You guys all remember Aaron Calvin, right?

Last weekend, a guy named Carson King made a viral appeal for beer money which brought in over $1 million. King donated the money to a children’s hospital.

Calvin is the noxious little BuzzFeed alum working for the Des Moines Register who wrote the story. His idea of doing a “background check” on King included going back into King’s tweets to when he was 16 and happened to quote a racially charged joke from the comedy show Tosh.o. This resulted in King being subject to a lot of public humiliation.

But Karma is real and, as it turned out, Calvin had a lot of very ugly stuff in his social media and it was from only a few years ago, after he was an adult. The Des Moines Register investigated him and today he was disappeared from that paper.

My colleague Brandon Morse takes the high road here and doesn’t want Calvin to be fired. I respectfully differ. I want him made unemployable for a period of years, if not his entire life. I want him working at a succession of minimum wage and menial and tedious and dirty jobs. And every day I want him to spend hours contemplating what kind of a pathetic douchebag he is. But enough of the good news. Because I have more good news.

Calvin has run back to BuzzFeed to play the victim. That’s right. A noxious little twerp who turned a guy’s life upside down for the sake of a few clicks is now the victim.

Soon, influential right-wing media figures also began circulating screenshots of Calvin’s own past offensive tweets that had been uncovered. In posts dating back to 2010, Calvin had used “gay” as a pejorative, written “fuck all cops,” and spelled out the word “niggas” twice when he was quoting others, including a Kanye West lyric. “Now that gay marriage is legal,” he wrote in one 2012 tweet, “I’m totally going to marry a horse.” Calvin told BuzzFeed News these were “frankly embarrassing” tweets that he “would not have published today,” but said they had been “taken out of context” and were being used to “wield disingenuous arguments against me.”

This is such a self-serving crock of sh**. The tweets were not taken out of context any more that were Carson King’s. There were no disingenuous arguments made against him. He’s a terrible person with no moral character whatsoever.

He was given the chance to apologize an decided that being petulant and snarking his employer was a great evolutionary strategy:

“I regret publishing that tweet now,” Calvin told BuzzFeed News.

No sh**? Really? You regret it “now?”

As soon as the story broke, Calvin said he began receiving a barrage of death threats. He said HR reps at Gannett, which owns the Des Moines Register, forbade him from speaking to the media and told him to leave his apartment for his own safety. They offered to put him up in a hotel, but he stayed with a friend instead. “I recognize that I’m not the first person to be doxed like this — this whole campaign was taken up by right-wing ideologues and largely driven by that force,” he said. “It was just a taste of what I assume that women and journalists of color suffer all the time, but the kind of locality and regional virality of the story made it so intense.” On Thursday, while he was speaking to police about the death threats, Calvin said he got a call from Gannett representatives. “They told me they were going to offer me an option — that I could resign or I could be fired — with no severance,” he said. “It was really a semantic difference, I guess, so I chose to be fired.”

He wasn’t doxxed. People simply did what he did to Carson King. And you didn’t suffer what “women and journalists of color suffer all the time,” you suffered what noxious, self-righteous douches suffer all to infrequently.

He also expressed his frustration about the “false narrative about me ‘canceling’ Carson.” “Carson was never in danger of being canceled — there was no attempt or intent to quote-unquote ‘cancel’ him,’” Calvin said. “He’s raised hundreds of thousands more dollars since this happened. The governor of Iowa declared a ‘Carson King Day.’”

I guess he forgot about the humiliation and Anheuser-Busch cutting ties with King. The only reason that King survived was the shot Calvin took at King was so pathetic and cheap that it offended the conscience of a nation.

Calvin said he’s still afraid to go out in public and is still staying at his friend’s house. He isn’t sure what he will do next, but hopes he can keep reporting. “I’m just taking it day by day,” he said. “I feel like I’m a good writer and a good reporter and I was doing my job to the best of my ability.” Calvin said he also still deeply believes in the “necessity of local journalism.” “Frankly, it’s really disappointing to me to be abandoned by my former employer,” he said. “I still in a lot of ways support the Register — I just wish they had believed in me.”

Screw him. I hope his misery lasts for years or decades. I hope people see him and point him out to their kids as an object lesson about the price of rampant douchebaggery as a life style choice. If any good comes of this maybe it will be that Calvin and his fellow travelers will discover that this stupidity cuts both ways and that they shouldn’t so eager to make rules for others with the idea that they won’t have to live by the same rules. Maybe, just maybe, some jerk-off at BuzzFeed will get ready to pull the trigger on some stupid stuff like this and pause for a second…and delete what they’ve written for fear of the crapstorm that may be heading their way. But I’m not counting on it.

Read the rest of RedState’s coverage of this incident

How The Des Moines Register’s Explanation of Their Actions Makes Everything So Much Worse

Their Rules: Des Moines Register Journo at Center of Carson King Tweet Controversy Gets Canceled

Des Moines Register Reporter Who Took Down Charitable Man Over Old Tweets Has Nasty Tweets Himself

Kira Davis: Cancel Culture Is Vile And The Des Moines Register Should Be Ashamed Of Themselves [Video]

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