The original draft of this admittedly hard-edged email was sent to Washington Post reporter Katie Mettler and copied to a few of her senior Post colleagues in the reed-thin hope they and their media colleagues everywhere may yet reconsider their speech-suppressing Stalinist ways and help pull us back from the brink.
Dear Katie,
You and your editors will never admit it, and Lord knows Peyton Ham’s devastated family will never let themselves think it [“Family ‘shattered’ after police shooting of teen,” Apr. 15]. But the bright, emotionally vulnerable 16-year-old “Alex P. Keaton” conservative who, rest his tortured soul, committed suicide-by-cop Tuesday may well have lost all hope for finding happiness in the woke totalitarianism you and your censorious media colleagues seem determined to impose on our once free-thinking, free-speaking nation. The last straw for young Peyton may well have come when baseball, the game “he had learned to love” from his grandfather, went all woke, too, with its boycott of Georgia. (Congratulations, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred.)
In any case, expect more dreadfully discouraged people, young and old, to choose similarly tragic ends as your societal purification program continues to work, presumably as intended, and room for dissent is steadily eliminated. Perhaps next you can convince the nonviolent face paint and headdress “insurrectionist” from Jan. 6, still languishing in jail without pre-trial bail, to hang himself in his cell with the American flag rather than be railroaded into a lengthy prison sentence for having had the audacity to demonstrate against arbitrary, arguably unconstitutional changes to many state election laws last year.
Darren McKinney, Washington, D.C.