Wednesday, the Boston Globe found itself in hot water for an editorial written by contributor Luke O’Neill. With a wink and a nod, he suggested waiters “contaminate the food of Trump administration officials.” Oh, he put in lip service, telling them not to. Then he went on to say they’d regret it later if they didn’t. Somehow, this managed to get past the Boston Globe‘s editorial board, at least until the backlash and condemnation, including some from their own employees, took off.

As for the waiters out there, I’m not saying you should tamper with anyone’s food, as that could get you into trouble,” O’Neil wrote. “You might lose your serving job. But you’d be serving America. And you won’t have any regrets years later.”

See how easily he moved from discouraging them from breaking the law to encouraging them to do just that? And it’s all for America!

But that wasn’t enough for O’Neill. He added this, referring to his own days as a waiter approximately a decade ago:

‘not pissing in Bill Kristol’s salmon’ when he was a waiter was one of his eternal regrets. ‘I was waiting on the disgraced neoconservative pundit and chief Iraq War cheerleader about 10 years ago at a restaurant in Cambridge and to my eternal dismay, some combination of professionalism and pusillanimity prevented me from appropriately seasoning his entree.’”

Can you imagine the outrage if a Conservative wrote something similar concerning a member of the Obama Administration? That’s assuming it even made it past the editorial board in the first place. The fact this dreck did says a great deal not only about the Boston Globe but about mainstream media in general.

It didn’t take long for the public to take note of O’Neill’s piece. The majority responded much as we see in this tweet and op-ed piece by Herman Cain.

Who makes the editorial decisions at the Boston Globe? https://t.co/geIu3fhAwt

— Herman Cain (@THEHermanCain) April 11, 2019

But the Globe didn’t sit still, at least not for too long. It edited O’Neill’s piece three times, including adding a note at the top to the effect the original version didn’t meet the paper’s editorial standards and had been updated. That included changing “pissing on” to “defiling”.

Big whoop-ti-do.

Oh, the Boston Globe also noted in another comment that O’Neill isn’t on the paper’s payroll. A fine point of distinction since he has been a regular contributor.

I guess that’s what you call “plausible deniability”.

Except the internet is forever and once someone tweets about something, it will go viral given a chance.

But O’Neill still had more to say. He wasn’t happy with the actions of the paper in first editing and then removing his piece. So he took to social media to let us all know how wronged he’d been. Here’s a screen grab via the Washington Post of his response (because he’s locked down his Twitter account.)

Wow, so this is now an issue of “siding with labor”. How quickly he forgot what he was encouraging workers to do.

What else did he have to say?

I really like the lead,” O’Neil told The Post in an interview late Thursday night. “I think it’s a really good lead. . . . It’s evocative.”

Then there is this:

I wasn’t really advocating to piss in somebody’s food, that’s crazy,” said O’Neil, who had been writing weekly columns for the Globe. “But I do think these people should be made uncomfortable in public. I don’t think that’s a . . . radical idea.”

Riiight. And if you believe he didn’t mean for someone to follow his advice, I have some land I’d like to talk with you about.

But never fear, there are those who, as the Federalist pointed out, have tried to support O’Neill. They’ve claimed he has a First Amendment right to express his opinions. The Federalist is also absolutely correct in its response to those claims.

O’Neil’s statement encouraging readers to serve America and avoid regret by tampering with a government official’s food is vile, and deserves public censure. The Globe’s editors should never have published it. Clearly, it endangers Nielsen, who was verbally accosted in a restaurant last summer by protesters who disagreed with the Trump administration’s immigration policies. Who knows what O’Neil might motivate someone to put in a government official’s food.”

Remember, we have politicians like AOC claiming that pointing out the bias in her cohort, Omar’s, comments about “some people doing something” on 9/11 is advocating violence against Omar. So where is their outrage over what O’Neill wrote?

This wasn’t just asking waiters to make “these people feel uncomfortable”. It was suggesting they do something illegal that could make “these people” ill–or worse.

Yet we hear no outrage from the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezes of the world. We hear no condemnation from the rest of her ilk as well. Why? Because they none-too-secretly want that and worse to happen to anyone who opposes their agenda. O’Neill is an excellent tool for their propaganda campaign.

But who is Luke O’Neill and why should we care?

He is a contributor to New York Intelligencer. According to him, people who watch Fox News, etc., are, well, I’ll let his words speak for themselves. “One problem is that once someone gets pulled into the Fox News vortex it naturally leads to other scummier enterprises.”

From the piece the Intelligencer article references:

Mom don’t read this one. I love you very much and I will call soon I promise but don’t read this one ok because it’s about me jacking off just kidding it’s about a sore spot for me which is feeling like you’ve lost a piece of your loved ones to Fox News brain cancer. Or maybe do read it maybe it will be beneficial I don’t know I don’t know anything aside from this one thing which is that Fox News has stolen something from all of us. Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly and the rest have kidnapped and brainwashed many of our otherwise lovely and kind family members and I’ll piss on their graves one day with a huge fucking boner that makes it hard for the piss to come out and I’ll be like ah fuck and it’ll splash out weird. Don’t ask me why they’re buried next to each other it just makes sense.”

And this is someone who managed to get a piece published by the Boston Globe without proper editorial oversight. Not only do I share Herman Cain’s concerns about who is running the show over at the paper, I have to wonder if the piece managed to make it all the way through to publication simply because it followed the MSM’s general marching orders of doing everything it can to undermine the current Administration. No one can accuse the paper of not showing its bias time and time again. But this. . .this goes beyond the pale.

They say Hearst and Pulitzer were the originators of what we now know as “yellow journalism”. What Hearst, and then Pulitzer, did in the opening years of the 20th Century has nothing on what the main stream media is doing today. I wonder if they’d be proud or horrified by what those who came after them have done?

Featured image: PDPics via Pixabay license.