Commenters Deemed Offensive After Charlie Kirk's Death Face Consequences
time.comJust proving that nobody* really cared about their stances on cancel culture except as that they could use it as a cudgel for their existing views, as we see the "accountability culture" and "free speech absolutists" meant nothing.
*Rounding to nobody; there are some small handful of principled people to be sure.
There are lots of principled people that you aren't hearing from. Please be aware of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-group_homogeneity fallacy.
Regardless, the current situation doesn't prove much about intellectual consistency. It's perfectly reasonable to put endorsement of political violence in a separate category, and it's not valid to conflate all cases of "cancel culture" with each other and consider it as a "is this okay y/n" question.
If a leftist were saying "this rightist who glorified the murder of a leftist should be fired" and had previously said "this leftist who said nasty things about white men shouldn't have been cancelled by the rightist mob", would you see any hypocrisy in that? I would not.
So today, as rightists tell me "this leftist who glorified the murder of a rightist should be fired", while I don't necessarily agree, I don't go reminding them "remember that time you thought a rightist who said nasty things about black women shouldn't have been cancelled by the leftist mob?", because it's not actually relevant. (And in reality, I have seen people get cancelled for far less objectionable things.)
It's very hard to find people who take "free speech absolutism" so seriously as to oppose the SCOTUS standard of "incitement to imminent lawless action". And I can't recall ever seeing one who would agree, in as many words, that employers have any kind of moral responsibility to ignore what their employees say, even from work accounts.
Only the prices paid by my side are unfair or absurd. The prices paid by their side are justified.
Meanwhile the lines dividing us become deeper and wider.
This is spot on.
""Really, this is as much the fault of the SPD as of the NSDAP, both are to blame for this", I think, while the Obersturmführer's dogs tear down the prisoner next to me."
FIRE has a list of people fired for making offensive comments after Kirk’s killing [0]. FAMA has something similer for people fired for making offensive comments after Floyd’s killing [1].
FIRE calls it the tragedy cycle: "A tragedy happens. Someone reacts by celebrating that tragedy for whatever reason. Then the social media mob comes to demand this person be fired, expelled, or otherwise punished for their views."
[0]: https://www.thefire.org/news/we-are-cancel-culture-part-trag...
[1]: https://fama.io/post/fired-racist-comments-george-floyd-prot...
Those lists are pointless if we can't see exactly for what words those people have been fired.
If my employee makes a slur against "n*ggers" while he has black coworkers, it is not the same thing as simply copy-pasting Kirk's own words on gun violence being an acceptable consequence of the 2nd amendment.
Europe has laws against hate speech that Americans think reach too far, but the positive side effect is that employers are not the one doing the calls - which they do instantly, under pressure, without any chance for the employees to defend themselves. A European firm has no basis to fire an employee until a court has reached a conclusion - the best they can do is suspend the employee.
The FAMA story links to examples, though not all of the links remain live.
One of the first was from a police officer who had posted on social media, "If he can scream he can breath, something else was going on. I’ve been pepper sprayed with CS gas and it messes with your breathing but you can definitely still breath.”
Another was a sports broadcaster who was forced out/resigned after tweeting: "Longtime Sacramento Kings TV broadcaster Grant Napear resigned Tuesday after he tweeted "ALL LIVES MATTER" when asked by DeMarcus Cousins for his opinion on the Black Lives Matter movement.”
Some of the links, and therefore the comments, are not accessible from Europe, but the actual comments (or stories including the comments) are all there.
And a black writer (the last black colomnist at WaPo) has been purged for literally quoting Kirk.
https://karenattiah.substack.com/p/the-washington-post-fired...
But again, my point isn't to dish anecdotes. If we want to set a standard, norms, we have to get more than one data point.
> for literally quoting Kirk
It wasn't literal and it wasn't quoting. Kirk named 4 people in his actual quote, she maliciously changed it to make it appear he said it was about all women of a certain race, and put it in quotes so that people think she was quoting verbatim.
"If we would have said that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative action picks, we would have been called racists. Now they’re coming out and they’re saying it for us … You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously."
– The Charlie Kirk Show, 13 July 2023
Her edit is wrong, and probably deliberate, for that she will be criticized. But Kirk did write and say some truly heinous things. That much is something we all know.
He accused four successful black women of "steal[ing] a white person's slot", and guys here are desperately trying to pretend it only applies to these four persons.
Pathetic.
Again, you're putting words in our mouths just like she did to Kirk.
You should never be attributing verbatim quotes to someone while signing their name to it, especially as a journalist, it's simply wrong and unacceptable.
The reader can decide for themselves what Kirk actually meant after reading his actual original quote with you or her deciding for all of us.
She turned it into this, while putting quotes around it.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!db2o!,f_auto,q_auto:...
Yes, I know, I can read the very link I shared.
Do you seriously think Kirk is only accusing the "four people" - four successful black women - of "steal[ing] a white person's slot" and just these four? Only these four? That this is the message he is sending?
The point is that it in no way justifies making up quotes and adding his name to them as if he literally said something else verbatim, especially as someone working for a newspaper.
She could've just added what she thought he actually meant after not butchering what he said on purpose.
I could not monitor my submission owing to other duties.
Short lived, that is too bad, especially as I see that the few posters have not mentioned the dark-galaxy-in-the-room noted in the article, about what would constitute grounds for enmity.