Jonathan S. Tobin
Firing those who dissent is troubling. But progressive hate cheering for Hamas and the murder of Charlie Kirk, along with right-wing conspiracy theories, shouldn’t be platformed.
Karen Attiah, global opinions editor for “The Washington Post” (left) with Alexis Okeowo, staff writer for “The New Yorker,” a New America fellow and author of “A Moonless, Starless Sky: Ordinary Women and Men Fighting Extremism in Africa,” Oct. 11, 2017. Credit: New America via Wikimedia Commons.
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.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of the Jewish News Syndicate, a senior contributor for The Federalist, a columnist for Newsweek and a contributor to many other publications. He covers the American political scene, foreign policy, the U.S.-Israel relationship, Middle East diplomacy, the Jewish world and the arts. He hosts the JNS “Think Twice” podcast, both the weekly video program and the “Jonathan Tobin Daily” program, which are available on all major audio platforms and YouTube. Previously, he was executive editor, then senior online editor and chief political blogger, for Commentary magazine. Before that, he was editor-in-chief of The Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia and editor of the Connecticut Jewish Ledger. He has won more than 60 awards for commentary, art criticism and other writing. He appears regularly on television, commenting on politics and foreign policy. Born in New York City, he studied history at Columbia University.
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