Aug 16, 2017 4 min read

Poor Peter Cvjetanovic.

Who is he? He’s going to be a senior this year at the Reno campus of University of Nevada, where he’s been majoring in history and political science. Like a lot of his classmates, he did some traveling before the summer ran out. And, also like a lot of his classmates, his exploits while he was away from home have been immortalized online.

There’s one inconvenient difference, though, between Cvjetanovic and his peers, who might have gone off to volunteer among the destitute or ventured to a fun-in-the-sun spot like Hawaii or the Caribbean.

Cvjetanovic was at the “Unite the Right” carnival of hate in Charlottesville, Va., last weekend. Unfortunately for him, a photo of him bedecked in a white polo shirt, carrying a Tiki torch, shouting, sweating and generally looking like an unhinged attendee at a Nuremberg rally in the 1930s, has gone viral.

According to USA Today, Cvjetanovic did not anticipate the photo would become as widely seen as it has, and he has received death threats as a result.

“I understand the photo has a very negative connotation,” said Cvjetanovic, stating the painfully obvious. “But I hope that the people sharing the photo are willing to listen that I’m not the angry racist that they see in that photo.”

Now, let’s see – Cvjetanovic was part of an event that ominously echoed Nazi torchlight parades, was suffused with chants like “blood and soil,” “Jews will not replace us,” and “one people, one nation, end immigration,” had bloody attacks on counter-protesters, and he wants to argue he is “not the angry racist that they see in that photo”? He’s going to have a pretty tough time making that case.

Cvjetanovic is in his early 20s and was in elementary school when Facebook bowed, but he doesn’t seem to understand a fundamental fact of the era in which we live – the expectations we once might have had for privacy have changed irrevocably when a photo can go around the world in an instant, a tweet can jolt the stock market and a social media post can get an admission to an Ivy League school revoked. In an earlier time, Cvjetanovic could have gone to that rally, bellowed, stomped and frothed to his heart’s delight, and he probably could have drifted back into anonymity.

Sorry, but he’s not deserving of any sympathy.

A petition on the site Change.org to have Cvjetanovic expelled from school and removed from his on-campus job garnered over 16,000 signatures in a 24-hour period, but that’s unlikely to happen, nor should it. University officials stated they have “no legal or constitutional basis upon which to expel him from studies, or terminate him from employment, and we will not.” At the same time, the university reaffirmed it denounced the white supremacist movement.

Cvjetanovic’s presence at the “Unite the Right” rally was, to say the least, stupid, but if every college student were expelled for stupidity, there would be a lot of depopulated classrooms. And the First Amendment does protect even the most noxious sentiments. Perhaps with time, Cvjetanovic, and the other young men who were there with him in Charlottesville, will see the error of their ways.

In any event, Cvjetanovic is probably in for a rocky semester. He said he would probably have to quit his job because it involves interaction with the public, and many of his classmates will probably cut a wide path around him.

He’ll be ostracized. And it will be richly deserved.