Wapo viper Felicia Sonmez gets the boot
(Is that a mixed metaphor? Can a viper get the boot?)
You can be totally forgiven if you haven’t followed the woker-than-woke shenanigans of victim-card-playing Felicia Sonmez of the WaPo. I can’t say that it’s been number one on my dance card, either, but it’s actually an interesting example of workplace enmity and its uses. You can catch up here if you’d like, and today Sonmez has finally been fired from the WaPo.
Apparently she overplayed her hand when she accused other WaPo reporters – who had tweeted support for the paper and said it’s a nice place to work – of being way too white and too privileged. It’s a bit confusing, because looking at her photos I’d say that Sonmez is also white, but I guess she gets points for accusing others of white privilege – isn’t that the way it works? Although perhaps, going by her last name, Sonmez may actually be Hispanic, which would make her a POC by definition no matter what her appearance? I can’t keep up.
On Thursday, Sonmez took a flamethrower to fellow staffers in another lengthy series of tweets, attacking those who had posted recent, strikingly similar messages of support for their paper.
“I don’t know who the colleagues anonymously disparaging me in media reports are. But I do know that the reporters who issued synchronized tweets this week downplaying the Post’s workplace issues have a few things in common with each other,” Sonmez wrote during a lengthy Twitter thread.
“They are all white – They are among the highest-paid employees in the newsroom, making double and even triple what some other National desk reporters are making, particularly journalists of color – They are among the ‘stars’ who ‘get away with murder’ on social media,” Sonmez tweeted. “Of course the Washington Post is a great workplace. It is a great workplace *for them.* The system is working *for them.* What about for everyone else? The General Assignment team? The Morning Mix team? The newsletter researchers?”
Viper.
Well, now she can move on to the next venue. I wonder which media outlet would like to be the first to hire her?
I wonder which media outlet would like to be the first to hire her?
Whichever one wants a borderline personality on its payroll.
As has been noted by many she has definitively identified which one of the ‘bi’s’ she is the last week with her manic behavior.
The internet also claims she is 39 years old so not some fresh from campus wokist.
Sönmez is apparently a Turkish surname. I’m not sure if that’s her maiden name or married name.
If she’s Turkish she can at least claim to be non-white. It’s a very grey area as many Turks are primarily European in makeup (as she certainly appears to be). In an earlier era (when ‘white privilege’ actually existed) most Turkish Americans would have identified as white, as would most people of Middle Eastern, Arab or Persian background. But in the world of victimology and scorn for ‘whiteness’, good wokesters yearn to be anything but white (cf. Nancy Pelosi’s grandson).
An aside: I’m a bit darker complected than Ms. Somnez, due to my South Slavic heritage. But of course, I’m white. Not just because my ancestry is more than 90% European but because I’m politically conservative. All conservatives are white and white supremacists, dontcha know? DNA has nothing to do with it.
Viper gets mongoosed? Viper gets snake shot? Viper gets axed?
They make handgun cartridges that are like teensy shotgun shells for the purpose of shooting snakes at close range.
In world of business there have been a couple of related events recently.
1) Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase recently spoke of the importance of the entirety of stakeholders to their respective corporations. Stakeholders include shareholders, but also include those employees who care ever so deeply about social issues. Dimon has generally been good in spite of claiming to be a Democrat, but he gets an F on this garbage.
2) Reed Hastings (Netflix) specifically told his employees that if they want to cause the company trouble over politics or ideology, the exit door is right over there. We’re ready to replace you.
Both Dimon and Hastings have done the opposite compared to what I would have expected. Maybe it’s because JP Morgan is flying high now, and Netflix is struggling.
Ackler:
Turkish people are every bit as white as I am.
I don’t know if she’s Turkish, though. I think if she had any claim to be a POC she’d probably have shouted that to the skies, wouldn’t she?
I think this Holden Foreman guy might be my favorite WaPo employee now that Felecia has been let go. He went through all 4,800 likes of a tweet to find the 4 likes by WaPo staff and found out to his horror they are all white males.
https://twitter.com/LevineJonathan/status/1534564531300704258
He is also 22 years old and was only last year writing in the Stanford student newspaper about how outrageous it was that Stanford wouldn’t package his meals for him.
https://stanforddaily.com/2021/08/05/opinion-stanfords-dining-hall-system-did-not-work-with-my-disordered-eating-that-can-change/
It’s nice to have some good news in the WaPo for a change.
