Similarly, depending on the conference, naming your talk "Make X great/Y again", even ironically, may be grounds for a ban from the conference, under the same rubric: normalizing hate speech.
I’d rather be a part of a community that gives folks the benefit of the doubt/charitable interpretation despite sometimes being duped by bad actors, than one which shuns and demonizes anyone who says anything that could be taken the wrong way despite their true intentions.
Unfortunately, co-opting slurs is hard. You'll get push back. It was the headline, and many people don't read past headlines. She wasn't normalizing hate speech, but she was reflecting hate speech, very much in public.
It's easy to call that a mistake in retrospect, and easy to say that as somebody who wasn't prepared for the consequences she should have shied away from it. That puts the blame on her and misses the bigger picture, that almost anybody can get caught up in forces far beyond their expectation or ability to handle that.
I don't know how to fix that. There's not much advice I can offer. I wish I could offer her some comfort, but probably the best thing I can do is leave her alone and hope that she can recover.
Actually, I'm pretty sure she used the slur as her writing prompt, which is far more interesting! Particularly as it generated a genuinely good story!
Even if that was the case (and do note that the claim that the "attack helicopter" phrase is hate speech is by no means uncontroversial), how does this excuse the Twitter trolls who hurled far greater amounts of hate speech at her? Is this the sort of moral code that the "woke" would want to universalize on our society in their inerrant pursuit of perfect social justice - lex talionis on super steroids? Come on, even on its most charitable reading this makes absolutely zero sense.
We must fight bigotry and hate, by being intolerant and disavowing the principle of charity! It is better that ten innocent persons "face consequences" than that one hateful person speak freely.