Things got pretty nasty over the last few months as everyone vied for votes over the midterms. It won’t surprise you, but CNN led the charge. They took the prize for saying the most untrue, divisive and outright bigoted statements of all. One of them tried to racialize mass shootings in our country. We won’t stand for that, so here’s a complete breakdown of CNN’s lies.
Don Lemon’s Rant
You already know this is going to be rich, considering the source. Nevertheless, CNN’s Don Lemon recently went on a rant exclaiming that white men are the biggest terror threat in the country. More specifically, white men who are “radicalized to the right” are the source of that threat.
Doubling down on this rhetoric, he further claimed “We have to stop demonizing people and realize the biggest terror threat in this country is white men.” Do you see that? He certainly missed the inherent hypocrisy. We have to stop demonizing people, but he then immediately demonizes a group based on their race. Classy stuff, CNN.
He didn’t stop there. He went on to show some charts to try and justify his unhinged claim. According to his stats, far-right extremists (no mention of race or gender) have killed 106 people in 62 attacks since 2001. At the same time, radical Islamists have killed 119 people in 23 attacks.
Yes, he actually used these numbers to claim that white men are more dangerous than Islamic extremists — even though the latter clearly have a higher kill count. This is the intellectual capacity of Don Lemon.
Actual Statistics
Lemon’s racist tirade disproves itself pretty cleanly, but we can do better. The Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) has actually calculated domestic “terror” attacks and categorized them in every way imaginable. If you look at mass shootings, bombings and other mass killings, you’ll find an interesting distribution of culprits.
To begin with, Don Lemon almost seems a little correct. White men have committed 58 percent of the mass killing attacks in the study. That’s a majority. Of course, there’s a huge caveat. White people also make up 64 percent of the total population, so you expect them to hold the largest share of every statistic. When you see the proportional breakdown of mass killings, it paints a different picture.
Black Americans are 12.8 percent of the population and commit 15.9 percent of the crimes. Proportionally, they’re a bigger threat than white people, but not by much.
Asians are 4.8 percent of the population and commit 12.8 percent of the crimes. That’s a little more extreme.
Hispanics come off as very peaceful as they account for 16.6 percent of everyone and only responsible for 5.8 percent of the crimes. In fact, of every demographic, white and Hispanic Americans are the only groups that have disproportionately low mass killing participation.
Finally, we get to the big group. Americans of Middle-Eastern descent account for 0.4 percent of the population and 8.7 percent of mass killings. That means a Middle-Eastern male in the U.S. is roughly 25 times more likely to commit a mass killing than their white counterpart. Good work Don Lemon!
The Hidden Truth
Lemon’s rant is now thoroughly debunked, but we’ve actually been holding back up to this point. Whether we talk about his statistics or the CPRC’s, they’re both heavily skewed against white men.
In case you didn’t notice, the data collection starts on September 12, 2001. If we change the date range by a single day, then no amount of statistical manipulation or mathemagic can change the results. Radicalized Islamists clearly carry they lion’s share of mass killing in the U.S. because that single attack killed more Americans that every other attack in the study combined. There’s no room for argument here.
All of these comparisons also forget another important stat. There are well over 1 billion followers of Islam around the world. Study after study has shown that radicalism in Islam is more common than any other religion or creed. A full 10 percent of Muslims believe in the necessity of jihad. In other words, well over 100 million Muslims in the world believe in the moral necessity of killing infidels (or westerners). You won’t find such numbers among “white men, most of them radicalized to the right.”
What can we take away from this? Don Lemon is a crazed racist. In stark contrast to his own data, he paints a racial group in this country as evil, and his network, CNN, has fully backed him on this. It’s time to take a stand. If CNN isn’t out of business by this time next year, then we have failed our country. Let’s do our part to make America great.
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