A woman who demonstrated her displeasure with President Trump’s policies by flipping the bird at his motorcade last week was sacked by her employer, a government contractor.
Juli Briskman, a 50-year-old mother of two, told the Huffington Post that she was fired by Akima LLC after her boss told her that she had violated company policies for social media.
Briskman asserting her 1st Amendment rights
This in spite of the fact that she did not take the photo, you cannot see her face, there’s nothing referring to Akima LLC in the photo, she wasn’t at work, and her Facebook page — where she had posted the photo — didn’t mention her employer.
In fact, it’s likely that her employer never would have found out about the incident if she hadn’t told them that she was the person in the photo. Her honesty earned her a one-way ticket out of the building with a box of her personal belongings.
Trump was returning from one of his golf outings in Virginia on Halloween when the motorcade encountered Briskman. She told the Washington Post:
“Here’s what was going through my head that day: ‘Really? You’re golfing again?’ ” Briskman said. …
She’d been chewing on the state of the nation during her ride — imagining the devastation in Puerto Rico, furious that young immigrants brought to the United States as children could be deported, despondent over the deaths and devastation in Las Vegas, concerned about her friends in the diplomatic corps who said their daily job is now being the laughingstock of the world — when the presidential golfing procession interrupted her meditation.
“I was thinking about all this, tooling along, when I see the black cars come and I remember, oh, yeah, he was back on the golf course,” she said.
Inspired by Briskman’s hand signal
Briskman told the Post that she’d repeat the gesture if the motorcade passed her again. Of course, she won’t be working for a government contractor, but perhaps a nonprofit such as PETA or Planned Parenthood.
Akima apparently doesn’t apply the social media policy uniformly. A mid-level manager who used scatological language in a Facebook discussion regarding Black Lives Matter — “You’re a f***ing Libtard a**hole.” — was allowed to delete the post and update his Facebook page that identified him as a Akima employee without getting canned.
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