The Washington Post Fired Me – But My Voice Will Not Be Silenced
karenattiah.substack.com
karenattiah.substack.com
And I'm saying this as someone who is on the "political left" by US standards, though more centrist by broader western standards.
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1ZPr6KwnzA/
The benefit of the doubt should go to the author. Why are we pretending that he was not this?
In life, where certainty is much more rare, it is a good rule of thumb to handle doubts this way. By OP's own admission, they can't watch every hour and minute of Charlie Kirk's speeches, interviews, and TV appearances. But he has a clear pattern of making remarks such as this.
Why would you believe that he did not make that statement? Objectivity does not require anyone be neutral for no reason. It is reasonable to assume that the author is correct.
It is yet another in a long line of politically correct terms used by the American Right to counch their racism. Charlie Kirk's commentary is no different than Rish Limbaugh.
I am not an expert in Charlie Kirk (I barely knew anything about him a week ago), but from the many many clips I have seen of him since, he seems to me to genuinely not be racist.
It's not worth debating whether DEI and affirmative action are problematic are not. We probably disagree, and this is a waste of both of our time. But in terms of this story, the simple fact is a journalist should not be misquoting someone. If one thinks he's racist by subtext, one can try to argue that, but at least be honest about what he's literally saying.
Kirk controlled most of his communication but the mask falls when he is around people on his "side" (podcasts or events).
That was my point.
These ideas are equivalent. The belief that employers are lowering their standards in order to include more black people is based on the idea that any additional black person hired must necessarily be less competent than a hypothetical white person who could have been hired instead of them; that is, white supremacy. In Kirk's words: "You had to go steal a white person's slot to go be taken somewhat seriously."
They don't believe that there are black people who are qualified but weren't hired because of, for example, discrimination, because they don't believe "discrimination" exists per se, they just think of not hiring black people as logical meritocratic decision-making.
You’re grossly failing at basic logic here. One case is describing racism and one being racist. Those things are not the same.
> They don't believe that there are black people who are qualified…
Again, you’re failing at basic reading comprehension but now it looks intentional.
Let's say there's a pool of 20 candidates, 10 male and 10 female. Since more men than women have an abiding interest in engineering, let us posit that 40% of the men are top prospects for the job, and 20% of the women are equally high-quality workers. The company is trying to fill 6 roles and has an internal mandate to hire 50% women. To serve that mandate, 1 unqualified woman will be hired, at the expense of 1 of the qualified men.
You can apply the exact same logic w/r/t race. Yes, there are legacy-of-slavery reasons why fewer blacks than whites are qualified for any given technical credential, but those are upstream of hiring decisions, and are not the job of e.g. airlines to solve, especially not at the expense of lowering standards for a crucial position like pilot.
The idea that airlines are passing on qualified white candidates to hire unqualified black candidates to fill a diversity quota, because there aren't enough qualified black candidates to fill it honestly, is a white supremacist conspiracy theory. Real life DEI programs don't let them do that. To a white supremacist, any number of black pilots is "just a few too many" to have hired honestly, and so there must be some hypothetical white people being "stolen" from. See GP.
Anyone in a hiring position would tell you, lack of intrinsic interest, or expertise, does not stop people from applying to an open position.
The paraphrase would be if I said, my co-works Bob and John were congenital idiots and I was quoted as saying "All Unix Administrators are congenital idiots"
Should she get fired for that kind of thing? Easily yes if she did it in a work product.
If she did it for something outside of work? I have no idea. Probably not but nominally she was doing straight news for the Washington Post. The deeper problem is the no one goes into Journalism to do straight news reporting but everyone at least starts off doing that and for most that's all they ever do - but everyone wants the dream; getting paid to tell other people what they think is right and wrong with the world. The only way to get that dream job is to start off doing it for free but it's not hard to see how that might conflict with your day job if your day job is straight news reporting.
The late Mr. Kirk was seriously messed up.
We really need to replace these corrupted institutions and at least boost our freedom of choice back up. Nothing needs to be a complete mega-hit 1:1 replacement in the world of news IMO.
I tend to think that long-term trends tends to be a better explanatory factor. There was this interview with this divorce lawyer that really helped shape my view on where we were as a society which basically said we’re in a place with too much post-modernism. The idea of how we imagine the world is just too flexible, there’s too much “freedom” and we’re on a trend back towards a more concrete view of the world. I tend to think this is correct, and that if there is backlash to Trump, or the public and popular notion of conservatism, we’re still, broadly speaking influenced by a group of folks who are ready for a more concrete or “conservative” popular culture. Gender roles, Right and wrong.
But I also think the trend sort of definitionally is already moving back in the other direction, it will just take ~ 10 years to play out as those in their formative years grow into a more liberal mindset(it’s probably just sort of barely impacting a few months of the psyche of the youngest pre-teens now and as that cohort ages they’ll influence the culture back in the other direction)