Holly Tinch, the owner of Holly's Road Kill Saloon in McLeod, Montana, is being criticized after she referred to COVID-19 as the "Ch*nk flu" in social media posts.
In an interview with KTVQ, Tinch insisted she is not a racist.
You can hear her remarks in the video below.
Tinch said:
"I’m not a racist person at all. And if you think that I am, that’s your problem, not mine."
"You want to call me an Irish name, have at it. Ask me if I care, I don’t.”
"I’m going to stand by my First Amendment and my Second Amendment and the rest of them."
However the First Amendment applies only to governmental action and does not apply to behavior by private employers, private companies, or private non-government individuals unless they worked in concert with the government.
Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences.
The social media page for Holly's Road Kill Saloon has been inundated with bad reviews since Tinch's social media post.
She has not stopped there, either.
Tinch, whose bar has a "Warning: Does not play well with liberals" sign out front, complained online people had "decided to call the bar, write sh*t on Billings Service Group (FB) because I said Ch*nk flu."
Unsurprisingly, Tinch has not attacted much sympathy.
Anti-Asian sentiment and hate crimes have seen an uptick since the pandemic was politicized by former Republican President Donald Trump and his administration, who regularly referred to COVID-19 as "the China virus."
Last year, a study published in The American Journal of Public Health found Trump’s rhetoric led to a rise of anti-Asian sentiment online.
The study, which reviewed 1.2 million hashtags during the week of March 16, 2020—the first time Trump used the phrase “China virus” in a post—found that there was a “massive increase” in use of the hashtag #chinesevirus in reference to the Covid-19 pandemic.
#chinesevirus eventually overtook #covid19 in popularity.
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