Politics

Media and liberals are using PizzaGate logic to exaggerate racism through the Gabby Petito case

This is driving me a little nuts. I saw this narrative coalescing from about a week ago when it began on obscure websites, made its way through Daily Beast, and then crashed onto the mainstream media. You’ve probably seen it and it’s ridiculously misleading.

What the headline makes you think is that all of the 710 cases were comparable to that of Gabby Petito and that the disparity in news coverage can ONLY be explained by massive racism, right? But that is simply false because the vast majority of those cases are NOT at all like that of Gabby Petito.

And ironically, what they’re doing here is exactly the misleading irrational tactic that conspiracy theories use to push crap like the PizzaGate nonsense.

I say this because most of these missing cases turn out to be runaways or other cases where the person who is reported missing is found very quickly. According the study these people cite, but apparently never actually read, 79% of those indigenous people were found within a month!

This is exactly the same tactic used by conspiracy theorists to scare people into thinking tens of thousands of children are kidnapped every year by some satanic group that is harvesting the adrenochrome from their pineal glands.

That’s because, much like with indigenous people, there are hundreds of thousands of kids reported missing every year. But of those, more than 90% are runaways, or kids who got lost trying to get home, or other cases where they are promptly found. In actuality, only about 400 children are kidnapped by complete strangers every year in the U.S.

You see the intellectual sleight of hand?

The only difference is that PizzaGate morons deceive people on the stats to push some insane right-wing conspiracy, while the media and the left deceive people on the stats in order to persuade people that America is unredeemably racist.

When I started pressuring media figures about this, I got into a debate with one Alex Howard, an anti-Trump proponent of open government, as far as I can tell. He was upset that I called some of the people pushing the narrative “morons,” admitted that the stats were deceptive, but he didn’t take his tweet down:

Instead, he whined at me that he’s been honest in his other 200,000 tweets, and blocked me:

Hey, as long as you don’t “intentionally” misled people, it’s OK to lie for the sake of your political agenda. Nice principle. Ironically, most of his other tweets are about how dishonest Republicans are and how deceitful Trump is.

So how do you responsibly report the statistics? Here’s a great example from KXXV in Texas:

That’s how you do it. You present the whole story on the stats. And that’s why it only has one like and one retweet, while the misleading race baiting Daily Beast version has 7,400 retweets. The race mongering bullshit gets the clicks and it gets the ad revenue. Don’t fall for it.