The Atlantic’s Jemele Hill has apologized for appearing to joke this week about the assassination of President Trump, claiming she never actually meant to advocate for violence against the president.
Her employer, meanwhile, remains silent on the matter, which is curious considering it had a lot to say about civil discourse last year after it was pressured into firing conservative author Kevin Williamson.
“Let me be clear: I have often disagreed with many of the president’s policies, his behavior and rhetoric, but I would never call for violence against him, or any person,” Hill said Wednesday. “I apologize for breathing life into such an absurd assumption.”
The tweet to which she is referring was written Tuesday evening as Trump delivered his annual State of the Union address. A Twitter user said during the speech that it’d be funny if Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., shouted: “whose mans is this.” Hill responded by writing, “Nah, she gotta yell: GETCHO HAND OUT MY POCKET.”
This is a direct reference to the shout used to distract Malcolm X’s killers so that they could assassinate him during a speech in February 1965. The exact words were, “[N-word], get your hand out my pocket!” and there’s absolutely no doubt that this is the incident to which Hill was referring.
“When I tweeted ‘GETCHO HAND OUT MY POCKET,’ in no way was I suggesting any physical harm to the president,” she later explained. “I don’t need to dig in on this unnecessarily. If there’s a chance someone could arrive at that conclusion, I’d rather just say I’m sorry and move on.”
She added, “So, FYI … I literally have used GETCHO HAND OUT OF MY POCKET a bunch of other times on Twitter, and always in a manner where you want to escape or distract from a situation. Never in a way that was harmful or malicious.”
Indeed, this has been a long-running gag for Hill. That only proves what I wrote yesterday when I said her State of the Union tweet wasn’t all that interesting. It was an off-color joke about assassinations. She deleted it and apologized. Time to move on and all that. What’s interesting is that her since-erased remark is apparently in line with the Atlantic’s editorial standards.
See, after Williamson was fired last year for making incendiary jokes about the abortion debate, the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffery Goldberg, explained that the magazine demands better, higher-minded discourse from its employees. I guess that editorial standard doesn’t apply to off-kilter assassination jokes involving Trump.
Now that I think about it, the Williamson and Hill incidents are somewhat incomparable. Williamson wasn’t even an Atlantic employee at the time he made his comments about abortion. He was fired for things he had said long before Goldberg even courted him away from National Review. Hill, on the other hand, was pulling a paycheck from the Atlantic at the time she made her joke.
At this rate, it looks like she will continue to pull that paycheck.
