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Last week Dave Rubin (of The Rubin Report) sat down for a rare interview with Thomas Sowell. For three quarters of an hour they roamed over an amazing array of issues – social, political and economic. YouTube (where The Rubin Report is posted) demonetised the video immediately. This is a favourite trick of the platform – to signal YouTube’s disapproval of the content, making sure that the no one (other than YouTube, of course) and certainly not the content’s creator can make any money out of it. For YouTube it would seem that nothing is scarier than a black economist talking brilliantly about the issues of the age.
Then on Saturday something strange happened in the universe. The rapper Kanye West sent out this Tweet:
For anyone unacquainted with her, Candace Owens is a seriously smart and sassy young American conservative whose campus and media appearances have seen her begin to gain the audience she deserves. I had the pleasure of meeting her last year and must say that I am much in agreement with Kanye.
Perhaps the spur for his tweet was a clip from Candace at UCLA last a few days ago. There she was (of course) protested against by Black Lives Matter (BLM). Her smack-down of them is rather beautiful to watch.
In any case, Twitter – among other social media platforms – is obviously programmed to be on the side of BLM and against young black women who confidently oppose the group’s increasingly leftwards trajectory. So when Twitter ran a headline banner about Kanye West’s tweet, not only did they decide to smear Candace Owens as ‘far-right’, but they didn’t even bother to spell her name right as they carried out this social-media equivalent of an attempted drive-by shooting.
Why do social media platforms like YouTube and Twitter – which are very happy giving platforms to terrorists groups like Hezbollah – keep behaving as though the most dangerous thing imaginable is a black person who happens to be on the political right? Whether they are in their late eighties, like Thomas Sowell, or just starting off, like Candace Owens. Might this not in fact be an example of the systemic racism we hear so much about?
