1619 Project founder purges her Twitter account after doxing journalist

February 9, 2021

There are now only nine tweets showing on her page, whereas this morning it was possible to see tweets going back to 2016. Tweets like these:

The story of Tuesday's deletions started with a story published in the Washington Free Beacon, in which Aaron Siribarium recounted the chats on a Times' staff private Facebook group where the forced resignation of science writer Donald McNeil was discussed.

Executive editor Dean Baquet was reported to have sent an email to staff explaining the rationale behind McNeil's forced resignation, saying plainly that "We do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent."

Siribarium said that his reporting that the inner workings of the debate resulted in 1619 Project founder Nikole Hannah-Jones posting his phone number on Twitter, all because he asked her a question she couldn't answer.

He asked her about her use of a racial slur, the "N-word," in a Twitter exchange about Larry Wilmore's use of the term at the White House Correspondents' Dinner in 2016. In this exchange, Hannah-Jones discussed the usage of the word itself. This is the same way that her colleague McNeil used the term, and it got him ousted from the paper. So why not Hannah-Jones?

Sibarium asked Hannah-Jones about the incident that led to McNeil's ouster from the paper, which went something like this: Some years ago, McNeil chaperoned a science trip for teens to Peru.

During a frank exchange, a student asked McNeil if a student should be suspended for using the "n-word." In addressing the question, McNeil repeated the term. This was drudged up by the Daily Beast only recently, which led directly to McNeil's departure from The New York Times.

If one writer loses his job for saying a word in an effort to untangle the consequences of its usage, but another writer does not lose her job for saying the word in an effort to untangle the consequences of its usage, it appears that there is a double-standard at play.

Instead of addressing that double-standard, Hannah-Jones posted the phone number of the journalist who asked her about it. When this led others to cull through her tweets to find out just how much of a double standard there was, she deleted her tweets.

Hannah-Jones has made it clear—she'll not be taking questions or be held accountable except on her own terms.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/lEDegIvicfE?feature=oembed