In Tuesday's edition, the New York Times added another weeper to the already well-stocked larder of stories lamenting the nationwide firings of gleeful ghouls who celebrated the death of Charlie Kirk. Sabrina Tavernise’s “She Was Fired for a Comment on Her Private Facebook Account.”
The headline deck:
She Was Fired for a Comment on Her Private Facebook Account
A look at how one state has turbocharged the crackdown on anyone who has criticized Charlie Kirk after his death.
The state is Indiana.
As NewsBusters noted in criticizing a similarly themed Times story, people lost their jobs over far more tame comments during the George Floyd hysteria, especially in liberal-dominated workplaces when they failed to bend the knee to Black Lives Matter. The Times didn't deign to notice them.
Two days after Charlie Kirk was killed, Suzanne Swierc, an employee at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., woke up to a cascade of missed calls, texts and voice mail messages from numbers she did not know.
“They were calling me all kinds of names, threatening my job,” Ms. Swierc said. “It was every awful curse word under the sun.”
“I immediately texted my supervisor, and I said, ‘I think I have a situation.’”
Ms. Swierc (pronounced swirtz) discovered that the barrage stemmed from something she had posted on Facebook the day before: “If you think Charlie Kirk was a wonderful person, we can’t be friends.” Her Facebook settings were private, but one of her followers must have taken a screen shot and sent it on without her knowledge.
Back in 2014, The Times didn't show this kind of sympathy toward Elizabeth Lauten, who resigned from the staff of Congressman Stephen Fincher (R-Tenn.) after her private Facebook page criticized President Obama's daughters for their outfits at the Thanksgiving turkey pardon ceremony. No one died, not even the turkeys.
Tavernise worked in an extraneous smear of Libs of TikTok, who has successfully tracked down hateful posts about Charlie Kirk in the wake of his assassination.
Within hours, Libs of TikTok, a social media account known for transphobic content and smear campaigns against schools, hospitals and libraries, posted it publicly on its popular X account. Ms. Swierc got her first message 19 minutes later. Elon Musk posted about it....
When someone from a Buffalo area code left a voice mail message stating Ms. Swierc’s home address and saying maybe she “should get the same treatment as Charlie,” Ms. Swierc called the police. Eventually, the post would get 6.9 million views.
The experience, Ms. Swierc said, affected her physically.
“I had the hardest time moving around my house that morning,” she said. “My brain was not processing things. Space and time became kind of their own thing. I wanted to vomit.”
She added: “September 12th was one of the worst days of my life.”
At least she has a life to live, unlike the person she wrote about so callously the day after he was murdered in front of his family.
The rash of firings, which are raising questions about the limits of free speech, has been supercharged in Indiana, where top officials have been channeling public anger about posts that criticize Mr. Kirk into a kind of internet hotline, where submissions -- that can include someone’s name, social-media posts and employer’s contact information -- are displayed publicly on a government website.
After that awful start, Tavernise made a grudging turn toward balance.
A number of conservatives in Indiana made the argument that the left had been canceling people for years, so in some ways, they created the norm — and the right is merely using it. They also said it’s not so unusual for political leaders to involve themselves in cancellations. Democratic political leaders called for Donald Trump to be cut off from Twitter, and celebrated when he was.
Charlie Mandziara, president of the College Republicans at Ball State, got the story's powerful last word, quoted at a campus vigil for Kirk.
“I only feel anger, a righteous, focused anger, not toward people I disagree with or any political party, but toward lying hypocrites who think that past a certain threshold of disagreement, you deserve to die,” he said. “People who encourage and justify political violence while screaming from the hilltops that people that they disagree with are evil, are wrong and should be condemned.”