SALT LAKE CITY — For a few shining days, he was Iowa’s most beloved philanthropist, a 24-year-old casino worker who raised more than $1 million for charity after his plea for beer money went viral.
Then offensive old tweets were uncovered, and Carson King lost his beer and his halo.
But unlike others who have lost jobs and reputations in similar circumstances, King is emerging as a sympathetic figure, in part because of how he handled the space between sudden fame and sudden infamy. In fact, his story is bigger than the sum of his headlines, and King may ultimately be known as the man who made America confront cancel culture.
“This is a wake-up call moment,” said Helen Andrews, a writer and editor in Washington D.C. who was widely acclaimed for an essay called “Shame Storm,” published in First Things earlier this year.
Andrews is among people who were appalled by what happened to King after a newspaper reporter discovered a pair of racist tweets he shared when he was in high school. The article focused on how King’s homemade sign asking for beer money turned into a million-dollar fundraiser for a children’s hospital, but it was the tweets that got the most attention, and Anheuser-Busch quickly cut ties with the young man it had just dubbed an “Iowa legend.”
In the past, Andrews said, a regrettable phrase or opinion had a relatively short life, thanks to the human tendency to forget, something that the internet does not do.
“Shame is now both global and permanent, to a degree unprecedented in human history.”
“Shame is now both global and permanent, to a degree unprecedented in human history. No more moving to the next town to escape your bad name. However far you go and however long you wait, your disgrace is only ever a Google search away,” she wrote in her essay.
The treatment of King, who was originally lauded for his generosity, is as horrific as the remarks he made as a teen, many people have said, while criticizing the Des Moines newspaper that reported on the tweets.
“Hey, this Carson King guy raised $1 million for a children’s hospital. Let’s see if we can find anything bad he might have posted as a teenager and spoil this kindness for everyone!” Carol Roth, a Chicago businesswoman and podcaster, said on Twitter, where the hashtag #standwithCarson has been trending.
The King case raises the perennial question of whether it’s fair for society to continually punish an otherwise upstanding adult for something wrong he or she did long ago. The criminal justice system often says not, setting time limits for when a case can be brought to trial. Similarly, Chapter 7 bankruptcy disappears from a person’s credit record after 10 years.
But the case also evokes a famous utterance made by a man who drew in the sand before a crowd that wanted to stone a woman for adultery. “Let those without sin cast the first stone,” Jesus said.
“Somewhere out there is a stone with each of our names on it because no one currently walking the Earth has never said something that someone would find offensive. Casting the first stone is, by its nature, a mark of poor character and evidence of little reflection,” said Marianne Jennings, professor emeritus of legal and ethical studies in business at Arizona State University.
And, as it turned out, King wasn’t the only one who had exhibited poor judgment in years past.
A quick turn of events
Just two weeks ago, Carson King was a private citizen whose main concern was his lack of money for beer. So he had the idea to hand-letter a funny sign, writing “Busch Light supply needs replenished” with his Venmo address, and he took it to the Sept. 14 football game between the University of Iowa and Iowa State.
ESPN was there filming, and when a shot of the sign was aired, people started sending King money. When the account topped $600, King decided he would donate everything that came in — minus the cost of some beer — to the University of Iowa Stead Family Children’s Hospital, and his proud mother posted about her son’s decision on Facebook.
After that, local media started calling, and both the brewing company and Venmo said they’d match donations, which ultimately passed $1 million when other businesses kicked in. For a while, the maker of Busch Light also saw King as a brand ambassador.
“The company quickly jumped at the opportunity to not only match King’s donation but also to supply him a year’s worth of beer — 60 cans of beer a month for 12 months for a total of 720 cans — branded with his face and proclaiming King an “Iowa Legend,” Aaron Calvin wrote in a profile of King for the Des Moines Register.
But that profile also revealed that King’s Twitter feed contained two racist jokes posted in 2013, when King was 16 years old. Despite an apology in which King wrote “I am embarrassed and stunned to reflect on what I thought was funny when I was 16 years old,” Anheuser-Busch announced that King would not be getting his free beer.
The newspaper published an article by its executive editor, Carol Hunter, explaining the decision to include the information in an otherwise positive story.
