Stop Giving Your Money To Crappy People

We have now fallen into a bizarre and terrible cycle in the United States in which one side does something bad and the other side then does something similarly bad, then points to the fact that the first side did something bad as an excuse for doing it.

This is a problem. We used to call this “whataboutism.’

Now, people have misapplied the term whataboutism over and over and over in the political context. It is not whataboutism to point out double standards.

Whataboutism is when you do something wrong and instead of saying, “Yes, I did something wrong, but a double standard is being applied,” you say, “I didn’t do anything wrong at all, and it doesn’t matter if I did do something wrong because the other side did it.”

Let’s take this example. Hunter Biden is super-duper-duper corrupt and then somebody on the Right side of the aisle does something super-duper-duper corrupt, and then the Right side is called on and they say, “Well, yeah, but Hunter Biden did something super-duper-duper corrupt.”

That’s whataboutism, because it’s a non-sequitur. You can say there’s a double standard being applied by the same media that was willing to ignore and cover up Hunter Biden’s activity for years but now they’re going after, say, Team Trump. You can say that the media have been disproportionate in their coverage of corruption. That is a fair point.

It is not a fair point to say that corruption on one side of the aisle is justified by corruption on the other side of the aisle.

If you do that sort of stuff, then you end up in a bottomless spiral.

That bottomless spiral gets worse and worse because everybody reacts against the last bad thing that the other side did and uses it to justify what they are doing now. And then the other side responds, “Well, you just did something even worse. And so I’m going to do something even worse than that.”

The reality is that calling out double standards is a good thing if you wish to uphold a standard. But calling out double standards as an excuse for doing bad things is not calling out a double standard. It is justifying doing bad things.

WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show

Which brings us to the story of Shiloh Hendrix.

Shiloh Hendrix is a white woman who was caught on camera this week calling a five-year-old boy the N-word. According to the New York Post, Hendrix allegedly caught this five-year-old boy rifling through her bag at a playground in Rochester, roughly 90 minutes south of Minneapolis, and called him the N-word. Hendrix also has a troubled history with law enforcement, including DUI, disorderly conduct and brawling.

A black man filmed the incident and confronted her. When she was asked if she called the kid the N-word, she answered, “Yeah,” adding, “he took my son’s stuff.” She also reportedly repeatedly used the same slur against the man who recorded her.

A few things are happening here. First, a five-year-old kid was rifling through her stuff. Second, five-year-old kids do bad things all the time. They can be wonderful and also extremely naughty and troublesome; they’re small kids. Third, calling a little black kid the N-word is a bad thing to do.

If you have trouble with the idea that calling a little black kid the N-word is a bad thing to do, I don’t understand why. That seems absolutely uncontroversial to me. 

The reason this has become a national issue is because this woman was videoed and people started targeting her on social media. The kid’s parents, who are from Somalia, said the boy is autistic. The parents were apparently supervising three other kids on the playground at the time of the incident.

“During the confrontation, Hendrix allegedly told him he and his wife shouldn’t have more children because they are a drain on the welfare system,” The New York Post reported.

Hendrix wrote in a crowdsourcing post:

Another man, who we recently found out has had a history with law enforcement, proceeded to record me and follow me to my car. He then posted these videos online which has caused my family, and myself, great turmoil. My SSN has been leaked. My address, and phone number have been given out freely. My family members are being attacked. My eldest child may not be going back to school. Even where I exercise has been exposed.

Hendrix asked for the internet to provide her with money so that she could move, and within days she had raised over $500,000.

To expose every aspect of someone’s life, even if they have called a child the N-word, to publish their Social Security number, their address, to try to destroy their life, is wrong, period.

But to raise half a million dollars in response also isn’t right.

This all became a scandal because people justified giving Hendrix money by using the case of Karmelo Anthony, the 17-year-old black teenager from Frisco, Texas, who stabbed a white teenager, Austin Metcalf, to death. Anthony admitted the stabbing to police. A fundraising site raised over $500,000 for Anthony’s defense fund; some of the funds were supposed to go toward paying for a secure location for the family to live.

None of this stuff justifies the other. None of them are equivalent, either. Alleged murder is by far the worst. Giving money to alleged murderers is second. Third on the list, and certainly not comparable to murder, is calling someone the N-word. And fourth on that list would be giving money to somebody who used the N-word.

But none of these things justify each other. And this is part of the terrible slide into the bottomless pit of garbage that the United States seems to be embroiling itself in; the idea that you have to give money to Shiloh Hendrix because people gave money to Karmelo Anthony.

You don’t.

I truly understand the people on social media who are justifiably furious that the news media seems to treat calling a child the N-word the equivalent of alleged murder.

But if you are calling on people to do less moral things with reference to other people doing immoral things, that’s not doing anything productive. That is making the world a worse place, one step at a time.

And there is no bottom to that pit, because the next time somebody does something terrible with the races reversed, somebody will raise $1 million.

This is how you end up with a body politic that has no level of trust in one another. It’s how you destroy the social fabric.

It’s the same thing as your child breaking a rule and then saying their sibling also broke the rule, so it was okay to do it. That’s kid logic and there’s no reason to use it. It is not moral. It does not make the world a better place. It does not make America stronger.

We can call out the media for treating the two stories as similar. They’re not.

But if you can’t at least say that these are bad things, that all of these things fall into the category of bad things people should not do, and you find yourself justifying the behavior on the basis of what the other side did, you’re making the world a worse place.