The Atlantic’s Jemele Hill this week appeared to joke about the assassination of President Trump, just in case you were wondering whether ESPN was mistaken to part ways with her in 2018 after she made similarly stupid comments about the president.
Honestly, though, the interesting thing here isn’t Hill’s joke. This interesting thing will be how the Atlantic responds, considering it sacked conservative author Kevin Williamson last year for making made similarly trollish comments.
Hill’s assassination remark, which she has since deleted, came Tuesday evening as Trump delivered his annual State of the Union address. One Twitter user tweeted during the speech that it’d be funny if Rep. Alexandria Occasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., shouted “whose mans is this,” which is apparently what the kids say today to mean someone is being a buzzkill.
In response to this tweet, Hill wrote, “Nah, she gotta yell: GETCHO HAND OUT MY POCKET.”
For those of you who don’t get it, that’s a reference to the 1965 assassination of Malcolm X. In February of that year, as Malcolm X addressed a gathering of nearly 400, a man in the crowd shouted, “N—-r, get your hand out my pocket!” It’s believed that the man’s intention was to distract Malcolm X’s bodyguards, who dutifully investigated the commotion, leaving Malcolm X vulnerable to an attack. At that moment, three armed men charged the stage, riddling Malcolm X’s body with bullets.
Hill’s tweet is not interesting. It’s in poor taste, sure, but poor taste is her brand. This is the same person who got dumped by ESPN after she claimed Trump is a white supremacist. These sorts of comments are the norm for her, not the exception. I’m most interested in seeing whether the Atlantic has anything to say about her tweet. It’ll be interesting to see if the magazine applies to Hill the same standard it used last year to justify firing Williamson for having engaged in Jonathan Swift-style absurdity regarding abortion.
“I had responded to a familiar pro-abortion argument: that pro-lifers should not be taken seriously in our claim that abortion is the willful taking of an innocent human life unless we are ready to punish women who get abortions with long prison sentences,” Williamson explained in his own word after his firing. “It’s a silly argument, so I responded with these words: ‘I have hanging more in mind.’”
He added, “Trollish and hostile? I’ll cop to that, though as the subsequent conversation online and on the podcast indicated — to say nothing of the few million words of my published writing available to the reading public — I am generally opposed to capital punishment. I was making a point about the sloppy rhetoric of the abortion debate, not a public-policy recommendation.”
Too late, the Atlantic’s Editor-in-Chief Jeffery Goldberg explained. The remarks, which Williamson made on social media and during a podcast prior to being hired by the Atlantic, were beyond the pale.
To be clear, Hill should not be fired for her Malcolm X tweet. Likewise, Williamson shouldn’t have been fired for the obviously absurd point he was making about the abortion debate. And this is why you should never police tone, no matter how trollish. The Atlantic is now in the unenviable position of having to decide between firing Hill, thereby remaining consistent in its supposed goal of being oh-so civil, or explaining how her assassination troll is in line with the magazine’s purported editorial standards.
Goldberg did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment.