“Eventually, Register editors decided we would include the information, but at the bottom of the story. We thought we should be transparent about what we had found, but not highlight it at the top of the story or as a separate story,” Hunter wrote. She noted that King had thanked the newspaper for its “kind” coverage.
The saga took a surprising turn, however, when King’s supporters discovered that Calvin, the reporter who wrote the profile, had offensive tweets on his Twitter feed, too.
And King’s supporters also turned on Anheuser-Busch, questioning the values of a company that once had “The perfect beer for removing ‘no’ from your vocabulary for the night” printed on its labels.
A ‘breakdown of charity’?
Writing for National Review Online earlier this month, Fred Bauer described America’s “cancel culture” as the urge to destroy art made by people who have done something “problematic” and to take away their platforms of expression or their jobs. He said that “it’s hard to shake the feeling that part of what’s involved in cancel culture is a breakdown in personal charity.”
“The idea that someone should be expunged from society for holding controversial (or, frankly, even objectionable) ideas can have troublesome implications,” Bauer wrote. “We are all of us flawed people, and part of living in brotherhood with others involves trying to see the virtues in others — to not let errors obscure the personhood of another.”
To take down King in this way was also especially brutal, coming as it did in a time in which he was actively doing good, Jennings said.
“In my mind, the young man came a long way in a short time. He went from hitting people up for donations for beer to the realization that such a project may have been slightly vapid and the use of the money a bit hedonistic. That’s not bad progress for a party animal, albeit a creative one.
“So, I look at his past sins that got all the heads of hair on fire and wonder if we might, through our mob punishment, actually deal out a setback for someone who made progress in front of us; he found it within himself to do a good thing,” she said.
The King case is unusual in that the newspaper’s decision to write about King’s tweets not only smeared one person, but others involved peripherally. Ed Stetzer, executive director of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College in Illinois, and the author of “Christians in the Age of Outrage,” says that cancel culture and its corollary, payback culture, creates a “circular firing squad” where everyone is shooting barbs at each other.
“It used to be 15 minutes of fame; now everyone one has 15 minutes of infamy,” Stetzer said.
If negative information is relevant to a news story, it could be justifiable, but Stetzer said he doesn’t believe it was in this case, adding, “Maybe 16 years of age is not the best standard to hold us all accountable to. There was a whole lot of stupid I was doing at 16,” he said.
Andrews, the writer in Washington D.C., said that while she believes the newspaper was wrong to mention the tweets, she also wouldn’t want to see the reporter fired for a similar offense. (The Register said Sept. 25 that it is “aware of reports of inappropriate social media posts by one of our staffers, and an investigation has begun.”)
Not only has the everlasting memory of the internet made old sins visible, but Andrews believes media standards have changed as well. “There used to be a hard rule in media about treating people in the public different from private individuals,” she said. King, she said, “got the public-figure rules applied to him just long enough to ruin his life.”
“That’s a bad idea,” she said.
The good news, for the children’s hospital that was the beneficiary of King’s largesse, is that they will still receive the money. Anheuser-Busch, on the Twitter handle @BuschBeer tweeted Wednesday, “To reaffirm, we stand by our commitment to match the donations raised through the end of the month for the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics.”
It’s unclear whether the brand will suffer from outraged Iowans who are standing by King, and whether the newspaper reporter will be disciplined for posts. King, meanwhile, is being praised for his respectful words toward the newspaper and what appears to be an expression of genuine remorse. “Carson King is very sympathetic; he has done a wonderful thing with his brief moment of fame, and when he got blindsided by this controversy, he handled it exceptionally well,” Andrews said. “He’s been such a stand-up guy throughout all of this.”
“If you did two things — turn the other cheek, and let him who is without sin cast the first stone — you’d have a lot less cancel culture and a lot less outrage.”
For his part, King continues to raise money, saying he hopes to have collected $2 million for the hospital by month’s end. Meanwhile, the governor has proclaimed Sept. 28 as “Carson King Day,” the Register reported.
As for how Americans can get past the “circular firing squad,” Stetzer said users of new technology could benefit from words of wisdom from 2,000 years ago.
“If you did two things — turn the other cheek, and let him who is without sin cast the first stone — you’d have a lot less cancel culture and a lot less outrage,” he said.