It was one of his favorite lines he ever wrote.
That’s what Massachusetts freelance writer Luke O’Neil thought of the opening to an opinion piece he penned for The Boston Globe, published Wednesday night.
The op-ed began with O’Neil, who also writes the newsletter Hell World, expressing his regret over not urinating in Iraq War cheerleader Bill Kristol’s salmon dinner when O’Neil waited on him a decade ago.
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“One of the biggest regrets of my life is not pissing in Bill Kristol’s salmon,” wrote O’Neil.
“The idea that anyone would really go and piss in someone’s food because Luke O’Neil the weird freelancer said to is fucking stupid. It’s obviously just being crude for humorous effect.” — Luke O’Neil
In the article, O’Neil argued that former Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen—who resigned earlier this week—should not be allowed to feel comfortable in polite society after her oversight of the Donald Trump administration’s child separation policy and general war on immigrants. O’Neil also sarcastically implied that waiters should do to Nielsen’s food what he didn’t to Kristol’s dish.
That triggered outrage from the right as Fox News, The Daily Caller, and other conservative media outlets and personalities attacked O’Neil and the Globe for the article.
The Globe took the article down Thursday and issued a strongly worded statement distancing the paper from O’Neil, noting that the writer was “not on staff.”
“In the end, this piece did not meet Globe standards and we regret that it got posted,” interim editorial director Shirley Leung told Boston public radio station WGBH Friday.
In an interview, O’Neil expressed frustration with the paper’s decision and its treatment of him.
“I’m disappointed that the Globe threw me under the bus and took the almost never done step of deleting an article entirely, all because the ‘civility police’ complained about it,” O’Neil told Common Dreams.
In a tweet Thursday, O’Neil announced he would no longer write for the paper.
Fellow journalists were outraged at the paper’s decision to pull the piece and leave O’Neil twisting in the wind.
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