Amber Athey, a conservative radio presenter and columnist, was fired from WMAL after activists complained about a tweet where she made fun of Vice President Kamala Harris’ brown outfit during the State of the Union speech.
“Kamala looks like a UPS employee — what can brown do for you? Nothing good, apparently,” Athey wrote on March 1.
WMAL Radio, which is owned by Cumulus Media, fired her, but The Spectator, where she is a columnist, ignored the complaints.
Athey announced the termination in a column published by The Spectator.
“I spoke critically of protests in favor of ‘trans kids’ at the University of North Texas. A group of maniacal left-wing activists who want to chemically castrate children in the name of ‘gender affirmation’ came after me. All of a sudden, the Kamala tweet was being re-framed as racist and dozens of Twitter accounts were bragging about contacting my employers about my ‘bigotry.’” she wrote.
“I received a call out of the blue from Jeff Boden, the vice president of Cumulus Washington, D.C, and Kriston Fancellas, the vice president of Human Resources.
“They told me that the tweet I sent about Kamala was ‘racist’ and that subsequent follow-ups defending myself and making fun of the efforts to cancel me were unacceptable. I had violated the company’s social media policy, they said, and I was terminated effective immediately.
“They did not have the courtesy to offer me an opportunity to defend myself, nor did they speak to anyone at the program before handing down their decision.”
In the column, she said it was not the first time activists have attempted to “cancel” her. When she was in Georgetown University, she was often reported for “creating an unsafe environment,” other students attempted to get the university to cancel her College Republicans events, and some even wanted the university to revoke her degree.
In the six years she has been a political commentator and journalist, “left-wing activists have tried every trick in the book to drive me out of the industry: digging up old tweets, demeaning my appearance and harassing my employers,” she said.
“I am sick and tired of conservatives apologizing to the left, staying quiet because they’re afraid of burning bridges, or complaining incessantly without taking action. We will only defeat the left’s bad faith attempts at censorship if we fight back.”
Athey accused the perpetrators of the “dishonest smear campaign” that made her lose her job of not actually caring about “stamping out racism, or transphobia, or whatever.”
“They only use those labels because they know they are powerful tools for silencing their opponents,” she explained.
WMAL Radio has ignored her appeals to get her job back, arguing that “the perception of racism was more important than whether or not my tweet was actually racist.”
“All I wanted was my job back, but now I feel obligated to speak publicly about what has happened. This incident has destroyed the integrity and reputation of WMAL and Cumulus as hosts of conservative content. We spoke frequently about the dangers of censorship and cancel culture on our program, and yet here they are bowing to the mob,” she wrote.
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