Twitter now considers objective, verifiable facts ban-worthy hate speech. At least, the pesky facts that woke liberal activists don’t like.
Apparently, dissident gay journalist Andy Ngo, editor-at-large at the Post Millennial, ought to have known that our Twitter overlords wouldn’t permit him to cite facts disputing the transgender oppression narrative. Ngo made the mistake of daring to question Chelsea Clinton and the left-wing activist organization Human Rights Campaign for peddling the pervasive myth that transgender people are the subjects of mass hate crimes and identity-targeted murder.
Since 2013, more than 150 trans people have been murdered in the U.S., the majority Black transgender women. On #TDoR2019, we remember and honor the lives lost, hold their loved ones in our hearts and must commit to doing all we can to end this epidemic of violence and hate. https://t.co/c1pYPPmpxD
— Chelsea Clinton (@ChelseaClinton) November 20, 2019
Of course, while all of these deaths are tragic, most of these people were not targeted or murdered on the basis of their identity. Rather, they just happened to be transgender and they were murdered. So Ngo questioned this dubious narrative, as to both murder rates and the fact that many are carried out not by evil cisgender white males but by black men.
According to the Post Millennial, he tweeted, “The US is one of the safest countries for trans people. The murder rate of trans victims is actually lower than that for cis population. Also, who is behind the murders? Mostly black men.”
For this, Twitter temporarily banned him from tweeting, retweeting, or using most Twitter functions other than scrolling. The company tried to silence the journalist, but he’s not taking it lying down. Ngo replied with a statement to the Post Millennial:
What Ngo said is objectively true. The Federalist’s Chad Felix Greene has crunched the numbers and objectively demonstrated that most of the transgender murder victims cited by activists were not, in fact, targeted on the basis of their being transgender. Greene also showed that the majority were killed by black men, one of the apparently banworthy facts that Ngo cited.
I’ve researched all reported murders listed by the @HRC and found only 4 examples since 2015 that appear motivated by anti-trans hatred.
The overwhelming majority are victims of crimes the rest of the population faces, no gender identity involved.https://t.co/CYrX81fOK4
— Chad Felix Greene (@chadfelixg) November 20, 2019
As for Ngo’s claim that transgender individuals’ murder rates are actually lower, this is also apparently fact. Research published in the American Journal of Public Health confirmed as much, finding that “the overall homicide rate of transgender individuals was likely to be less than that of cisgender individuals.”
So, Ngo literally stated two objective facts and got banned for it, with Twitter citing his tweet as “hateful conduct.” But frankly, even if he had gotten his facts wrong or messed them up, even that would not justify a ban. Liberal journalists aren’t banned for stating or even misstating facts, otherwise half CNN’s staff would have been purged from the platform by now.
The actions taken against Ngo are both ridiculous and deeply unfair. Twitter should reverse its mistake immediately and publicly apologize to the journalist.
Woke activists and liberals are not entitled to be shielded from facts when they go on social media. Shame on Twitter for deciding otherwise. If the company keeps up this kind of ridiculous censorship and ends up slammed with foolish regulations as a result, they will have themselves to blame.
