A right-wing panelist was removed from CNN anchor Abby Phillip’s show on Monday after a “vile attack” he made against journalist and political commentator Mehdi Hasan on the show.
Conservative commentator Ryan Girdusky, founder of the anti-critical race theory the 1776 Commission, told Hassan: “I hope your beeper doesn’t go off” during a discussion on the rhetoric from former President Donald Trump’s New York City rally on Sunday.
“Did you just say I should die?” Hasan asked in apparent disbelief. “Did you just say I should be killed on live TV?”
“No, I did not say that,” Girdusky responds.
“You said you hope my beeper doesn’t go off,” Hasan pointed out.
Girdusky asked Hasan if he supported the Palestinian armed group Hamas, to which Hasan responded that he supported Palestinians.
Hassan then said: “This is America in 2024… […] Forget the racism. It’s I should die.”
Ah, the classic, “It was just a joke!” Now, he gets to return to his right-wing safe spaces, censored by the left because they’re too sensitive.
I’m not understanding how the beeper not going off means he’d die.
Also from the article if you missed it last month:
Last month, hundreds of pagers reportedly held by suspected Hezbollah members across Lebanon exploded in an attack widely believed to have been carried out by Israel. At least 37 people were killed, including two children and medics, with thousands more injured.
No, I read the article. But saying, “I hope your beeper doesn’t go off,” is saying the opposite of, “I hope you die.”
I’m not defending him; he absolutely should have been fired for his overt and unabashed racism. I just don’t get how you get from point a to b here.
Then you are quite obtuse, unintentionally or not.
The insinuation is that he supports Hamas, and therefore is a target of the Israeli government’s supply-chain terror attack. Therefore the hope that “his beeper doesn’t go off” is meant to be a slight against his choice to support Palestinians.
The fucked up parts are as follows:
- assumption that all supporters of Palestinians are supporters of Hamas and/or their actions on October 7th, and therefore any criticism of Israel’s actions is an explicit antisemitic attack on Judaism itself
- Assertion that Israel was right and just to target Hezbollah operatives with the pager attack, even though it was reckless (and in fact killed and maimed innocents, and committed an act of war away from any battlefield)
- Flippantly dismissing a person by basically saying “you’re next”; by basically saying “for your opinion, a foreign government should sneak a bomb into your personal electronics and explode your family at home, better hope it doesn’t happen”
And don’t you dare try to say that takes it too far, because that’s exactly what that “joke” implies. What else COULD it mean? Only mental gymnastics could attempt to explain it away.
I mean, I took it as him calling the dude a terrorist because of the reasons stated above, but that’s not the same as saying, “you should die”
Again, horribly bigotted and a very good reason to fire him. It’s just a weird logical jump to go to that instead of calling him out on saying he’s a terrorist for siding with Palestinians and being Muslim.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing, when I first heard this story. He’s not saying he hopes Mehdi dies, he made an extremely cavalier joke about him dying. Just as bad, but, y’know, not as good of a sound bite.
Israel intercepted a bunch of pagers and filled them with explosives and then sent out a mass page that killed a bunch of people including kids.
Their beepers DID go off.
Right, I’m uncertain as to why saying he hopes his pager doesn’t go off means, “I hope you die.”
If anything he’s saying the opposite (but absolutely should have been fired for saying it in the most bigotted way possible.)
If absolutely nothing else, it’s conflating support for Palestinians with support for Hamas and is suggesting that the use of indiscriminate explosives is a cool and funny thing to do (assuming you believe him that it was a joke).
But more to the point, if you were to randomly say “I hope you don’t die” or “I hope you don’t get cancer” or even “I hope you don’t stub your toe in the middle of the night” while having a heated argument with someone, it will never be taken as you actually hoping for those things to not happen.