Am I the only one who believes the Weigle retweeted joke directly, although probably unintentionally applied to Sonmez, i.e., that she is personally bipolar and/or bisexual, which might account for the very personal way she perceived an otherwise mildly amusing joke? If one wanted some proof that the joke, as with all effective humor, contained some kernel of truth, one need look no further than Ms.Sonmez. Say what you will about Amber Heard’s defecatory peccadillo, Ms. Sonmez certainly metaphorically pooped her own bed.
So Infelicia then, eh what?
It’s astonishing that she thought she could loudly and publicly trash her employer without any negative consequence. So astonishing that many commenters on other sites opine that she *wanted* to get fired, then sue. It’s plausible.
TommyJay– Apropos of snake shot, my Uncle Karl (mother’s older brother) had a small farm in the flyover part of central Pennsylvania (a former governor once made the mistake of calling it a “cultural wasteland between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh”) where he occasionally used his squirrel gun to protect Aunt Rosie’s chickens against snakes and other varmints. Pennsylvania has only two species of poisonous snakes, rattlesnakes and copperheads, but even if they are not called vipers, they are not to be messed with. My dad and I saw Uncle Karl more than once shoot the head off a snake crawling out of the stone wall at the back of his property.
Felicia Sonmez may yet find out what it’s like to live in the real world rather than a journalistic bubble. As for who might hire her next, I hear the WH is hemorrhaging staff members of all colors, sexes, and sexual preferences. If she passes the Biden hair sniffing test, she won’t even have to leave The Swamp to find her next job.
The Turks originated in Mongolia, and migrated to what is now called Turkey (well I guess it is now spelled differently, but I don’t know what it is).
I have had no interest whatsoever in the opinions of anyone working for the leftist media.
“Sonmez may actually be Hispanic, which would make her a POC by definition…” neo
Apparently she’s a… “white Hispanic”.
I’ll believe the Washington Post is reforming itself when it fires Taylor Lorenz.
As to the joke whose retweeting caused all this uproar, along with the recovering lawyer above, I though it was kind of funny. I did not interpret it as an attack on all women. It was a joke, people. How many snide comments about men, funny or not, get ignored by the twitter patrol?
Kate–
Saw an update on Instapundit to the “bi” joke that upset Sonmez: “Every girl is bi. You just have to figure out if it’s Felicia or sexual.”
Enjoy!
Her full name at this time is Felicia Marcella Sonmez. She supposedly took a degree at Harvard in 2005. I’m finding a date of birth of June 1982. I’m guessing it’s a married name, or her mother is not Turkish, or her family’s had a couple of generations here as search results for the name ‘Sonmez’ are usually paired with Near Eastern given names (e.g. “Mehmet”). The addresses she’s been associated with have been in DC, bar one in Hackensack, NJ.
PA Cat, hahaha!
We know some Turks, from my husband’s business connections in years past. Some are obviously Turkic in origin, from the steppes of Asia. Many are of Balkan appearance, because of the heavy importation of slaves from Serbia over many centuries; also, there were quite a few Muslim refugees from Bosnia during the war in the 1990s.
Kate:
I don’t for a moment believe the WaPo is reforming itself. Sonmetz broke the house rules, and proved she’s not a team player.
Turks are white.
PA Cat,
Uncle Karl was a marksman. I suspect that the snakeshot cartridges are often used in a volume operation: killing several snakes or perhaps many rats in the barn in a hurry. The squirrel gun was a .22?
I’m familiar with copperheads from the Midwest, and rattlers from New Mexico and California. I think I saw a cottonmouth once in the southeast.
Sonmez’s chief critic, WP reporter Jose A. Del Real, is pretty clearly Hispanic, so she apparently doesn’t regard Hispanics as POCs.
