Blogger Suspended from Medium After Pro-Second Amendment Post

Popular Twitter user and blogger “Kantbot” was suspended from Medium, a major blogging platform, after writing an article arguing that poor public school “mental health programs” are more culpable for school shootings than the availability of guns.

In the blog post, titled “Guns Don’t Kill People, School Psychologists Do” Kantbot argues that the over-diagnosis and pathologizing of high school kids, particularly male high school kids, played a major role in the sense of social exclusion that the author argues contributes to school shootings:

75% of school psychologists are women, with an average age of 46. It is this same group of people most empowered to conduct psychological monitoring of children across the country, and over the last 30 years, they have come to classify a larger and larger percentage of young boys as having developmental issues, to the point where it’s not clear whether there is anything wrong with these children at all, or if school psychologists have simply written off a wider and wider range of behaviors which they find problematic or incomprehensible as constituting autism.

….

If its the case that school shootings are result of a failure to recognize the warning signs, and to dispense appropriate psychological treatment to at-risk students, it’s hard to reconcile the fact that violent incidents have risen despite a parallel growth in school psychology, in diagnoses of behavioral issues, and in the prescription of psychiatric medication to problematic children. How is that we have increased treatment, but also seen a concurrent rise in the prevalence of the disease? The math simply doesn’t add up. Post-Columbine paranoia has driven the expansion of an invasive psychological surveillance complex within American schools, which, while attempting to identify and reform at-risk students, does so by aggressively isolating them using psychiatric diagnoses and behavior modifying drugs, and by ensnaring them in a never-ending nightmare of sterile, unpleasant therapy with middle-aged female social workers and mental health professionals who are in no position to adequately understand them.

Shortly after publication of the post on Medium, Kantbot announced on Twitter that his Medium account had been banned.

My medium account has been suspended because of this article. https://t.co/nR2mE1nQGd

— The Ur-Kantbot (@KANTBOT20K) April 25, 2019

Medium says it suspended the account for “hateful text, images, or other content in (his) username, profile, or bio.” Kantbot’s Medium account did feature a profile picture featuring “Pepe the Frog” — but whether this seriously constitutes a “hate symbol” is a matter of considerable dispute.

The media and left-wing advocacy organizations have attempted to categorize an increasing number of innocuous words and symbols as “hateful” in recent years, often due to the fact that 4chan trolls and members of the alt-right also use them. The “OK” hand-symbol, the phrase “clown world” and milk — yes, milk — are other prominent examples.