Opinion: Getting Fired for Publicly and Unapologetically Threatening to Stab People Is Not 'Cancel Culture'

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Janover

 

Over the past few days, the saga of Harvard graduate Claira Janover, who decided it’d be a good idea to go to Tik Tok and threaten to stab people who say “all lives matter” has played out. In the rant, she went so far as to say she would watch them bleed out in what was a tortured analogy, to say the least.

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Eventually, Janover would lose her job at a prestigious accounting firm over the commentary she chose to broadcast to the world. Here was her response.

The Harvard graduate who said in a TikTok video that she would “stab” anyone who told her “All Lives Matter” revealed in a new pair of recordings that she has lost her job over the perceived threats and ensuing furor.

“Standing up for Black Lives Matter put me in a place online to be seen by millions of people,” a teary Claira Janover said in a new video posted Wednesday afternoon. “The job that I’d worked really hard to get and meant a lot to me has called me and fired me because of everything.”

Notice what you don’t see in the above comments. There’s no remorse or apology. There’s not even a hint she understands why what she did isn’t proper and could cost her a job opportunity. There’s no admission that perhaps going on a public forum and telling people you are going to stab them and watch them bleed out might not have been a smart decision. Instead, she would go on to blame Trump supporters for her woes, because if there’s one group that has large cultural sway over UK companies, it’s Trump supporters, right?

She also took aim at the company that fired her.

During the video, Janover gestured to what appears to be a page from the company’s website, and noted that she was axed “even though they claim to stand against systematic bias, racism and unequal treatment.”

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I’ll note that if you want to get a job after you make insane, violent comments, perhaps accusing the company that fired you of being racist isn’t the best move. But making good moves doesn’t appear to be part of Janover’s repertoire.

The reactions on the right were mixed. Some said turn about is fair play. This was cancel culture blowing back on someone who no doubt supports it. Others posited that her firing was wrong because people shouldn’t be fired over social media postings.

While I highly doubt this woman’s life is ruined (she’s more likely to end up teaching at some prestigious university now), the idea that anyone ruined her life in this situation is a stretch. This isn’t a case of old tweets from ten years ago being dug up to go after her. This was not a political targeting either. This is a woman who consciously made the decision to make a video talking about stabbing people over their political views.

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Would you hire someone with such a clear inability to make rational decisions and work with others? I certainly wouldn’t. This wasn’t new age cancel culture taking down another victim. If a person made these comments 30 years ago, they’d have ended up fired just the same. In the end, the decision to not end up bringing her on by Deloitte likely had less to do with what she actually said compared to how she responded to the backlash. There was no contrition shown on her part. Instead, she continued to blame others.

Through tears, a defiant Janover vowed not to back down.

“I’m too strong for you. I’m too strong for any of you ‘All Lives Matter,’ racist Trump supporters,” she said. “It sucks. But it doesn’t suck as much as systemic racism. And I’m not going to stop using my platform to advocate for it.”

She’s not a victim of systematic racism. She’s a victim of her own idiocy. That’s something she apparently can’t grasp, and that’s why she got fired, not because of some nefarious push from the right.

My colleague Kira Davis put this succinctly in a tweet last night.

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While conservatives should push back on real cancel culture, which operates in bad faith to get people “canceled” for things they’ve already apologized for, there’s a difference between that and a far-left ideologue saying insane things, doubling down on those insane things, and then calling everyone racist when it blows back on her. Janover is not a person who needs defending because she doesn’t even want to be defended.

No company in their right mind would hire a person who acts like that. She should have at least had the good sense to not voluntarily take such rantings public. Deloitte doesn’t deserve scorn for making a decision that was obviously based on what is best for their business. Calling Janover’s situation cancel culture pushes the meaning of the phrase to such absurd lengths as to make it meaningless. This was not cancel culture, it was normal culture. If you don’t want to risk getting fired, don’t threaten to kill people and then insist you are right when confronted about it. It’s a pretty simple calculation.

 

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