TommyJay–
I don’t know the caliber of Uncle Karl’s gun– he just called it his “squirrel gun.” His farm was on the edge of the state game lands, and he used to go deer hunting every year during hunting season. That may be where he got to be an expert marksman, as he was too old to serve in WWII. My dad (who learned to shoot an M1 Garand in the Army) used to say that if Uncle Karl had gone into the service during the war, he’d have been a great sharpshooter.
All this because Weigel laughed at a joke about women being crazy. Sonmez sure proved him wrong, huh?
PA+Cat,, rattlesnakes and copperhead (and cottonmouths) are all classified as pit vipers. One can buy snakeshot and ratshot rounds for a variety of calibers, but these tend to foul the rifling in a gun barrel. The best solution is to find one of those old single-shot “snake charmer” guns that fire a .410 shots he’ll. Not very loud, no kick, and does the admirably.
I am reminded of the old Nocona Boots advertisements regarding ‘giving the boot to a viper’
I remember reading something about ‘the serpent shall strike at your heel, but you shall strike at its head’. Old book, may still have a copy lying around somewheres.
Felicia Sonmez has quite the history when it comes to trashing other people: there’s a long article in Reason about her destruction of a journalist named Jonathan Kaiman. You have to scroll down a bit because the first part of the article is about Kaiman’s relationship with a previous girlfriend named Laura Tucker. Then Sonmez rears her ugly head: That day, Kaiman saw that he had a message from an old friend, Felicia Sonmez, and assumed she was contacting him to offer advice. She wasn’t. She was writing to him about a sexual encounter they’d had the previous September that unfolded after a long, alcohol-filled day and night of partying. She wrote in part that “it has taken me a while to fully process what happened that night….I remember thinking your behavior was aggressive at the time; it’s taken me a while to realize that actually, that kind of forcefulness totally crosses the line into inappropriate behavior.”
Kaiman immediately called Sonmez, a journalist who had recently completed a year of Chinese language study and who now works for The Washington Post. Though he offered her an apology, he was shocked by her assertion. He says what happened was “a messy, drunken hookup,” one that they each pushed forward at various points. After that night, they had discussed the encounter; he thought they had thoroughly excavated an event that both agreed was a mistake . . . The rest of the article goes into detail about Sonmez’s takedown of Kaiman. While he certainly is no choirboy, Sonmez is a truly nasty piece of work.
https://reason.com/2019/08/23/im-radioactive/
FWIW, Kaiman is presently a 2L at UCLA.
” Can a viper get the boot?”
Better have a pair of snake-proof boots. https://snakebitesafety.com/best-snake-proof-boots/
PA+Cat … I remember reading about that at the time.
Okay. She’s poison as a potential employee. She’s poison as a potential relationship partner. It’s unlikely her brain can expand sufficiently to do actual writing, fiction or otherwise.
There are places, I’m getting the impression, which are so woke that the foregoing count as qualifications…for something.
Griffin: Whitey white white Holden Saige Foreman of Stanford may have jumped on the intersectional grievance train a bit late. Apparently his ‘eating disorder’ is that he doesn’t know when to eat his delicate vegan meals nor how much to consume when he does eat. That’s quite a stretch and doesn’t allow a whole lot of room, I think, for a flex.
And how many whiter names than Holden Saige Foreman can exist? I mean, that’s just a preciously white name. Sounds whiter than I look, and I’m REALLY white-looking.
Although Turkey has the highest concentration of the Sonmez surname it is also common in Germany and Sweden.
He says what happened was “a messy, drunken hookup,”
Note, at the time he was 30 and she was 35. A majority of their contemporaries would have been married by a point in time several years previous and such behavior is decadent at any age.
Apparently his ‘eating disorder’ is that he doesn’t know when to eat his delicate vegan meals nor how much to consume when he does eat.
I’m remembering that Mickey Kaus used to refer to a particular collection of young liberal journalists as the “juicebox mafia’.
Neo, the whole category of “white” is meaningless, other than “not sub-Saharan African.” Turkic peoples came from Asia, and include Turks, Uyghurs, an numerous other groups from the “stans.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkic_peoples
My husband shoots copperheads in our yard with my 20-gauge shotgun and birdshot. Aims for the snake’s head.
I believe you will find many people who live in Turkey are in fact of Greek background, as cappadocia was a majority greek for centuries.
