In case you missed it, The Huffington Post has had a rough couple of weeks. The unabashedly liberal and anti-Trump site published a post that perfectly captures Trump Derangement Syndrome. One blogger, whose post was removed by the site, decided that it was perfectly fine to say that Trump voters deserve to die,
@HashtagGriswold We do, which is why that blog on our platform was deleted almost immediately after it appeared.
— Lydia Polgreen (@lpolgreen) April 21, 2017
If the bombs start dropping, it’ll be on cities like New York, Los Angeles, hell maybe even Miami. Granted that cesspool of a state Florida is long overdue for a disaster to sink it into the ocean, but I happen to love South Beach. The fact that the first Americans to be vaporized or poisoned with radiation in the coming nuclear war will be the ones who tried to stop this crazy train from leaving the station just seems kind of...unfair.[…]
So sorry not sorry, but the ones who actually deserve to have a nuke dropped on them first are the ones who voted to get us all into this mess. They’re the ones who would have brought it on themselves if their healthcare was taken away and they dropped dead from their pre-existing conditions. And you know what? The world really wouldn’t miss them one itty bitty damn bit. If a bunch of these hypocrites who chanted “lock her up” overdose on Oxy and decimate their Podunk towns, honestly, the human species will be better off without them. It’s practically Darwinian. Or to put it in language maybe more of them are familiar with, “God don’t like stupid.” It’s one thing to be dumb enough to expend so much of your energy hating other people or neurotically obsessing about what others do with their own god damn genitals but it’s another to do it to the point that you’re willing to sink your own ship just to watch people you don’t like drown next to you. These are the people who should be filling the front lines of whatever war Trump wants to start so he and his billionaire buddies can profit off weapons manufacturing and oil contracts. These are the people who deserve to have their towns annihilated. These people are who actually deserve to die in a war that they’ll line up to support. Not my ass. I have a lot to live for. They’ve already decided that they don’t.
@HashtagGriswold @neontaster I'm a liberal and the answer is: No. I actually refuse to go to the website anymore.
— Phil Palermo (@PhilPalermo) April 21, 2017
More, from the same author. pic.twitter.com/GBniXTxHPf
— Alex Griswold (@HashtagGriswold) April 21, 2017
So, you can see why Huffington Post deleted this post. You can see how you come off when you break the cardinal rule of blogging: never write angry. This is just abjectly insane. The irrationality is nothing short of incredible. These people voted the wrong way, so I hope you get bombed--that's quite the rallying cry. Liberals claim (wrongly) to be the keepers of all that is intellectual. This post is far from that. It’s the ravings of a lunatic.
Yet, ‘the I hope Trump voters get nuked’ wasn’t the liberal publication’s only foul-up. They also had this gem from their South African bureau: maybe it’s time to deny white men the vote. Right, because reversing old Apartheid policies are a real winner. It sounded like troll bait—and it was—but HuffPo posted it. In the end, not only did they have to remove the post, but its editor resigned as well. Oh, and they didn't verify if the author was real person at the time of publication.
Huffington Post SA has removed the blog "Could It Be Time To Deny White Men The Franchise?" published on our Voices section on April 13, 2017.We have done this because the blog submission from an individual who called herself Shelley Garland, who claimed to be an MA student at UCT, cannot be traced and appears not to exist.
We have immediately bolstered and strengthened our blogging procedures that, until now, have operated on the basis of open communication and good faith. From now on, bloggers will have to verify themselves.
The real writer of the post turned out to be Marius Roodt, a researcher at South Africa’s Centre for Development and Enterprise, who was recently fired for this hoax. As for Verashni Pillay, the former HuffPo South Africa editor, well—let’s just say her former employer heavily criticized her on the way out:
The CEO of Media24, which operates HuffPost in South Africa, issued a statement calling the article’s publication “hugely damaging” to their reputation.“Responsible journalism is at the heart of what we do; it’s the currency we trade in,” said Media24 CEO Esmaré Weideman. “In an era of fake news, I know only too well that our editors spend an inordinate amount of time checking the veracity of information before they publish. When our systems fail, we’re not just alarmed; we’re outraged. This is a sad day for journalism.”
Andreij Horn, the head of News24.com, announced that they were accepting Pillay’s resignation and announced that the company will be making changes to editorial management to “address the internal issues that made the situation possible in the first place, and the impact it had on society at large, the company, and its staff.”
South African press ombudsman Johan Retief found that the controversial blog post was both discriminatory and constituted hate speech.
“Let me be short and sweet: If disenfranchisement of anybody (whether white males or black females for that matter) is not discriminatory‚ the meaning of discrimination should be redefined‚” wrote Retief in the 14-page finding.
I’m sure you all know what you’re getting when you come to Huffington Post, but can we all agree that this is just a trainwreck.
(H/T Alex Griswold/WFB)