I kind of love it when the nutbags on the left eat their own. They never see it coming when the ideals they stand for come back to bite them. It never pays to be a progressive liberal left-wing Democrat socialist (that’s a mouthful of labels right there). His real problem was engaging in debate on Twitter. That’s where he made the suggestion that Lenin wanted to kill more people than Hitler. He tried to walk it back a bit but it didn’t work and he ultimately deleted the tweet thread.
I was only speaking in terms of intention—of who wanted to kill more, not who actually did, and in a follow-up tweet I explained: “Hitler was more evil than Lenin if we’re looking at what they did to people and that’s a pretty important metric for assessing evil!”
Let me be absolutely clear: actually killing more people, which Hitler did, is more evil. Lenin killed 4 million people, possibly up to 8 million, whereas Hitler killed roughly 20 million, including 6 million Jews. “In terms of death and destruction, the Nazis were more evil,” I wrote on Twitter. I also wrote, “Hitler was more evil in terms of how many he killed.”
It’s the kind of topic that you can debate among trusted friends over drinks or dinner. But Twitter is very much not that kind of place. And the argument I was making is a fraught one even under the best of circumstances—you don’t need to compare anyone to Hitler to argue that they are evil—and my delivery was poor, to say the least. Four days after I started making these points on Twitter, I deleted the thread.
My Family Was Hunted by Nazis. But I Was Fired For ‘Defending Hitler.’ – The Free Press
Not to worry. The Seattle Times had his back. Or I should say drove a knife into his back.
Six days after my piece was published, I was relieved when my boss told me she had reviewed the Twitter conversation and concluded I had obviously not “defended” Hitler. I was told the company had my back. I was told the paper would not stand for a lying Twitter mob coming after one of its own.
But then, just a few hours later, my boss called me and told me I was fired.
The official reason for firing me was “poor judgment” and “continuing to engage online.” I shouldn’t have “engaged,” but I admit it was hard not to defend my family against the baseless accusation they were Nazis who had killed more than 10,000 Jews.
In a statement the day after I was fired, the paper tweeted that “[an] editorial writer engaged in Twitter recently in a way that is inconsistent with our company values.” The statement added: “We apologize for any pain we have caused our readers, our employees and the community.”
I’m well aware, as I explained in a subsequent apology, that my comparison of Lenin to Hitler was not only pointless but potentially dangerous: white supremacists could conceivably use my words to minimize Hitler’s atrocities—at a time when Pew research shows most Americans are clueless about the Holocaust, and the number of antisemitic attacks is rising. The thought of neo-Nazis weaponizing anything I said makes me sick.
My Family Was Hunted by Nazis. But I Was Fired For ‘Defending Hitler.’ – The Free Press