Breitbart Pretends to Oppose Racism, Fires Writer Who Posted String of Bigoted Tweets
Aaron Rupar, Think Progress, June 5, 2017
Katie McHugh has lost her job as a writer for Breitbart after posting a blatantly Islamophobic tweet about the London attack on Saturday evening.
There would be no deadly terror attacks in the U.K. if Muslims didn’t live there. #LondonBridge
— Katie McHugh🇺🇸 (@k_mcq) June 3, 2017
McHugh’s tweet prompted Iranian-American actor Pej Vahdat to tell her, “You’re a real moron.” In a since-deleted reply, McHugh said, incorrectly, “You’re an Indian.”
Sceenshot Credit: Oliver Darcy
On Sunday, CNN reported that employees at Breitbart — which has a well-deserved reputation for promoting Islamophobia, sexism, and white nationalism — variously found McHugh’s tweets to be “appalling, “terrible,” and “dumb.”
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Breitbart management, however, decided McHugh went too far and decided to part ways with her.
McHugh announced her firing on Twitter on Monday afternoon.
Her tweet linked to a fundraising page that claims McHugh “was fired on June 5 for telling the truth about Islam and immigration in Europe.”
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The fundraising page also contains the following statement from McHugh.
Breitbart News fired an editor for speaking frankly about Islam and Muslim immigration. If there were no Muslims in London, there would be no Muslim terror attacks, period.
I said nothing wrong. As President Donald Trump says, if we don’t get smart, it will only get worse.
It’s also interesting Breitbart News chose to fire me rather than colleagues leaking to CNN.
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Though her tweets are obviously reprehensible, McHugh has good reason to be confused about Breitbart’s decision to fire her. The site used to be run by Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who described it as “the platform for the alt-right” — a euphemism popularized by Richard Spencer, head of the white supremacist National Policy Institute (NPI), one of the country’s leading contemporary advocates of ideological racism.
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