Teach your children well


The family of Parker Mustian clearly had not heard that great song by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young (see below). PZ brought this young man’s story to my attention.

Parker Mustian, a 16-year-old former student at Cardinal Newman high school in Columbia, South Carolina was arrested by local law enforcement officers last month after he appeared in a pair of racist “public service announcements” that were circulated among students at his school.

Mustian is further alleged to have threatened to “shoot up” the Catholic school following his expulsion last month.

“Howdy, I’m Parker Mustian and I hate black people,” the teen begins in the first clip. “They’re the worst. They’re stinky and they just suck. They’re just bad people.”

And it gets even worse.

It turns out that Mustian is the son and grandson of prominent South Carolina figures.

But as I read the linked source article, one thing jumped out at me.

Sources close to Mustian’s family tell us the young man is not a hateful person by nature, but was part of a group of boys who made videos purely for “shock value.”

“The idea was to see who could be the most outlandishly, ridiculously offensive,” the source told us. “They weren’t being serious.”

It doesn’t matter if they were ‘being serious’ or not. The problem is the entire idea of competing to see who can be “the most outlandishly, ridiculously offensive” just for the sake of its “shock value”. Someone who thinks that is acceptable behvaior is clearly someone whose mind has been thoroughly warped and has become a hateful person. Minimizing it with a ‘boys will be boys’ attitude tells me that the people around him have seriously warped values too.

Here’s the song I mentioned at the top for the few who have not heard it, performed live minus Neil Young.

Comments

  1. johnson catman says

    Just look at those three guys with acoustic guitars (CSN). Neil Young came in with his electric guitar and blew the whole thing wide open.

  2. Ridana says

    @ Marcus: yes, and also gross and viciously misogynistic. It’s called “pornogrind” for good reason. Even the song titles are hideous. I’m not going to give examples. Like Mustian, they claim it’s all just a joke, but Betts’ bandmate said he was shocked, shocked that Betts apparently wasn’t in on the joke.

  3. blf says

    Imagine what would have happened if he were black….

    Or Muslim; e.g., If the El Paso shooter had been Muslim …:

    […]
    If the El Paso shooter had been a Muslim, the entire Muslim American community would be blamed for the actions of this one person.

    If the El Paso shooter had been a Muslim, the president [sic] would be lobbing accusations such as “Islam hates us” in the direction of Muslims and not lecturing the public about video games.

    If the El Paso shooter had been a Muslim, we would have a Muslim ban on immigration to this country. More precisely, we would have an expanded Muslim ban on immigration to this country.

    If the El Paso shooter had been a Muslim, the national security infrastructure would penetrate the Muslim American community. Mosques would be monitored. Informants would be contracted. Spies would be deployed. Rush judgements would soon be reached. Then, years later, the convictions built on bad evidence and on paying informants more than $200,000, would be vacated. That’s what happened in Lodi, California, just last week, when the case against Hamid Hayat, who has been in prison since 2006, collapsed.

    If the El Paso shooter had been a Muslim, the gun lobby and its partisans would offer arguments like “blaming guns for terrorist shootings is like blaming airplanes for Sept 11.” They would argue that more access to guns is needed to protect us from dangerous Muslims.

    If the El Paso shooter had been a Muslim, [… many more nasty things…]

    If the El Paso shooter had been a Muslim, a lot of things would change, though not really for the better. At first, things would get worse for Muslim Americans. But then they’d get worse for everyone.

    But the El Paso shooting suspect is not a Muslim, so nothing will change. And that outcome, too, is worse for everyone.

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