The Barbershop: Dennis Byrne, Proprietor
Should cultural cancelers get cancelled?
Two left-wing critics, one of white men and the other of Trump, get fired for their views. Is it right?
USA Today fired Hemal Jhaveri, its Race and Inclusion Editor, for falsely tweeting that the recent Colorado mass shooting was done by a white man.
While it may go down as a perfect example of getting hung on her own petard, I’m wondering if she should have been fired for expressing her views.
Then there’s Dr. Bandy Lee, an eminent hard-left psychiatrist, who says she was fired by Yale University after calling ex-president Donald Trump and his supporters mentally ill. She was bounced for diagnosing public figures without actually having examined them, a “reckless” and “serious violation” of medical ethics.
One is tempted to proclaim, serves them right for being a part of the hard-left’s cancel culture campaign to silence commentators, politicians and anyone else (read: conservatives) who disagree with the given progressive wisdom.
On the face of it, the two have violated those very progressive principles that make the far left the only certified prosecutors, judges, juries, jailers and executioners of the deplorable conservative pervaders of misinformation and hatred. While never, of course, seeing the mote of misinformation and hatred blinding their own eyes.
Fair is fair, you might say of Jhaveri who tweeted of the recent murderers, “It’s always an angry white man, always.” She was, she informed us, “Extremely tired of people’s lives depending on whether a white man with an AR-15 is having a good day or not,” an apparent reference to the sheriff who said that a suspect in the earlier mass shooting in Atlanta was “not having a good day.”
Turns out the man charged with the Colorado murders is Syria-born Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa. she apologized, deleted the tweet and said she had been “careless.” That, she averred , “doesn’t represent my commitment to racial equality”–although it pretty much reveals what she thinks about white men.
She went down with her guns firing, aiming at the newspaper for living up to its commitment to diversity and inclusion by dismissing her. She accused USAToday of caving into an “alt-right” backlash that called her out for her hypocrisy.
“There was social media outrage, threats and harassment towards me,” Jhaveri complained. “This is not about bias or keeping personal opinions off of Twitter. It’s about challenging whiteness and being punished for it. Sending one wrong tweet that ended up in the hands of Sean Hannity on Fox News though, was enough for this publication to turn tail.” Her parting shot: USAToday is subservient to white authority.
Lee, the psychiatrist also is firing back, suing Yale for unlawful termination. Her troubles stemmed from saying that civil rights advocate and law professor Alan Dershowitz, who defended Trump in his impeachment trial, had a “shared psychosis” with Trump’s “grandiosity and delusional-level impunity.” Dershowitz complained that she had violated the ethical code of the American Psychiatric Association by not examining him before publicly stating her diagnosis.
Well, she said, it wasn’t a formal diagnosis–a pretty weak excuse if you ask me. More significantly, she claims that Yale violated her First Amendment right of free speech. “My goal currently is to ensure that professionals and intellectuals are not silenced,” Dr. Lee said in an interview with the New York Times.
As I’ve said before, such long-distance diagnoses of public figures are unfair and unprofessional. Even though Trump exhibits a truck-load of symptoms. And Lee brought these troubles on herself.
I suppose you can fire someone for being stupid. But the two’s firing presents a challenge for conservatives who make a point of portraying themselves as victims of the cancel culture. They make a good case that they ax more frequently falls on them.
But what of Jhaveri and Lee? Yale and USAToday engaged in the kind of behavior that conservatives despise. Will conservatives come to the defense of the two?
As loathsome as their speech was, should their careers and their means of making a living be torpedoed? And what of progressives? From them, will we hear any criticism of the two? Did the two get their just desserts?
I guess we’ll just have to stay tuned.
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