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Writer Who Attacked Kyle Kashuv Learns He's Fired in Most Hilarious Way Possible

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Newsweek editor Kurt Eichenwald has been making all the wrong kinds of news lately.

His social media tussle last week with Kyle Kashuv, the pro-gun survivor of February’s mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, made him look even more foolish than usual.

Then on Tuesday, Eichenwald made headlines in a way that was even crazier than his “tentacle porn” revelation.

The controversial writer was fired from a sideline gig at the magazine Vanity Fair without even knowing about it.

The word was first published by the website The Daily Beast, and it came after Eichenwald admitted in an email to conservative commentator Ben Shapiro that he’d sought a psychiatrist’s opinion on Kashuv.

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Eichenwald wrote that this Florida teenager, whom he’d obviously never heard of before Feb. 14, was, in the opinion of a psychiatrist, in need of “psychiatric help or support.”

He also wrote that Kashuv is a “psychologically troubled kid” then – bizarrely – told Shapiro not to let Kashuv know about the exchange.

“Don’t forward this to Kyle,” Eichenwald wrote. “He does not need to know what a psychiatrist is saying about him. You have hurt him enough.”

As it turns out, Shapiro shared the emails with the entire world.

As The Daily Caller’s Benny Johnson noted, Eichenwald signed his very strange email with Vanity Fair’s logo.

In an even stranger follow-up email, Eichenwald accused Shapiro’s Twitter followers of sending him strobe light GIFs, mimicking a man who sent him a flickering light via Twitter in December 2016 that Eichenwald claimed induced an epileptic fit. (A criminal case is still pending, according to the Dallas Morning News.)

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News that he’d been fired from Vanity Fair induced a fit of a different kind.

Other Twitter users had their own kind of fit at the news:

Should any publication be paying a "journalist" like this?
If all that seems harsh, remember, Eichenwald is on the same political side as the people who are demanding that Fox News host Laura Ingraham be taken off the air for a relatively mild tweet about another Parkland survivor, David Hogg.

Now, there’s no way of knowing whether Eichenwald’s contract with Vanity Fair wasn’t renewed because of his egregious moves against Kyle Kashuv. Beyond Vanity Fair’s terse statement to the Daily Beast that “Kurt Eichenwald is not a contributing editor at Vanity Fair,” a broader statement from Vanity Fair wasn’t available late Tuesday afternoon.

And from Eichenwald’s complaint, it’s not even clear when it was not renewed.

But it’s a good bet that using the publication’s name on an email he’d sent slandering a teenager shooting survivor — and without that publication’s knowledge — wouldn’t endear him to any editor, anywhere.

For a guy who’s spent a lifetime in the news business, Eichenwald sure has been making a lot of the wrong kind lately.

That psychiatrist friend might have better things to think about than Kyle Kashuv if this keeps up.

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Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro desk editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He's been with Liftable Media since 2015.
Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He's been with Liftable Media since 2015. Largely a product of Catholic schools, who discovered Ayn Rand in college, Joe is a lifelong newspaperman who learned enough about the trade to be skeptical of every word ever written. He was also lucky enough to have a job that didn't need a printing press to do it.
Birthplace
Philadelphia
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