Medium Bans Author After Article on Role of Public School Culture and Psychology in Mass Shootings
Tom Pappert
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The popular Twitter user Kantbot 20k was banned from online publishing platform Medium for unexplained reasons after he wrote an article discussing how the culture of public schooling and psychology may create an environment conducive of school shootings.
Kantbot 20k had written dozens of articles for Medium over a two year period before his article, “Guns Don’t Kill People, Psychologists Do” went viral on social media and racked up thousands of views on the website. The article featured a nuanced take on school shootings, and attempted to transcend the typical narrative of anti-Second Amendment versus pro-Second Amendment rhetoric.
The 3,000-word article explored the early days of psychology and compared it to the ramblings of various psychopaths who have committed school shootings, and came to the conclusion that society should examine the role society plays in creating them.
This is the paranoid system which today we entrust with rescuing at-risk young boys. This is what stands between us and more school shootings. Never mind the fact that as this system has grown, it has only led to a rise in mass shootings. Maybe the real cause of such cases is not guns, or a failure to identify and treat students, maybe the cause is these same students, following a protracted process of isolation and attempted psychological modification, learning to play the part the system has assigned to them, that of the security threat.
After publishing the article, the author, who says he models his work after philosophers who used “irony to challenge the false prejudices and historicism of liberalism,” was banned by Medium for “hateful text, images, or other content in (his) username, profile, or bio.”
His bio merely contained a quote, and a picture of Pepe the Frog dressed as a philosopher.
Kantbot believes he has fallen victim to political censorship at the hands of a Big Tech platform.
Speaking to Big League Politics, he said he does “think its politically motivated, these companies are after narrative monopoly,” and added that these platforms “Use circular reporting to purge those who undermine their narrative authority.”
He described it as “Journos reporting on other journos to create a locked circle of dishonest interpretation that serves as a false consensus,” and called it “Unprincipled hermeneutics.”
Kantbot also insisted that none of the dozens of articles he’s written since joining the publishing platform in 2017 have been hateful in nature, and that if the website had a policy prohibiting Pepe the Frog, he would have gladly changed it if given a warning.
He attempted to reply to the email notifying him of his ban in an attempt to appeal the decision, and has not received a response.
Medium’s decision is, according to Kantbot, preventing discussion over one of the major issues of our day: school shootings.
He described his article as “A call to draw attention to the fact that no one seems to care why school shootings actually happen,” and added that “People want to treat the symptom with gun control whereas the real problem may in fact be in our public school culture itself.”
While Kantbot 20k has been purged from Medium, his Twitter account remains active.
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