dismissal.” The school also cited the dismissal of Hughes and Hartley to deflect a protest by some parents who claimed the “greenface” episode was evidence of “kids participating in blackface and thinking that this is all a joke.”

What utter McCarthy-like assholes progressives were back then. Are they any better now?

This week, four years after the two boys’ parents sued the school, a jury delivered a $1 million verdict against St. Francis, with both Holden Hughes and Aaron Hartley being awarded $500,000 each along with a reimbursement of their tuition for their three years attending the school, for tuition, which was estimated to be $70,000 total for their three years attending the school. The verdict was based not on the First Amendment, as a private school isn’t legally required to allow free speech (though basic ethics should prevent the kind of wildly unjust punishment that took place in this case). A California Supreme Court ruling had held that private universities and schools including religious institutions are legally obligated to give students notice of charges and a fair opportunity to respond before discipline is imposed.

Good. Nonetheless, I don’t understand how any institution, and the officials of any institution, could justify behaving like Principal Katie Teekell did, freak-out or not, or worse, state outright that the students were being not only expelled but tarred as racists not because of what they had actually done or intended to do, but because someone might wrongly assume that their actions were motivated by racism.

Who thinks like that? I know California is Ground Zero for woke mind rot, but is it that bad over there? So bad that adults–educators!— would self-righteously jeopardize two students’ reputation just to signal their virtue and contrived indignation at a racial incident that wasn’t a racial incident? Is the school full of brutal zealots like this? Is St. Francis not a horrible mutation, but typical of where the plague of presumed racism and progressive persecution is taking the nation’s society and culture?

Teekell still has her job. How can that be? Decent, responsible parents should be picketing to have her sent packing to one of those lucrative California’s fast food jobs, or else they should pulling their vulnerable students out of that school so they won’t end up as monsters.

I don’t understand this story.

Or maybe I don’t want to…

Coda: A note on our despicably unethical journalists… so far, all of the coverage of this story has been in local news media (that couldn’t avoid it), conservative news sources like Fox News and the New York Post, and websites like Reason. Huh! Why do you think the political and partisan Left’s mouthpieces don’t think this story is “newsworthy”? It couldn’t be because this is a perfect example of why supporters of Donald Trump have reluctantly concluded that that extreme measures, and an extreme leader, is required to stop such cultural contagions…could it?