In Twitter debates, people have no problem pointing to articles such as Newsweek’s: “White Supremacists Killed More Americans Than Muslim Extremists in Recent Years.” The article explains, “The mass shootings at a shopping center in El Paso, Texas, last August and at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand last March are just two high-profile examples [motivated by white supremacy].”
But if you try to explain that this isn’t the whole story, you will get a warning from Twitter. On Saturday, after someone pointed to the Newsweek article, I responded that the El Paso and Christchurch murderers were both environmentalists/socialists who didn’t like minorities because minorities have too many children. The Tweet linked to an article of mine in the New York Daily News, where I discussed the New Zealand murderer’s stated views. I also linked to a piece at the Crime Prevention Research Center about the El Paso killer. But Twitter refused to post this, saying, “We can’t complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful.”
But the social media giant has no problem with people saying that the Christchurch mass murderer was a “right-winger”. It's also ok to blame Trump for inspiring the attack. In my New York Daily News piece, I committed the offense of contradicting those claims:
"Right-wingers don’t normally declare that 'conservatism is dead' and that 'global capitalist markets are the enemy of racial autonomists.' Tarrant calls himself an 'Eco-fascist.' Have you ever met a right-winger who pontificates about the need for 'furthering the unionization of workers' or minimum-wage increases? Or one who denounces 'the ever increasing wealth of the 1% that exploit the people for their own benefit'?
Tarrant writes: 'The nation with the closest political and social values to my own is the People’s Republic of China.' . . .
Tarrant frequently disparages minorities, but his racism stems from environmentalist concerns. 'The environment is being destroyed by over population, [and] we Europeans are one of the groups that are not over populating the world. The invaders are the ones over populating the world. Kill the invaders, kill the overpopulation and by doing so save the environment.'
The El Paso killer identified with the Christchurch shooter, which the news media took as evidence that he was a Trump-influenced “right-winger.” But even a cursory reading of this manifesto makes it hard for anyone to view him as either. Here’s more:
“Our lifestyle is destroying the environment of our country. The decimation of the environment is creating a massive burden for future generations. Corporations are heading the destruction of our environment by shamelessly overharvesting resources. This has been a problem for decades. . . . Urban sprawl creates inefficient cities which unnecessarily destroys millions of acres of land. . . . Corporations that also like immigration because more people means a bigger market for their products. . . . So the next logical step is to decrease the number of people in America using resources. If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can become more sustainable.”
The El Paso murderer hated both parties, writing, “Remember that both Democrats and Republicans support immigration and work visas.” As to Trump’s supposed responsibility: “Some people will blame the President or certain presidential candidates for the attack. This is not the case. I know the media will probably call me a white supremacist anyway and blame Trump’s rhetoric. The media is infamous for fake news.”
It may be accurate to say that environmentalists kill more people than Muslim Extremists in recent years. But there’s no way that Twitter would stand for that.
This isn’t the only time that the media shields people from knowing about violence perpetrated by left-wingers. Just this past week, Gary Maynard, a left-leaning professor of sociology at Santa Clara University in California, was found to have started forest fires “over and over again” between July 6 and August 7. But don’t expect the media to point out that Maynard hated Trump, believing that, “President Trump suffers from the same malignant Narcissistic Personality Disorder as Jim Jones did." If Maynard was a Trump supporter, this arsonry surely would have been newsworthy.
Social media and the news media clearly don’t trust Americans to make the “right” decisions. But the scary thing is that they believe that the truth is “potentially harmful,” whenever it doesn’t suit their political agenda.