Robert Stacy McCain wrote:

This reminds me of how anti-Semitic and anti-Asian hate crimes were spiking a few months ago, but because the perpetrators were black, liberals didn’t want to talk about the problem.

It is no longer enough to not be racist; you must now be anti-racist!

Anti-racism encompasses a range of ideas and political actions which are meant to counter racial prejudice, systemic racism, and the oppression of specific racial groups. Anti-racism is usually structured around conscious efforts and deliberate actions which are intended to provide equal opportunities for all people on both an individual and a systemic level. As a philosophy, it can be engaged in by the acknowledgment of personal privileges, confronting acts as well as systems of racial discrimination, and/or working to change personal racial biases. Major contemporary anti-racism efforts include Black Lives Matter organizing and workplace antiracism.

Today’s credentialed media have taken that to mean that news which could “perpetuat(e) stereotypes about who commits crime in our community” — quote taken from the Sacramento Bee but could have come from any number of newspapers — must be soft-peddled if not outright suppressed. Maybe that’s why the two murders yesterday in the City of Brotherly Love — both committed fairly early in the evening so there was plenty of time — were not mentioned on either the main page or crime page of The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Elizabeth ‘Lisa’ Hughes, the publisher, explicitly declared that the Inquirer would be an “anti-racist news organization,” and they’ve run plenty of articles on the Buffalo shooting, but virtually nothing on the killings in Philadelphia. Miss Hughes told us that the Inquirer was:

• Establishing a Community News Desk to address long-standing shortcomings in how our journalism portrays Philadelphia communities, which have often been stigmatized by coverage that over-emphasizes crime.
• Creating an internal forum for journalists to seek guidance on potentially sensitive content and to ensure that antiracism is central to the journalism.
• Commissioning an independent audit of our journalism that resulted in a critical assessment. Many of the recommendations are being addressed, and a process for tracking progress is being developed.
• Training our staff and managers on how to recognize and avoid cultural bias.
• Examining our crime and criminal justice coverage with Free Press, a nonprofit focused on racial justice in media.

Miss Hughes did something really radical in that: she told us the truth, that the Inquirer would no longer tell the truth, not if that truth might offend some people. A year later, she apologized again for the newspaper having told the truth in the past.

A site search for David Wenwei Chou, the (alleged) killer in the plan to murder Taiwanese people about which Mr McCain wrote, turned up zero returns in the Inquirer, but there was this in the pages of the Inky:

Buffalo shooting a reminder of what happens when white men get radicalized

We must invest more in helping vulnerable boys before they become madmen.

by Chad Dion Lassiter | Monday, May 16, 2022

I do not know if Mr Lassiter, the author, and the executive director of the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission and the 2021 PA Social Worker of the Year, wrote the headlines for his OpEd column; that’s a job normally given the newspaper’s editors, but maybe, just maybe, the ten murders (allegedly) committed by Payton Gendron in Buffalo pale in comparison to the 178 committed as of 11:59 PM EDT on May 16^th in the City of Brotherly Love. You know what ten murders in Philadelphia are? They are last week!

We know a lot about racially motivated violent extremists. Yet we have done little to prevent people like Payton S. Gendron, 18, who traveled 200 miles from Conklin, N.Y., to massacre Black people in Buffalo.

We know, for example, who is most likely to become radicalized — socially isolated white men with bleak economic futures, criminal records, substance abuse, and mental health issues.

We also know that the problem of racially motivated attacks is a growing danger.

Last year, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, upon releasing the Biden administration’s plan to counter domestic terrorism, said: “In the FBI’s view, the top domestic violent extremist threat comes from racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists, specifically those who advocated for the superiority of the white race.” Garland added that the threat was “rapidly evolving.”

Mr Lassiter then lists several mass shooting incidents in which younger white males deliberately targeted others, often blacks.

James Fields Jr. was only 20 years old in 2017 when he drove from Ohio to Virginia to join the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, one of the largest white supremacist rallies in the United States in recent history. The high school graduate, described as a loner with a deep admiration for Adolf Hitler, had a long history of abuse toward his mother and was suffering from schizophrenia. Like many far-right violent extremists, Fields was struggling with social mobility, working as a security guard for $10.50 per hour. He became infamous for plunging his car into a group of peaceful counterprotesters, killing 32-year-old paralegal Heather Heyer.

Somehow, in his zeal to condemn young white males, Mr Lassiter neglected to mention Darrell E Brooks, Jr, a 39-year-old black male, released only two weeks earlier over a domestic violence incident, who deliberately drove an SUV into a crowd in Waukesha, Wisconsin, killing five people. Mr Fields’ plowing into a crowd killed only one person.

Of course, Mr Lassiter makes the obligatory-among-the-left attack on free speech:

Social media has been a welcoming place for racist influencers whose mission is to reestablish white supremacy through the use of hate speech, microaggressions, coordinated harassment, and weaponization of emojis, GIFs, and memes. Social media has the power to connect people who were once loners with their ideological partners, and it speeds how quickly white supremacist ideology can spread, thus encouraging and emboldening copycats.

“Weaponization of emojis”? Heaven forfend!

As a former child therapist, I know that any isolated men with low educational attainment, underemployment, mental health and substance abuse issues, and criminal backgrounds should sound an alarm. Prevention works.

Of course, Amanda Marcotte, who lives in Philly, wrote “Mass shooting in Buffalo: Tucker Carlson and other right-wing conspiracy theorists share the blame”, but somehow never writes about the carnage in her adopted hometown.

We must “identify” these young men, Mr Lassiter wrote, and then “invest” in all sorts of intervention efforts to keep them from “connecting with less extremist friends”.

It’s all politics, an effort by the left to demonize their opponents. Rahm Emanuel said, “You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.” The left are once again blaming freedom of speech for allowing young Mr Gendron to become “radicalized,” and want increased something, government surveillance, I suppose, of social media to ferret out those who might be so “radicalized.” Mr Lassiter noted a case of Benjamin McDowell, who was found via Facebook screeds before he could act, and then set up by undercover FBI agents offering to sell him weapons.

Somehow, we never seem to see stories about left-wing radicals like Antifa being seriously investigated.

There is, or course, an obvious question that never seems to get asked: are the ten people murdered in Philly over the last week somehow less dead than those killed in Buffalo? Are the relatively few white men radicalized over the internet somehow more of a danger than the armed young men, mostly black armed young men, roaming the streets of Mr Lassiter’s hometown, littering the streets with the dying and the dead, and the ‘just’ seriously wounded? According to the city’s shooting victims database, there have been 775 people shot in Philadelphia as of May 15^th if this year. That’s 5.74 shooting victims per day, and the vast majority of the victims have been young black males, and while the database doesn’t tell us this, the vast majority of the shooters have been other young black males.

There were 13 people shot in Buffalo; that happens every two days and six hours in the City of Brotherly Love! It’s just that the city’s gang bangers are less accurate than Mr Gendron (allegedly) was, but, not to worry, Philly’s bad guys make up for it over the course of a week or so. Why Mr Lassiter, a black man himself, is more worried about a radicalized white man (allegedly) killing ten black people than he is about the 178 people killed in Philly so far this year, most of whom have been black, escapes me.