The Huffington Post raised eyebrows with their shade-throwing at departing White House strategist Steve Bannon. Their first headline on their home page read “GOY, BYE!” The Jewish word for a non-Jew is usually not seen as derogatory, but it sounded derogatory in this usage.
The reporter of the piece was Sam Levine. His funniest paragraphs was this: “Bannon also gave a bizarre interview this week to The American Prospect, a progressive publication, calling white supremacists a “collection of clowns” and contradicted Trump’s military threats to North Korea.” The HuffPost thinks it’s bizarre to mock white supremacists?
Linguistically, the HuffPost was in sync with white-supremacist anti-Semite David Duke, who tweeted in the same time frame, implying Jared & Ivanka were the end of Bannon: “(((They))) are no longer behind the curtain - in your face, Goy!”
You know you’ve raised eyebrows when Keith Olbermann suggests you’ve come a little unglued:
This was a top-down decision, as HuffPost editor Lydia Polgreen twirled in the shade. It was an “epic splash,” she said, and when warned it would stir things up, she wrote “Looking forward to it!” She suggested it was taken from a "GOY, BYE" tweet from HuffPost's Chloe Angyal.
Polgreen & Co. decided they better change it, so the headline on the front page became "WHITE FLIGHT."
In a March interview with Out magazine (headlined "Meet the Queer Black Woman Changing Journalism"), Polgreen said:
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the emergence of a president backed by a white-power ideology came after two terms of an African-American president.” She believes The Huffington Post can repair some of the damage. “I’d love HuffPost to be the place where the real conversation is happening about who gets to define what it is to be American, and what the real America is,” she says.
