Do you remember when the idea of censorship of the government in the US looked like the plot of an Orwellian novel, or something that happened elsewhere, countries where masked militia kidnapped and disappeared from the street? Our first amendment rights as Americans looked like, would never guarantee it. The state could not take away our free speech.
It seems that we do not need a state -sponsored oppression to punish those who are expressing sentiments that are offended, because the private sector has entered to do the job. An office supply store, a news network and an airline writer is among companies that recently fired staff who comment on the death of influencer Charlie Kirk who was interpreted as festive, insensitive or the conservative activist’s polarizing views for his purposeful kill.
Now Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah says she was unfairly fired at thoughts she expressed after the Kirk assassination last week in Utah. She wrote: “The Post has accused my measured bluesky posts of being” unacceptable “,” gross misconduct “and to jeopardize the physical safety of colleagues – charges without evidence, which I completely reject as false.”
“They rushed me to fire me without even giving a conversation,” Attiah said. “It was not just a hasty overreaction, but a violation of the standards of journalistic fairness and the post claimed to be maintained.” She said that in her posts she “exercised restraint, even while condemning hatred and violence.”
Her remarks are largely about gun violence and issues of race. Attiah mentioned Kirk directly in just one post, and he paraphrased from a remark he made about Supreme Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson and the former Texas Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, who is both black. ” Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to steal a white person’s lock ‘ – Charlie Kirk,’ she wrote.
Attiah did not celebrate the death of Kirk in her posts or raised his manslaughter, but she did not mourn. In the current political environment, it can only be enough to make her employer nervous, even compared to all the other horrible things out there.
Unfortunately, the cruel, inhuman and politicized reactions followed to the tragic death of Kirk should be surprised. Social media has worn as always – as a repository for every good, bad and very bad impulse experience after a tragedy or crisis.
The same quotient of 20% Civility, 80% ugliness enveloped X, YouTube, Tiktok and the like three months ago Minnesota, Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, were killed in their home in a politically motivated attack. The Democratic State, Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, were also allegedly shot by the same suspect in their home, but survived.
The difference in June? There was no mass movement to fire, cancel, cancel or quietly those who minimized the tragic murders, or, worse, turned it into a trolling opportunity. The Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah blamed the murders on the left – “That’s what happens when Marxists don’t get their way,” he wrote on X – and posted a photo of the suspect Vance Boelter with the heading “Nightmare in Waltz Street.” It was a Crass reference to Tim Walz, the Democratic Governor of Minnesota, who was Kamala Harris’ running measure in the presidential election in 2024. Lee (who is now mourning the death of Kirk in public), takes his clues from above.
President Trump’s short condemnation of Hortman’s murder of Truth Social said that “such heinous violence will not be tolerated.” There was no long sulogy, he did not attend the funeral, and when he was asked the day after the murder of Hortman, the president said: “I can be nice and call, but why waste time?”
In response to Kirk’s murder, Trump issued an order to lower US flags to half -staff in the White House, all public buildings, US embassies and military posts. He announced that he would positively award Kirk the presidential medal of freedom. And during an appearance on Friday on ‘Fox & Friends’, he promised revenge against the left for Kirk’s murder, although the suspect – let his motives – still unknown at the time.
“I’ll tell you something that will get me in trouble, but I can’t care less,” Trump said. ‘The radicals on the right are often radical because they do not want to see crime. They don’t want to see crime. They say, ‘We don’t want these people to come in. We don’t want you to burn our malls. We don’t want you to shoot our people in the middle of the street. ‘The radicals on the left are the problem.
The prospect of retaliation of a thin-skinned leader leaves no mystery about why major media outlets such as Die Post, “60 minutes” and MSNBC appear to reform their news rooms to be less critical of the current administration. The same goes for breaking rooms, shopping floors and office cubicles in all sectors of American work life. It is not the Big Brother scenario envisaged in George Orwell’s warning story about a totalitarian state, ‘1984’, but it is a beginning.