What happens when a chronically online teenager grows up to marry the mayor of New York? The media is forcing Rama Duwaji, the 28-year-old wife of Zohran Mamdani, to find out.
Earlier this month, the press scrutinized her adult social-media activity. Then journalist Jon Levine dug up her teenage tweets and found her old blog on Tumblr. While Mr. Levine mostly highlighted Ms. Duwaji's anti-Israel posts, one comment in particular drove discussion online. In a comment, posted on Twitter (now X) in February 2013 -- when Ms. Duwaji was 15 -- she used the "N" word in what appears to be a friendly interaction. Soon after Mr. Levine's article was published, X users began circulating another screenshot from 2013 in which a teenage Ms. Duwaji complained that she left Instagram due to "gay a -- " people.
The response to the resurfaced posts ran the gamut between genuine anger and outright glee. The right-wing account LibsofTikTok shared screenshots of the posts with a laughing-crying emoji, and a dig that, "Democrats should be lining up to condemn this! Why are they so silent?"
Of course, the most reasonable reading of these posts is not that Ms. Duwaji is a hardened racist or homophobe, but that she was once a dumb teenager. In these posts, she was likely playing with adolescent transgression. It's also possible that she didn't really understand the particularly American taboo against using certain words in certain ways, considering she lived in Dubai for most of her youth. Rather than revealing some fundamental bigotry, the posts are much more likely to be the kind of embarrassing, thoughtless comments that young people have always made. It's only recently that they've been preserved in the amber of the internet, ready to be unearthed once someone's ideological enemies go looking.
In fact, the outrage over Ms. Duwaji's posts was so nakedly opportunistic that it's hard to take online cries of offense seriously. After all, many of the people salivating over Ms. Duwaji's teenage posts would no doubt be defending them as meaningless if their favorite conservative influencer had written them. Conversely, if the posts had come from the wife of a notoriously right-wing mayor, many of those who rushed to Ms. Duwaji's defense would be condemning her with equal fervor.
The whole saga stinks of feigned outrage and all-too-convenient exceptions to previously stark moral lines. The short news cycle dedicated to the posts exemplified all the worst impulses of 2010s-era cancel culture, but with little of the typical zeal. It was almost as if everyone was lumbering along, seizing on the opportunity to perform hurt on the internet, but too exhausted to mount a convincing performance.
Ironically, focusing on Ms. Duwaji's teenage mistakes is unnecessary in part because she has plenty of adult activity to scrutinize. Despite some X users' protestations, it doesn't say much about her adult character that she used forbidden words as a teenager. It's much more revealing, however, that a decade later, she liked a post praising Hamas in the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7.
Regardless, it's long past time to declare bipartisan amnesty on adolescent stupidity. Thoughtless -- and yes, offensive -- posts made by young people before they turn 18 should be off-limits for public outrage. Just because something is floating around on the internet doesn't mean it reflects the adult someone became years later. And if the teenage comments are truly beyond the pale, then there should be evidence of this in the person's adult actions. In Ms. Duwaji's case, I don't see any indication of adult homophobia or racism, but her more recent social media activity indicates -- at best -- a willingness to excuse violence and terrorism directed at Israelis.
A simple distinction between teenage ignorance and adult beliefs isn't a radical bargain to strike. But with online cancel culture limping along -- and with social-media natives growing older -- it's better late than never to declare a truce on adolescent carelessness.
Ms. Camp is senior newsletter editor at Free Expression.