The White House correspondent for the right-wing Daily Caller news website apologized Thursday for years-old anti-Semitic tweets. The anti-Semitic tweets were made in 2012, the year Amber Athey graduated from high school. The tweets, which included a joke about the Holocaust, were first resurfaced Thursday afternoon by a fellow at liberal media watchdog group Media Matters. “How many jews can fit in a clown car?” Athey tweeted. “1002. 2 in the seats and 1000 in the ash trays. Sorry @SaltznPeppa !!” “What happens when a jew with an erection walks into a wall? they break their nose,” Athey wrote in another tweet.
Athey used anti-gay slurs in other tweets, writing “shut up fag” in 2012. “If youre a guy and you have two earrings in one ear you are a faggot,” Athey wrote in another tweet. Athey apologized in a statement posted on Twitter, calling the tweets “awful” and saying they were meant as “jokes among high school friends.” “I understand now that they are not funny and are in fact extremely harmful,” Athey wrote. “This past behavior does not reflect who I am today and will be one of the regrets I carry with me for the rest of my life.” Daily Caller Editor-in-Chief Geoffrey Ingersoll declined to comment.
The Daily Caller, which was founded by Fox News host Tucker Carlson, has repeatedly run into problems with its reporters’ racist writings. Last year, the site cut ties with reporter Scott Greer, who had secretly written for a publication run by white nationalist leader Richard Spencer. In 2017, The Washington Post reported that Daily Caller reporter Chuck Ross argued in earlier writings that black people are inferior to other races.
