The Washington Post fired Karen Attiah, its last full-time Black opinion columnist, who says it was because
they didn’t like what she posted after Charlie Kirk’s shooting.
For many readers of The Washington Post
who care about the normalization of antisemitism, it was a case of good
riddance. Karen Attiah was named the newspaper’s first Global Opinions
editor in 2016 and has been a columnist since 2021. This week, she
claimed that she was fired
over what the newspaper said was a series of posts about the
assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, which the paper
said were “unacceptable,” and constituted “gross misconduct” and
“endangering the physical safety of colleagues.”
Are her posts about Kirk’s murder reason enough to lose her job?
Corrupted institutions
Her publishers’ excuses and disingenuous
“safety” language notwithstanding, the real issue with Attiah or any
other similar situation isn’t really about cancel culture.
It’s what it says about the Post, The New York Times
and other corporate media institutions that employ many people like
her. That they thought placing radical hate-mongers like Attiah in
charge of influential platforms was a good idea in the first place is
the problem.
We should be extremely wary of engaging in
a culture war in which the goal is to silence, shame and even hound out
of the public square people with whom we disagree. The question we
should be asking in the wake of this latest example of political
violence is not about how best to punish those who use their
social-media accounts to say terrible things. It’s why we have allowed
institutions that should be the bulwark of democracy, like journalism,
to be so corrupted as to normalize the sort of public discourse from
people like Attiah, whose goal is to tear down the foundations of the
American republic and Western civilization.
Attiah has every right to say what she
likes. And the same goes for anyone else who unfairly and insensitively
defamed Kirk after his death. The same applies to those extremists on
the far right who sought to exploit the assassination to promote their
own brand of conspiracy theories, whether it was the libelous claim that
Israel was responsible or other antisemitic insinuations about the
crime.
No one should interfere with the ability
of those who behave in this fashion to post on social media (so long as
they are not directly advocating violence), stand on street corners or
march in the streets while spouting their lies, whether about Kirk,
other conservatives, or Israel and the Jews. Still, that doesn’t entitle
them to a job at the top newspapers in the country, a tenured
professorship at an Ivy League university or a position at a private
company whose owners want no part of such madness. And it ought not to
grant immunity from criticism or legal action when they violate the law
or help fund radical groups like Antifa or Students for Justice in
Palestine, both of which promote violence and hate.
What we want is not a nation that chills
speech. We crave a culture of political discourse that doesn’t normalize
hate and toxic extremist ideas—that doesn’t exacerbate racial divisions
and promote antisemitism. Just as important, we should be actively
discouraging a belief that political violence—whether against
conservative activists, insurance company executives or politicians
disliked by fashionable opinion on the left—is acceptable discourse.
Marginalizing hate-mongers
Our challenge isn’t how best to silence or
punish ideologues who ran to TikTok to cheer for Kirk’s murderer or to
mock those who mourned him. It’s recreating a political culture where
such people are relegated to the fever swamps of the far left and right,
where they belong, rather than featuring them in the mainstream media
or allowing them to dominate our educational system.
Attiah was one among many being held up
for opprobrium, even sometimes losing their jobs for their insensitive
reactions to an act of political violence. But for those who have
followed her career, her broadsides aimed at Kirk following his death
were typical of her brand of journalism. She claimed
that she was fired for “speaking out against political violence, racial
double standards and America’s apathy toward guns.” The truth is that
she is a typical of those self-styled progressives who have no problem
with political violence so long as it is directed against people and
groups that she thinks have no rights worthy of respect—for example,
Israelis and Jews.
The columnist has written
explicitly of her belief that the State of Israel had no right to
exist. She falsely labels it a European-style colonial project, rather
than an expression of Jewish self-determination in their ancient
homeland. Even before the Oct. 7 Hamas-led Palestinian attacks on
Israeli communities, she was cheerleading for the effort to defend the
genocidal terrorists in Gaza from the consequences of their crimes, and
delegitimizing Israel and its right of self-defense.
Her work illustrated how toxic left-wing
myths like critical race theory, intersectionality and
settler-colonialism are a method to normalize antisemitism. Indeed, as
an alumnus of one of those institutions that have been a bastion of such
terrible ideas—Attiah graduated from Columbia University’s School of
International Affairs—there is no better example of the way the academy
manufactures and then spreads Jew-hatred.
Many on the political left, like Attiah,
thought the aftermath of Kirk’s murder was a license to not only vent
their anger at his views, but to post misleading, if not downright
false, information about the late activist. They now say that
retribution for this is no different from something that the right has
long decried: cancel culture.
That’s not a charge that can be dismissed
out of hand. And it’s one that is also related to the assertions that
President Donald Trump’s efforts to roll back the tide of woke
antisemitism at colleges and universities are an infringement on free
speech, academic freedom and a form of cancel culture.
Is the backlash against those who mocked
Kirk’s death different from the moral panic about race that swept across
the United States during the Black Lives Matter summer of 2020? That
moment of peak progressive conquest of America’s media and culture led
to cancellations of those who were deemed insufficiently sympathetic to
BLM or otherwise denounced as “racists.” Most educational institutions,
arts organizations, celebrities and even many corporations quavered in
the face of this Jacobin-like attempt to purge conservatives or even
moderates who wouldn’t bend their knees to BLM lies about race from the
public square.
