Sacked journalist hits back over "racist" royal tweet
A columnist who was fired from The Telegraph over a “racist” tweet about Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s baby has released a follow-up essay blaming “snowflake sociopaths” and “cancel culture” for her firing.
Julie Burchill lost her job after mocking the name of the Sussexes’ daughter Lillibet Diana on Twitter.
“What a missed opportunity,” she wrote. “They could have called it Georgina Floydina!”
The journalist took to Facebook to announce she had been sacked after working for The Telegraph for five years, claiming she had been complaining about the paper rejecting her “edgy column ideas” recently.
Burchill reiterated that she wasn’t “upset in the least” about losing her column in a new essay published in The Daily Mail.
“Newspapers with no original voices will decline even more rapidly than they would anyway in the digital age. It’s ironic that a conservative newspaper which castigates cancel culture cancelled me for castigating wokery.”
Burchill insisted her tweet was “sober, wry and entirely without racist intent”, and that she could not “stress enough how much I deplore the murder of George Floyd”.
“What I was mocking was the type of people who - like H&M - live in gated communities while espousing BLM’s politics of social upheaval, without giving any thought to the damage that pro-BLM riots do to poor and black Americans.”
This goes against research conducted by The Washington Post last year which found the Black Lives Matter protests involved very little violence and property damage from protesters. Instead, most of the violence reportedly came from police or counterprotesters directed at BLM protesters.
She has attributed the backlash to a “sexist and misogynist element” within “wokeness”.
“We live in an age of cultural insanity, a topsy-turvy land where men are women, harassment is justice and the Left are jostling to tug their forelocks and call for those of us who criticise royalty to be punished,” she said.
Burchill also touted her new publication on Substack - an online platform that allows writers to create and send email newsletters to paying subscribers.
“In the autumn, I’ll be back with my book, Welcome To The Woke Trials,” she wrote.
“And thanks to Twitter, The Telegraph and a pair of hypocritical fibbers whose fantasy land is so fragile brilliant journalists (me) must be silenced in order to maintain the illusion - it will have a whole new ending.”
Image: Daily Mail