The Boston Globe unpublished an opinion column Thursday that strongly suggested waitstaff in restaurants “tamper” with the food of Trump officials, saying the piece did not receive proper editorial scrutiny. They also stressed that its author, Luke O’Neil, was not a staff writer for the paper.
“The Globe Opinion page has removed from its website an April 10 column by Luke O’Neil on former homeland security chief Kirstjen Nielsen because it did not receive sufficient editorial oversight and did not meet Globe standards,” the paper said in a note to readers affixed to the top of the Opinion section Thursday. “The Globe regrets its lack of vigilance on the matter. O’Neil is not on staff.”
The original piece pointedly urged servers to condemn former Trump staffers like Nielsen to a life of “eating Grubhub over her kitchen sink.”
“As for the waiters out there, I’m not saying you should tamper with anyone’s food, as that could get you into trouble. You might lose your serving job. But you’d be serving America. And you won’t have any regrets years later,” O’Neil wrote in his piece.
He also lamented his own failure to urinate on the food of conservative publisher Bill Kristol when he had the chance about a decade ago.
“ONE OF THE biggest regrets of my life is not pissing in Bill Kristol’s salmon,” read the original opening. “I was waiting on the disgraced neoconservative pundit and chief Iraq War cheerleader about 10 years ago at a restaurant in Cambridge and to my eternal dismay, some combination of professionalism and pusillanimity prevented me from appropriately seasoning his entree,” he wrote.
The ultimate process that led to the article’s final removal appears to have been a painful one, with the Globe originally trying to salvage the piece by taking out its roughest elements.
“A version of this column as originally published did not meet Globe standards and has been changed. The Globe regrets the previous tone of the piece,” read an attempted editor’s note flagged by Mediaite before the final pull down. The edits included the removal of both the paragraph about tampering and Kristol’s salmon.
It wasn’t enough, however, Fox News picked up the story Thursday and the issue rocketed around conservative Twitter.
“So funny that all the resistance psychos who hate Trump are 10000x more hateful than Trump ever dreamed of being. What a bunch of losers,” said Daily Caller columnist Eddie Zipperer in a tweet.
O’Neil is a prolific freelance columnist, with recent pieces in New York Magazine and The Guardian. He is listed by Esquire magazine as a “writer-at-large.”
“I am sorry for my commentary regarding the warden of the baby jail,” O’Neil told TheWrap via Facebook Messenger, declining any further comment. In a message now hidden under a locked Twitter account, he appeared to criticize the Globe’s decision.
“In the famously left wing media, you can write op-eds advocating for turning Muslim weddings into bloodbaths forever but if you say human rights violators or war criminals deserve a pube on their salad it’s over the line,” he said.
Boston Globe editor Brian McGrory did not immediately respond to request for comment from TheWrap.