You’re fired!

You’re fired!

It is really ironic that I was working on an article on the uptick in black unemployment when yesterday I was fired by the conservative weekly I write a column for because I am too conservative. At least they didn’t fire me because I was black. But first a little background. For twenty years I wrote a monthly business column for our local daily. Then it was sold to Gannet whose editors did not like me – no surprise there. They started editing my articles, sometimes changing their meaning. When I complained they said “If you don’t like it then quit.” They then moved my column from the business section of the Sunday paper to “Opinions”. Why? Because sometimes I expressed an opinion in the pieces. “OK”, I said, “I will now write opinion pieces.” Then during Covid they refused to publish my article that listed all the mandates from our local health department saying that I could not find scientific justification for any of them. Stores had a curfew – I asked did this mean that Covid only spread after hours? There was the 6 foot rule, later admitted by Fouci to be made up. I noted that every rule was a repeat of rules mandated by health departments during the Spanish Flu and asked whether knowledge had advanced since 1918. But our newspaper was in the “let’s keep them scared” camp. They wouldn’t publish the piece. So I quit. It was not a surprise that I was too conservative for the new editors.

Fast forward to yesterday. The publisher of the conservative weekly had called me when he found out I had quit the other paper and said that I could write “anything I wanted”. Turns out that was true only while Joe Biden was president. Although I wrote pieces supporting President Trump on his efforts on DEI, trans and antisemitism, I was opposed to the tariffs, the shakedown of private firms and noted that Trump had lied when he said he was going to be too busy to wreak vengeance on his enemies. The publisher called me obviously upset I had used the word “lied” – maybe I should have called it a fabrication – and fired me. He said that he was receiving too many criticisms of my articles and remember “we are a conservative paper.” It was curious because I had gotten only one email that called me a racist for writing that Europe was a loser and we should look elsewhere for alliances. Recall that months later, the Wall Street Journal had a piece saying the same thing. I reminded the publisher that I was a conservative – a laissez faire, free market, government with a small “g” conservative. But I was not a Trump conservative and the publisher was, agreeing with everything done by this president. So he fired me.

Isn’t it ironic that I was fired from a liberal paper for being too conservative and then fired by a “conservative” paper for the same reason? So my platform continues to shrink. Now there is only my blog. But so be it. I have been told from the womb that my mind works differently. I do this because it is fun. I don’t ask you to agree with me. I only want you to enjoy what I write whether you agree or not. Tell me when you do and please tell me when you don’t. I am an academic. Milton Friedman once said that professors love to profess. And I do love to profess.

Again. Thank you for being there.