Earlier this week, an utterly disingenuous campaign to get MSNBC contributor Sam Seder fired over a 2009 joke tweet about Roman Polanski/rape apologists proved successful. Inspired by Mike Cernovich, who’s headed up such deliberately misleading (and harmful) efforts as “PizzaGate” and “date rape is not a thing,” a bunch of “alt-right” trolls harangued the network to drop Seder for a now-deleted tweet that read “Don’t care re Polanski, but I hope if my daughter is ever raped it is by an older truly talented man w/a great sense of mise en scene.”
Naturally, the “alt-right” didn’t care about the context, which was a gross mass effort from Hollywood filmmakers to demand Polanski’s release after he was arrested in Switzerland in 2009 on rape charges from 1977. Seder was criticizing the apologists, but because humor is best left to those who talk about “[choking] bitches out,” these enraged trigger warnings urged MSNBC to cut ties with the Majority Report host while Cernovich denied having complained about Seder in earnest.
MSNBC was already blowing with the wind, though, and fired Seder. But now there are reports that the network has changed its mind yet again—according to The Intercept, Seder has been offered his contributor job again, which he plans to accept. MSNBC president Phil Griffin gave the following statement: