It was a not-so-happy start to the Memorial Day weekend for conservative activist Gavin Wax. Wax was publicly fired from his job at the Babylon Bee, a Christian right-wing satire site, on Friday over a not-so-nice tweet about a member of the DeSantis 2024 campaign.
Wax, who runs the New York Young Republicans and supports former president Donald Trump in the GOP primary, was warring against DeSantis supporters last week who implicitly accused him of fraud because he used to work for Gettr. Gettr was financially backed by Miles Guo, a Chinese businessman who was arrested for allegedly orchestrating a $1 billion fraud conspiracy.
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Cockburn acknowledges that this is all very confusing. Stick with him.
The DeSantis campaign’s rapid response director, Christina Pushaw, liked some of the tweets attacking Wax.
Wax noticed, and tweeted, “Hey @ChristinaPushaw what’s your fucking problem?”
Seth Dillon, who runs the Babylon Bee and is thus Wax’s boss, apparently took issue with the profanity-laden question. Dillon replied, “tweeting like this with the Bee in your bio doesn’t work for me.”
“Being accused of things that are false (and criminal) doesn’t work for me,” Wax shot back.
Dillon then officially fired Wax, telling him to take the Babylon Bee out of his Twitter bio.
Wax complied and then went on a screed against the Bee, asserting that he was fired for supporting Trump over DeSantis. It was revealed in March that DeSantis had paid thousands of dollars to the Bee for “advertising” and “email services” during his 2022 gubernatorial campaign. This could perhaps explain why the Bee wasn’t happy with one of its employees publicly cursing at Christina Pushaw.
Others alleged Wax was fired because of the use of profanity, but this explanation didn’t hold up because other Bee employees had also used plenty of curse words in their tweets.
Breitbart writer Brandon Darby chalked the firing up to something even simpler: Wax “sassed [his] boss publicly.”
Dillon jumped on a Twitter Space (where else?! to defend firing Wax, and argued that Wax did not comport himself online appropriately while identifying as an employee of the Bee. He also insisted that he would have fired a DeSantis supporter if he had behaved the same way. But still, Wax’s defenders said that the Bee was engaging in conservative cancel culture.
Luckily for Wax, he didn’t head into the long weekend unemployed. Raheem Kassam, editor-in-chief of the National Pulse, quickly swooped in to offer Wax a new job.
“@SethDillon fires people publicly, and whines. I hire people publicly, with wine!” Kassam captioned a photo of the pair enjoying a bottle of red.
Cockburn is glad that everyone is enjoying the Twitter spats between Team DeSantis and Team Trump, which seem to have wrecked quite a few personal relationships. He can’t help but wonder, though, how the shockwaves of these spats will impact the voters in Iowa…