Jemele Hill: Sorry People ‘Assumed’ My Fantasy About Assassinating Trump Was Violent

“GETCHO HAND OUT MY POCKET”

Jemele Hill halfway apologized on Wednesday for seeming to fantasize about President Donald Trump being assassinated.

During the president’s State of the Union address on Tuesday, the liberal journalist took to Twitter to conjure the scenario, which in her mind would take place live and involve Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.

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The tweet: Hill — whom The Atlantic hired last year to cover the intersection of “sports, race, politics, gender, and culture” — tweeted that Ocasio-Cortez should shout, “GETCHO HAND OUT MY POCKET” during Trump’s speech. Amid backlash, she deleted the tweet.

Her words appeared to reference the assassination of Malcolm X during a public oratory in 1965. Moments before the radical black activist was shot to death, someone in the crowd shouted, “Get your hand outta my pocket,” presumably to cause a distraction.

The aftermath: A spokesperson for the Secret Service told the Washington Examiner on Wednesday that the agency was “aware” of Hill’s tweet and “investigates all threats related to our protectees.”

In her pseudo-apology-clarification-clap back, Hill tweeted that while she doesn’t agree with the president, it’s crazy for people to think she had been advocating violence against him.

“Let me be clear,” she wrote. “I have often disagreed with many of the president’s policies, his behavior and rhetoric, but I would never call for violence against him, or any person. I apologize for breathing life into such an absurd assumption.”

Hill added that she had jokingly used the “pocket” quote “a bunch of other times on Twitter” and “never in a way that was harmful or malicious.”

The White House Press Office did not immediately respond to Pluralist’s request for comment.

Last August, Hill was fired from a lucrative gig at ESPN for calling Trump a “white supremacist” and urging a boycott of Dallas Cowboys’ advertisers after the NFL team took a hardline against national anthem protests.

The double standard: Conservatives, including The Federalist’s Madeline Osburn, challenged The Atlantic to take action against Hill, noting that although the magazine poses as a hive for pluralistic thinking, it last April caved to a left-wing Twitter mob and fired conservative opinionator Kevin Williamson for saying that abortion should be treated like “homicide.”

Jeffery Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, explained at the time that Williamson was fired because his statements made colleagues feel “unsafe.”

“Either this employment policy is only enforced when a Twitter mob pressures the editor into enforcing it,” countered Osburn, “or there are no employees at The Atlantic who are disturbed by their coworker’s public desires to murder the president.”

Read more: Osburn’s full rebuke of The Atlantic.

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