Please read Julia Reinstein’s 9.27 Buzzfeed story about the lunatic (or lamentably deserved?) firing of Des Moines Register reporter Aaron Calvin, 27.

Boiled down, Calvin favorably profiled a much-admired local guy, but then researched his subject’s social-media history and found some offensive [read: racist, crude, asshole-ian] tweets that the guy posted when he was 16 or thereabouts. When Calvin aired these tweets, he was hate-stormed by the right for unfairly dredging up what they regarded as immaterial sentiments from an unfortunate, ill-nurtured past. Then Calvin’s enemies doxxed him by posting some of his own asshole-ian tweets [one was anti-gay] from his teenaged years.

And so Calvin’s Des Moines Register editors canned him. Cowards!

Some would say, “Tough shit, Calvin, but you started it” or “he who lives by the sword dies by the sword.”

I say pass a nationwide law stating that the hostile posting of a person’s idiotic teenage tweets should be off-limits, totally verboten and punishable by a stiff fine. Everything that a person tweets from his/her 20th birthday on can and should be fair game, but not before. Get it?

Young women are generally more mature than their male counterparts, but it’s a very rare fellow who hasn’t had a few crude, idiotic, gorillian thoughts in his mid-teen years. That shit should be left there. By the time you’re in your junior year of college you’re on your own and will have to suffer slings and arrows if you fuck up. But teenaged tweets? C’mon.

No, this doesn’t apply to Brett Kavanaugh‘s high-school and college situations. Hostile sexual fratboy aggression when you’re all beered up is a much more serious thing that sending out idiot tweets. It’s a whole ‘nother realm because it involves bringing hurt, brutality and lasting trauma into another person’s life.