Commenters Deemed Offensive After Charlie Kirk's Death Face Consequences
time.com
time.com
*Rounding to nobody; there are some small handful of principled people to be sure.
Meanwhile the lines dividing us become deeper and wider.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
– The Charlie Kirk Show, 13 July 2023
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!db2o!,f_auto,q_auto:...
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?
She could've just added what she thought he actually meant after not butchering what he said on purpose.
Pathetic.
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.
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.