The Hill’s firing of Gray was in retaliation for an interaction between her and Yarden Gonen, whose sister was allegedly taken hostage during the al-Aqsa Flood. Throughout the interview, Gray calmly and cordially disagreed with Gonen, who was espousing Islamophobic and anti-Arab bigotry, as well as repeating the debunked narratives about Hamas and October 7.
Gonen went so far as to argue that Arabs and Palestinians residing in the U.S. “pose a threat” and Gray assertively pushed back. Gray followed up by stating: “I hope that Netanyahu agrees, and Israel agrees to the ceasefire deal that could bring all the hostages home, including your sister, home. I am sure the viewers watching are praying for her safety.”
In a pompous manner, Gonen inappropriately responded, “I really hope that you specifically will believe women when they say they got hurt,” as a jab at Gray. (The Hill/Rising, June 5). The asinine statement from Gomen visibly annoyed Gray, who was accused by her employer of “rolling her eyes.” Gray kept her cool and responded by simply saying: “Okay, thanks for joining. Stick around.”
She’s not especially impressive, I just can’t help but pity her being continually hung out to dry in increasingly degrading ways by the systems she keeps trying to work within. A person in her position could live an easy and comfortable life like any other DC suit passively toeing the liberal line. She burns all her bridges with the DNC to be Sanders’ press secretary after they’ve already fucked over Sanders once before, and Sanders turns around and disowns her when she doesn’t endorse Biden. She can’t get work in DC, so she uses some of her only remaining relationships to try to make a living as a podcaster by attaching herself to a Chapo host at the height of their success. The Chapo host gets outed as an alleged sex pest and ghosts her, with the scandal sinking the podcast. She gets a job as a talking head on a DC tabloid rag’s pivot-to-video internet talkshow where they make her interview a settler colonist promoting an ongoing genocide. Gray stays professional throughout the interview, and they fire her anyway, not for anything she said, but because they didn’t like her alleged facial expression after the settler accused her of being a rape apologist.
Obviously she’s a privileged imperial reformist whose politics are nothing special, there’s just something surreal about how disproportionately her career seems to keep getting worse every time she fails to seig heil with enough enthusiasm. If anything, she’s a living morality play for every DSA-adjascent professional “progressive” reformist: you can do everything “the right way” and this is still the best you can expect.
I agree with you on her being shafted. And yeah, it’s sad since she’s not a terrible person or a grifter.
I just feel like there are a lot of lessons, particularly those of the black civil rights movement, that she doesn’t want to learn from. I guess she thinks she’s too smart or professional for radicalism or a material analysis of the fake-left “progressive” movement she want to rise within.
Virgil had no credibility or political purchase, so it was pretty odd to me that they started that podcast. Seems like everyone else had enough sense to ignore him. Tried listening to a little and it was just a whoosh of co2. I half expect she’ll join TYT at some point.
In her interview with that zionist, she had a lot of opportunity to absolutely shred that bullshit; Finklestein would have and they’ve spent enough time together that she should know better. Although I’ve seen her scowl at Finklestein enough times, too.
There are plenty of people with lame politics so I have trouble deciding why I expect more. Maybe I keep wanting to see a new generation of black panthers, instead of someone who doesn’t want to cross the invisible line. Going against the imperial narrative in US media is hazardous to your career, for sure. There’s room for her if she wants to move left, but the forces of capital won’t let her use their media monopoly to undermine their interests.
Sure she could’ve, but I’m sure the logic going on in her head was: “If I lose my cool and come off too aggressive, they’ll just fire me and replace me with someone more explicitly Zionist. If I stay calm and professional I can ask questions that prompt the settler to expose her own bigotry to the audience without looking like I’m trying to do a debate instead of an interview. I’ll get to keep using this platform to reach people and ask questions that others wouldn’t.” The joke is that it didn’t matter at all because in the end they just fired her anyway because they didn’t like a black woman’s face while she was being slandered by a bigot.
There’s ideological room for her on “the left” (the limits there being her own class interest and political education), but lets not pretend there’s room for her to have a career “on the left”. The Panthers didn’t organize a 501c4 to pad their resumes. People like BJG desperately want to believe they can turn meaningfully positive political action into a job that pays the bills, and it always ends up like this. To ideologically move beyond the limits of professional reformism, she’d need to accept that it’s almost never going to come with a financially successful career. You can make a living, and you can be a revolutionary, but you can’t make a living being a revolutionary in a capitalist framework. The contradictions will always make you choose one over the other, and a person’s material conditions will usually end up being the deciding factor.