Yes, Robert Shotzberger. I believe recent ancestry studies show that many of the Greeks who lived in Anatolia converted to Islam in the face of pogroms and stayed as Muslims. The remainder were purged in the early twentieth century and left entirely.
The same thing happened in Egypt. Copts (Egyptians) remained Christian until the programs of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries caused many conversions to Islam. About 10%-12% remain Christian, but the larger Egyptian population has a lot of Coptic blood.
Folks like Sonmez and her ilk have the maturity of spoiled rotten 5 year olds. She probably has a s**t fit if she finds that she has run out of cookies to accompany her glass of milk.
Not that many years ago protestations emanating from the anal orifices of these spoiled brat morons would be totally ignored by everybody and anybody.
Not any more.
They are attention seekers; no more no less. For whatever reason they need to be the center of attention, to have everybody notice them; sort of like those who dress up as Goths – spiked hair and all (why do the feel the need to stand out?)
I do not know what sort of personality disorder this is, but it certainly is a disorder.
Let’s just say she is mentally ill.
If you really want to get these folks have their knickers twisted about their throats, totally ignore them. Make believe they do not exist.
That will lead them to suicide .
One can only hope !!
It may just be Sonmez’s good luck that there’s an opening for “Biden”‘s Disinformation Czar…
(Unless Boudin’s already been promised it, or some uber-qualified individual—Hillary Clinton? Stacey Abrams?—was already appointed….)
She has done what we call “shooting your feet”. The STUPID was STRONG in this one…
Of course a viper can get the boot.
What they can’t do is WEAR the boot.
Roy – There are 7 million Turks in Germany, and 115,000, more or less, in Sweden.
So the LORD God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, Cursed are you above all livestock and all wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life.
And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.“
Gen 3:15, NIV
Yes. Snakes get the boot.
I hate those terms “Hispanic” and “Latino”. I won’t mark that down on forms (even though since I was born in a Latin American country, that is the “expectation”). I speak Spanish fluently. I reject the term. I was brought up enjoying my roots-but loving America, and my family never used those terms to describe ourselves. Anyone that is a near immigrant goes by the country they are from. I am an American, born in Cuba. I’ve yet to find a satisfactory definition for Latin or Hispanic. In the colloquial, really they are a term for mixed heritage Mexicans (although most Mexicans from Mexico that I am friends with, when asked they will tell you what state they are from in Mexico—folks from Jalisco are very clear they are from Jalisco and not Districto Federal; etc) Many people are not from NY or Miami are dumb struck when they meet a black Dominican, or someone from São Paulo who speaks Chinese as his first language. What does a 3rd generation American of Mexican descent, that doesn’t speak Spanish, is an atheist, and thinks Cinco de Mayo is the Mexican 4th of July have to do with a Black Colombian, or a Peruvian of Japanese descent, or an Argentinian of Italian descent from Buenos Aires, or a Quechua from Bolivia?? Certainly not the food, religion, ethnicity, color, and likely not the language. Latin America is too diverse in all aspects.
I suspect it is similarly annoying to those somehow associated with the Asian continent (or sort of anyway, as I don’t hear of Turks, nor Persians called Asians). What does someone from Pakistan have in common with a Han Chinese, or a Laotian? But they are called Asians. Really weird.
Using this mentality, since we are associated with the US/North American, then we are all Americans, and we should quit the profiling/cubbyholing of our citizens. Hmm, maybe I am on to something…
“Is that a mixed metaphor? Can a viper get the boot?” – it can if you step on it – good and hard.
@ Tina > “Using this mentality, since we are associated with the US/North American, then we are all Americans, and we should quit the profiling/cubbyholing of our citizens. Hmm, maybe I am on to something…”
Works for me!
Teddy Roosevelt: “America for Americans”
Address to the Knights of Columbus
New York City- October 12th, 1915
https://the-american-catholic.com/2019/10/12/october-12-1915-theodore-roosevelt-addresses-the-knights-of-columbus/
*For context, Roosevelt was specifically addressing the German-American organizations that were supporting the agenda of Germany in World War I, and there is no doubt he would include every other continent in the same way.
A slightly different version of that speech is here.
http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/images/research/txtspeeches/672.pdf
Amen, Tina!