Juno News - June 22, 2020


Getting fired for “liking” conservative tweets

Mentioned
Michael Corrin Dinesh D'Souza Charlie Kirk Donald Trump Ann Coulter Antifa
Why does Canada even want a seat on the UN security council？ We must always remain vigilant against terrorism

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

129.94

Word count

638

Sentence count

36

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

A leftist mob at the University of British Columbia is celebrating as they get someone from a university to resign just for being a conservative. The mob s target was Michael Koryenberg, the chair of the UBC's Board of Governors, and what did he do to get himself in trouble? Well, he was caught liking tweets by mainstream American conservative pundits like Dinesh D'Souza, Ann Coulter, and Charlie Kirk. And unforgivably, one of the tweets he liked was critical of Black Lives Matter.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 An online mob of leftist students and activists are likely celebrating right now, as they have
00:00:10.860 succeeded in getting someone from a university to resign just for being a conservative. The mob's
00:00:17.700 target was Michael Koryenberg, the chair of the University of British Columbia, or UBC,
00:00:22.960 Board of Governors. And what did he do to get himself in trouble? Well, he was caught liking
00:00:29.720 tweets, multiple tweets, by some mainstream American conservative pundits like Dinesh
00:00:36.320 D'Souza, Ann Coulter, and Charlie Kirk. And unforgivably, one of the tweets he liked was
00:00:43.440 critical of Black Lives Matter. And we all know you can not criticize the group Black Lives Matter.
00:00:49.460 He also liked a tweet by the Team Trump account that celebrated Antifa being designated as a
00:00:56.080 domestic terrorist group. And he liked a couple tweets that wished Donald Trump a happy birthday.
00:01:01.180 So, an Antifa-affiliated campus group called the UBC Students Against Bigotry, whose whole mandate
00:01:09.740 is to get right-wingers and non-conforming leftists deplatformed and fired, they start combing through
00:01:17.160 Koryenberg's Twitter likes and flagging everything that they personally disapprove of. And then, this
00:01:23.760 UBC, Board of Governors guy, his list of liked tweets became headline-worthy for the leftist media.
00:01:32.160 The tiee called his social media history disturbing, and later the province copied that same line.
00:01:41.160 And I am sad to say that Koryenberg did the thing that you shouldn't really do in this situation.
00:01:47.100 He said that he regrets liking the tweets, and he gave a weak excuse about how he liked the tweets
00:01:54.000 late at night. He also said he wasn't aware that his Twitter likes were publicly viewable,
00:01:59.160 and he affirmed his support for Black Lives Matter. And look, maybe he's being genuine. Maybe he really
00:02:07.140 does support Black Lives Matter. Maybe he really did like these tweets, you know, late at night when
00:02:12.420 he was just so tired and not thinking properly. But it really is a shame that we can't just say,
00:02:19.100 or he couldn't just say, yeah, I liked those tweets, and I like those conservative pundits. So what?
00:02:27.660 A couple of UBC professors started advocating for Koryenberg to resign, and, well, they got what they
00:02:35.240 wished for. Koryenberg has resigned as chair of the UBC Board of Governors, effective immediately,
00:02:42.320 as of Saturday, June 20th. He wrote on Twitter,
00:02:46.080 Over the past two weeks, some articles slash statements that I liked on Twitter supported
00:02:52.220 regressive voices and took aim at thousands of brave individuals who are standing up against racism,
00:02:58.200 discrimination, and hatred. I accept that in liking these social media posts, I damaged what I support,
00:03:05.020 and that I hurt people. I wholeheartedly apologize to them, particularly to the students, faculty,
00:03:10.680 and staff of UBC. I have stepped down because it is the right thing to do. And that really is all he's
00:03:17.760 resigning for, folks, because he liked some tweets featuring basic Republican talking points.
00:03:26.180 Some journalists had a really strange reaction to this story. First, they were wrongly crediting the
00:03:32.920 student newspaper with breaking this story, when, as I just explained, it was the campus Antifa group,
00:03:39.420 Students Against Bigotry, who started all this. And then one blue check journalist said that getting 0.83
00:03:45.920 Koryenberg fired over his Twitter likes was great, important journalism. I tried asking her what she
00:03:53.580 meant by that, but no response yet. So let this be a lesson. Sometimes people will mockingly talk about
00:04:00.500 a conservative victimhood complex, and they'll say, oh, conservatives always think they're being
00:04:05.300 persecuted, even though it's not the case. But this Koryenberg situation shows that even if you are
00:04:10.900 a basic Fox News Republican mainstream conservative, the activists really are after your job.
00:04:20.000 I'm Lindsay Shepard with True North. Thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you in the next video.
00:04:24.620 I'll see you in the next video.