We have entered the era of swift action taken towards those who do not comport in the approved fashion.

(This is the latest in a series of reports detailing the way activists are wielding punishments for improper protest support.)

Most of our prior entries in this series involved people and entities with insufficient or incorrect support for the current racial movement in this country. Swift and oppressive action is taken to cancel those who are not in line in the correct fashion. But there is an even more insidious aspect to the current activist movement — squashing factual data that runs contrary to their narrative.

Recently I covered a number of details that are proveably showing that many of the claims from the Black Live Matter movement are not supported by facts. I noted that the spate of recent racial crimes in Minneapolis are black-on-white crimes, and a university study found that a majority of POC victims of police shootings are shot by POC officers. These are the kind of details that the people who call out for a serious dialogue will not allow into the conversation.

As we are witnessing, with growing frequency, how facts need to be censored and those who distribute them need to be addressed. This is something Democratic data analyst David Shor can attest to personally. The numbers cruncher recently found himself on the receiving end of the cancel culture brigade — for the severe act of repeating research data. The rub; it was not even his own study. We have entered the age where sharing clinical studies is a fireable offense.

Shor recently had the audacity of retweeting a study he discovered by Princeton professor Omar Wasow. That analysis found that there was a measurable correlation between the intensity of protesting and the results in an election. Wasow began to look into voting returns from the Martin Luther King era forward, finding that peaceful uprisings led to measurable benefits in elections for Democrats, while riots have been measured to depress the results for Democrats and benefit the GOP.

Shor sent out a tweet with this study, adding a brief synopsis in his message.

Post-MLK-assasination race riots reduced Democratic vote share in surrounding counties by 2%, which was enough to tip the 1968 election to Nixon. Non-violent protests *increase* Dem vote, mainly by encouraging warm elite discourse and media coverage. https://t.co/S8VZSuaz3G. pic.twitter.com/VRUwnRFuVW

— (((David Shor))) (@davidshor) May 28, 2020

A rather straightforward summation to an unbiased university study. The responses to Shor’s tweet were filled with disdain over his willingness to note clinical data.

So we’re really concern trolling to for the purposes of increasing democratic turnout.

Tell you what, go to Minneapolis and fill the protestors in about your findings. Be sure to video it for our viewing pleasure.

— Benjamin Dixon (@BenjaminPDixon) May 28, 2020

white dems to black people in 2020: "could you die more quietly? we have an election to win."

— 𝐠𝐚𝐲 𝐰𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐡 𝐝𝐞𝐦𝐨𝐧 🏳️‍🌈 (@disco_socialist) May 28, 2020

One of the louder complaints was from Ari Trujillo Wesler, the founder of OpenField, a Democratic canvassing group. Wesler accused Shor of providing information that ”reeks of anti-blackness”, and then, after Shor gave a polite and evenhanded response, in a follow-up tweet Wesler went for the throat. “YOU need to stop using your anxiety and ‘intellect’ as a vehicle for anti-blackness”. (Wesler’s tweets are now hidden, as they have since locked down their account.)

SEE ALSO – Previous entries in this series are found here.

This backlash became enough to get the attention of Civis Analytics, Shor’s employer. Wesler tagged Dan Wagner, CEO of Civis with the note ”Come get your boy”. Within days Shor found himself fired, as we have come to see these days companies are extremely gun shy when facing these hot-button charges. It is common practice to fire first, investigate later. The company justified Shor’s termination by making the wan claim that some workers and clients said they felt his tweets ”threatened their safety”.

This is utter garbage, considering Shor did nothing more than retweet a study made by another individual. It would be interesting to find out why the actual source of the data has not absorbed the same treatment. It is not as if his studies are hidden away in a Princeton basement. His work has been published and available for the public, as recently seen in The Washington Post.

All we can surmise is the data is not problematic — but sharing that data becomes racist. This is the environment we find ourselves in these days. About one month prior to his ouster Shor’s boss had sent out this tweet regarding an article he recently had published.

Doesn't need much more explaining. We're all in this together: https://t.co/cE1iYfYQCu

— Dan Wagner (@danrwagner) April 24, 2020

I guess at Civis those words actually mean ”In this together as long as ALL of us say exactly the same thing, and do not share inconvenient or uncomfortable factual data.”