Sunday’s New York Times front-page investigation, “Remarks on Kirk’s Assassination Bring On Broad Wave of Firings,” by Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs and Bernard Mokam, was galling for anyone whose sense of history goes back five years.
During the 2020-era George Floyd hysteria, the Times ran little news coverage of the many people (many not even conservatives) getting cancelled and fired or pushed out of positions for insufficient worship of Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement. Yet when the reverse is happening regarding Charlie Kirk, it's disturbing front-page news?
The 2020-era firings were mostly ignored by corporate media. But the online job screening firm FAMA posted a gleeful blog listing some of the myriad firings in the aftermath of the George Floyd’s death and the resulting protests, many of which devolved into rioting and killing: “People are Getting Fired for Racist Comments about George Floyd Protests.”
Also, Iconoclastic linguistic scholar John McWhorter wrote (in a Times opinion column, not a news report) about “the firing of the data analyst David Shor after calling attention to an academic study -- by a Black scholar -- showing that in the past, violent Black protests in an area tended to make it more Republican.”
Not only did the Times cover these new Kirk-related firings prominently (firings that resulted from comments far more offensive than Shor’s historical note), but the paper’s tone was sympathetic to the liberal posters so gleeful over Kirk’s assassination.
Tara Marcelle says she doesn’t remember exactly what she said near the nurses’ station the day that the conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot. She remembers making some dark jokes with her colleagues and, at some point, laughing. But she knows one thing for sure: It cost her her job.
....
Ms. Marcelle, a 43-year-old Air Force veteran, said she never said Mr. Kirk deserved to be killed, but she is now among scores of people across the country who have been fired, suspended, reassigned or pushed to resign in the past two weeks for things they said about Mr. Kirk or his assassination.
The Times took the firings very seriously (they have numbers) and relayed the horrific insults with cool neutrality.
Though there is no way of determining exactly how many people have faced workplace consequences, The New York Times identified more than 145 such cases through news reports, public statements and interviews with several of those targeted. Those who have faced discipline are professors and health care workers, lawyers and journalists, restaurant workers and airline employees.
They include a North Carolina police officer suspended for calling Mr. Kirk racist while also saying the shooting was horrific, a burger restaurant manager in Illinois who commented that “another one bites the dust,” and a California restaurant employee who said Mr. Kirk could “burn in hell.”
This paragraph provided only the slightest inference that the left has been doing this consistently to ordinary people.
Firings over controversial statements are not new, but they appear to have become more frequent in recent years as online armies seek to identify and assail the employers of people who say things they deem inappropriate….
Private-sector employers often have social media policies, and regardless, most can fire their workers for almost any reason, as long as they do not violate statutes that protect workers, such as those that prohibit discrimination based on race, gender and other protected characteristics. But the recent firings raise questions beyond the law, about how free workers should be to share their views and whether employers should have to answer for their workers’ opinions.
So only “now,” with the cancel culture shoe on the other foot, are questions being raised?
Unlike the silent treatment that ordinary victims of Floyd-era firings received, these supposed victims of the right were able to commiserate in the pages of the New York Times.
...another person who lost her job, Amber Thibodeaux, said that it could hardly have come at a worse time. Thibodeaux posted that memorials to Mr. Kirk were 'like asking ppl to mourn Hitler.'….Now without a job, Ms. Thibodeaux is worried about not having enough money for rent, losing her health insurance and putting food on the table for her husband and son.
As if people fired for offending the left didn’t have spouses and children to feed as well? As if they're not just as human?
After spending years patrolling the social media ramparts hunting down ideological dissent (i.e. “disinformation”) on issues like COVID and BLM, it’s galling to see the Times quoting professors spouting: “Right now, it’s at quite an extreme level of fear that people have in speaking out.”
