Conservative show host wonders who’s next after she’s fired from radio gig over Kamala Harris joke

With so much going on in the world there hasn’t been as much attention paid to the toxic cancel culture in America, but lo and behold it’s alive and well.

A recent example of this can be seen in an incident involving Amber Athey, the co-host of O’Connor & Company on WMAL, who said she was fired from that gig because of a benign joke she made about Vice President Kamala Harris’ attire.

Athey, who is the Washington editor for The Spectator and a senior fellow at the Steamboat Institute, explained why she has been absent from the show in a tweet, “Over the past two weeks, I have received a lot of questions about why I haven’t been on @WMALDC. I was not sick or on vacation. @WMALDC @CumulusMedia fired me for making a ‘racist’ joke about Kamala Harris’s SOTU outfit.”

That tweeted joke is still up and can be seen here: “Kamala looks like a UPS employee — what can brown do for you? Nothing good, apparently.”

“About a month ago today, I posted a tweet during the State of the Union address poking fun at Vice President Kamala Harris’s outfit,” Athey wrote in a Spectator article. “Harris wore a chocolate brown business suit that was panned on social media — some users compared her to a Hershey’s chocolate bar, while others wondered why she wore the same color as her chair. I went for a UPS joke, featuring the company’s now retired slogan.”

That slogan, of course, is: “What can brown do for you?”

As is often the case, it wasn’t until Athey dared to dissent from the left-wing narrative that her joke became a problem.

“No one had a problem with the tweet until a few days later, when I spoke critically of protests in favor of ‘trans kids’ at the University of North Texas. A group of maniacal left-wing activists who want to chemically castrate children in the name of ‘gender affirmation’ came after me,” she explained. “All of a sudden, the Kamala tweet was being re-framed as racist and dozens of Twitter accounts were bragging about contacting my employers about my ‘bigotry.'”

Athey said her bosses at The Spectator “laughed” at the complaints, understanding the fight against censorship, but WMAL, which is owned by Cumulus Media, took a different approach.

“I was officially hired at WMAL, which is owned by Cumulus Media, this past fall as one of three female co-hosts of O’Connor & Company, the morning drive radio program.”

“On March 9, I co-hosted the show alongside my friend Larry O’Connor, just like I normally do on Wednesday mornings. It had been nearly a week since the social media meltdown over my Kamala tweet, and none of us at the show had a feeling that anything was amiss,” Athey said. “Later that afternoon, just before 4 p.m., I received a call out of the blue from Jeff Boden, the vice president of Cumulus Washington, D.C, and Kriston Fancellas, the vice president of Human Resources.”

“They told me that the tweet I sent about Kamala was ‘racist’ and that subsequent follow-ups defending myself and making fun of the efforts to cancel me were unacceptable,” she continued. “I had violated the company’s social media policy, they said, and I was terminated effective immediately.”

Using the “spineless decision-making” that not only resulted in her being fired, but is present in boardrooms across America — see Disney — as motivation, Athey said she feels obligated to call attention to the “dangers of censorship and cancel culture.”

“If I can be fired for making fun of the vice president’s outfit, every single host on a Cumulus station is in danger of losing their job at a moment’s notice,” she wrote. “Political commentary is worthless if it can’t be used to speak truth to those in power without fear of professional consequences.”

She’s also tried of folks on the right apologizing for essentially nothing and urged conservatives to start fighting back.

“I am sick and tired of conservatives apologizing to the left, staying quiet because they’re afraid of burning bridges, or complaining incessantly without taking action,” Athey concluded. “We will only defeat the left’s bad faith attempts at censorship if we fight back.”

Tom Tillison

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