The scenario has been a theme this week. Someone shoots off his or her metaphorical mouth showing ignorance and probable anti-Semitic bias in a social media post designed for public consumption, and loses a job when the employer decides that it doesn’t want to lose business from those who might wonder, “Why do they hire people like that?”

It is not a First Amendment issue. It is a an irresponsible employee issue. Hollywood has been especially busy. Spyglass, the company that owns the “Scream” film franchise, fired actress Melissa Barrera from the upcoming “Scream VII” (There are going to be seven of these?) after she posted standard issue “genocide/innocent Gazans/ cruel Israel messages. “THIS IS GENOCIDE & ETHNIC CLEANSING,” she concluded.

1) No, it isn’t, and 2) You really don’t understand the Cognitive Dissonance Scale, do you?

It’s really quite simple, Melissa…

For the vast majority of Americans who pay attention and aren’t intersectional fanatics, supporting the Palestinian-Hamas “From the river to the sea” mission is at the bottom of the scale. People who want to see movies must regard the films and its stars above zero, ideally quite a bit above. If that film or its stars associate themselves with a deeply negative point of view or conduct, that connection (think of being tied to an anchor) drags the positive attitudes down, meaning fewer tickets sold, and in turn fewer profits.

Never mind Alaska, U.S. schools need to educate students about Dr. Festinger’s scale.

Barrera was not alone in making this error. Voice actress Tara Strong was fired from the animated indie TV show “Boxtown” after posting indiscriminately about the Israel-Hamas war, liking and then unliking tweets. Apparently the producers don’t want their actors saying anything about the controversial issue at all. The biggest casualty of the Hamas-Israel Ethics Train Wreck in this respect was five-time Oscar nominee and one-time winner Susan Sarandon, who spoke at at a pro-Palestinian rally last week and was dropped by United Talent Agency, whose management is Jewish. More importantly, the agency concluded, probably accurately, that Sarandon’s comments diminished her value to them, and perhaps having a pro-terrorism client might deter more rational artists from seeking their aid.

In the legal world, at least four law students from Columbia, Harvard and NYU had their big firm offers rescinded after making pro-Hamas statements for public consumption. Then there is the interesting case of Melat Kiros, a 2022 graduate of Notre Dame Law and a securities regulatory and enforcement associate in the New York office of Sidley Austin.

After more than 200 law firms issued an open letter urging law school deans to be more pro-active against antisemitism in their schools, she took to Medium with an  open letter criticizing the letter which her own firm had signed. She argued that the firms’ letter “conflat[ed] such bigotry with the geopolitical question of Israel’s legitimacy.” After Kiros’s letter was circulated widely among the Pro-Palestine crowd, the firm told her to take it down. She refused, and was fired.

Her firing has ignited another controversy. Defenders of the now ex-associate argue that she did not excuse the October 7 attack in her letter, but merely made the case for a better resolution of the Palestinian-Jewish conflict than the current one. That’s not exactly right: her letter’s statement that “it cannot be forgotten that violence does not occur in a vacuum” is a thinly veiled excuse for the Hamas attack, and her “There is no justification for the attacks on Israel on October 7th, just as there is no justification for the disproportionate and collective punishment being waged on the Palestinian people by the Israeli government in retaliation…” echoes Barack Obama’s ‘both sides are at fault’ fallacy. But Obama doesn’t need a job.

Moreover, her “solution” to the problem is a single, multi-denominational state in which Hebrews and Palestinians can live together in peace and harmony, cue the teddy bears, rainbows and “Imagine.” Yeah, that’s going to happen. Such a theory is so contrary to reality, logic and history that it calls into question her trustworthiness as a lawyer, as well as the competence of any firm that would hire her.

Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Eugene Volokh wonders whether her dismissal violates New York Labor Law § 201-d, which protects political activities and speech conducted on an employee’s own time. However, Kiros identified herself as a lawyer and also told readers what firm she worked for. As with the Hollywood firees, she behaved in blatant defiance of the Cognitive Dissonance Scale. The professor concedes that Sidley probably has a right to fire an associate for such a letter, but wishes that firms would accept a wide variety of opinions in their midst.

They do, however, at least most of them. The problem is when a member of the firm pronounces a particularly stupid opinion in a public forum, and that opinion reflects so poorly on the firm that it could cause tangible harm.