Hoisted by His Own Petard: MSNBC Cuts Ties with Sam Seder for 2009 Rape Joke

MSNBC has cut ties with Sam Seder over a rape joke the left-wing activist tweeted in 2009, according to TheWrap.

A source told TheWrap that “internally there was disgust over the tweet,” and so the decision was made not to renew Seder’s contract as a contributor. Seder’s current contract expires in February, but starting immediately, he will no longer be seen on the left-wing network.

“Don’t care re Polanski, but I hope if my daughter is ever raped it is by an older truly talented man w/a great sense of mise en scene,” Seder tweeted in 2009.

Last week, right-leaning journalist Mike Cernovich found Seder’s tweet and, from there, it quickly went viral. Seder then deleted it, something he now says he regrets.

Using his online show, The Majority Report with Sam Seder, the former-MSNBC contributor blamed the scandal on Cernovich and the alt-right with the claim that critics of his tweet were engaging in “willful misinterpretation.”

He explained that the context of the rape “joke” involved his disgust over a petition to “allow for Roman Polasnki to return to the U.S. from where he was a fugitive to avoid a trial regarding his alleged rape of a 13-year-old girl.”

“The [pro-Polanski] arguments forwarded at that time,” Seder says, “consisted largely of ‘time has passed’ and ‘he’s an important filmmaker.'” Seder claims that, through the use of satire, the tweet was meant to capture his anger at those arguments.

Seder further claims that there is a concerted boycott effort underway to use that tweet to get him “fired” (which has now happened at MSNBC) and to strip his online show of advertisers, a plea that rings awfully hollow in the wake of Seder’s own comments about the very subject of advertiser boycotts.

In a 2012 video titled “Stop Advertiser Boycotts on Right Wing Radio…Really?” Seder, who is obviously reveling in the relentless campaigns to remove the likes of Rush Limbaugh from the radio through advertiser boycotts, is so smug he actually challenges people to start advertiser boycotts against his own show.

“I want to reiterate that I do think it’s okay to email and pressure sponsors if you think that they should not be associated with … a program because of its content in some manner,” Seder explains, adding, “[I]f you have a problem with the liberal, leftist politics that I espouse, by all means, I would start a massive campaign asking [my sponsor] to stop sponsoring the Majority Report … it is well within your rights. I am fully behind it.”

Even if you buy Seder’s explanation for his rape tweet — the part about “Don’t care re Polanski” makes that difficult — this is yet another example of a leftist cooking in a stew of his own making.

The whole idea of destroying people and their careers through the twisting of words, of being unforgiving even after an apology or explanation, was invented, manufactured, and set sail by the left’s Sam Seders.

I would much prefer to live in a world where we allow for mistakes or moments of thoughtlessness, where apologies are accepted and forgiveness granted, where entire human beings are not sentenced to historical infamy over an off-the-cuff remark or crude joke from eight years ago.

But because of people like Sam Seder, that world does not exist.

This is a classic case of someone being hoisted by his own petard, and one can only hope that Seder comes out the other end of this experience less of a fascist, and a little more mature and forgiving when it comes to those with whom he disagrees.

Welcome to the world you built, Sam.

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.