A failure to engage
Left-wingers who were happy to join the
cancel culture mobs in 2020 or to cheer on the efforts of pro-Hamas
activists to target Jews since Oct. 7 have suddenly discovered that
being ostracized in this way isn’t a good thing. They assert that those
who disagreed with Kirk—like Attiah and the countless others who have
been attacking the victim of an assassination as someone who got what he
deserved—are being unfairly punished.
As we saw in 2020, the impulse to
persecute those who contradict the conventional wisdom of the moment and
to seek to deprive them of their livelihoods is antithetical to how a
free republic operates.
The real sickness afflicting American
democracy is not primarily the fault of extreme speech that breeds angry
arguments, but the unwillingness of so many people to engage with views
differing from their own. The bifurcated political culture, in which
much of the country reads, listens and watches two entirely different
sets of media outlets, has created an almost unbridgeable gap between
left and right. That has made many people uncomfortable with opinions or
even facts that contradict their assumptions and prejudices. It also
encourages them to engage in radical speech that demonizes their
political foes.
Thus, it wasn’t enough for many people to
state their disagreements with Kirk’s views about Trump, abortion,
immigration, gun rights, gender ideology and even Israel (he was a
strong and vocal supporter of the Jewish state). They also felt
compelled to damn him as a racist, hate-monger, fascist or Nazi, and to
double down on the same smears of Trump and his supporters.
That’s bad enough under normal
circumstances. But those who did so after the object of their
intemperate invective was murdered for exercising his right to free
speech are understandably being criticized for what is, at best,
insensitive behavior and, at worst, exactly the sort of hate speech that
encourages more political violence.
Moving the Overton Window
So, what should our response be to this
sort of speech? Should those who do so be held up to public outrage by
being “ratioed” with a flood of critical comments on their social-media
feeds—the 21st-century-version of the Medieval punishment of being put
in the stocks in the public square for passersby to jeer at? Should they
lose their livelihoods and be run out of town?
The answer to that question most often
depends on whether the offending poster is situated on your side of the
political aisle. We tend to be more forgiving of allies who misbehave
online and demand the scalps of those whose opinions contradict our own.
Regardless of where you stand on the
political spectrum, some basic truths need to be acknowledged. If you’re
going to express opinions that are nasty, insensitive or extreme, then
you don’t have standing to play the victim if other people who are
offended respond in the same way. That doesn’t excuse foul language or
threats, which platform providers have every right to moderate.
Yet we need to draw some distinctions
here. Espousing opinions on a wide range of political issues, about
which those who believe in democracy are compelled to agree to disagree,
is not something that should be treated as a reason for shunning.
Supporting political violence, however, is
not the same as backing a particular political candidate on the right
or the left. Nor should we treat open racism—whether in the form of
white nationalism or fashionable left-wing “anti-racism,” or
antisemitism in all of its forms—as the same thing as just having a
position on the best way to achieve racial harmony or how to bring about
peace in the Middle East. What we’ve seen on the left is the growth of
what can only be termed “assassination culture,” as some people laud
those who murder their political foes or the terrorists of Hamas. Those
who are part of this trend shouldn’t complain if their fellow citizens
or their employers want nothing to do with them.
The problem is that the Overton window of
acceptable discourse was deliberately shifted by progressives so as to
treat their own extremist views about race, gender, American history,
the Jews and Israel as normal, and to brand those who defended
traditional values on religion, liberty and Jewish rights as hateful.
Attiah is someone who despises the America to which her African parents
immigrated, and who backs genocidal positions that deny Jewish history
and rights. A political culture in which someone like her is treated as a
respected voice rather than a marginal extremist is sick and in need of
reform.
The same applies to someone like Tucker Carlson,
who may have been a much-needed tribune of conservative resistance to
BLM and the far left in 2020, but has since descended into an
antisemitic extremist rabbit hole since being fired from his prominent
position at Fox News. Those on the right who may disagree with
him but are still treating his views as worthy of
platforming—unfortunately, that included Charlie Kirk—are wrong.
What happened at The Washington Post and Fox News
was not the cancellation of independent voices. They were necessary
corrections by companies that don’t wish to be identified with
extremism, and to that end, they cleaned house.
The Post’s billionaire owner,
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, may be a hypocrite who shows no sign of
having much in the way of principles. And he has belatedly concluded
that his money-losing sinkhole of a publication is better off with its
editorials and columnists defending free
markets and personal liberty, as opposed to partisan progressive
extremism. He is trying to align himself with most Americans and
actually doing something to defend the democracy that its banner warns
will “die in darkness.”
Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch
likely also feels himself well rid of Carlson’s particular brand of
isolationism and hate for Israel, mixed in with kowtowing to tyrants in
Russia and Qatar.
Attiah and Carlson may well prosper on
Substack or podcasts on X, though they shouldn’t be silenced or
interfered with by the government. Still, they have no place in
mainstream media or discourse. Marginalizing them and other radicals
aren’t examples of cancel culture to be decried. It’s just common sense.
It’s also a sign: We need not despair that we are doomed to helplessly
watch the polarization they represent send the American republic
tumbling into a civil war between the left and the right.
Radio-Canada has apologized for the journalist’s comments. 
