The purge of pro-gun pages from social media has been going on for years. It started years ago when YouTube began de-monitizing gun channels, and has continued and expanded to many other platforms. Facebook has long been a leader in the purge of pro-gun content, and in typical gun grabbing fashion, enforces their “Community Standards” with extreme double standards. If they agree with it, their standards are ignored. If they dislike it, they bend the standards to somehow encompass something that clearly does not fit.
The most recent page to fall victim to the double standards of the gun grabbers belongs to a friend, who in the social media world, goes by the name Hank Strange. Hank and I have been doing the gun media thing for about the same length of time. In fact, we met in person at what was both of our first trips to SHOT Show, and I have followed Hank’s social media pages since that time.
Who is Hank Strange?
For those who are unfamiliar with Hank, he is not your average gun channel guy. He is a middle aged black guy with a Mohawk. He is a legal immigrant to this country. He was raised in New York City, but now lives in Florida. He got into guns later in life, and once he got introduced to guns, it was a love affair.
With the help of his beautiful wife Lola, they run a pro-gun, pro-America social media business that has a presence on several platforms and includes a regular podcast.
As of today, they are available on one less platform.
In case you are wondering if Hank is one of those guys who is always pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable and what is not, he is not. I have never seen him post anything that I found remotely edgy or offensive, and certainly not anything that would qualify as a threat or hate speech.
In fact, Hank has personally had encounters with law enforcement, while he was carrying concealed, that were questionable when looking at them from a law enforcement perspective (seemed to be a clear case of racial profiling, even from my perspective). However, when Hank publicly spoke about the incident, he was extremely calm and logical in his discussion of the encounter.
Hank is definitely NOT the guy running around telling people to take up arms and go after lawmakers or storm state houses. If that were the case, not only would we not be friends, but I would also not have an issue with Facebook taking down his page. Because unlike Facebook, I do not have double standards. If a friend of mine crosses the line, I call them out for it.
Enter The Double Standards
Yet, that is exactly what Facebook did, employed their double standards. They killed his page (his personal account is still intact), and in doing so, they merely told him that it was because his page had violated their policies.
On the flip side, Facebook continues to refuse to remove the “KYLPO” page. If you are wondering what that that is, KYLPO stands for “Kill Your Local Police Officer.” The title alone is a violation of Facebooks published “Community Standards” because it is calling for the murder of police officers.
The fact that this organization is spewing hatred and calling for violence has not gone unnoticed by other companies that KYLPO deals with. While they claim to be a “clothing company,” the fact is, their clothing is not available because Shopify has removed their “store” from the website.
Yet here is Facebook, despite hundreds of reports that the KYLPO page is promoting violence, Facebook continues to leave it published.
That comes as no surprise to me, though. As a guy who has run a pro-gun, pro-LE social media page for about seven years, this is not remotely the first time Facebook has ignored posts that “glorify violence” against cops.
Facebook’s Long History Of Double Standards
Back in July 2016, in Dallas, TX, a man carried out an attack on the cops that was motivated by racism and anti-cop propaganda. That man killed five cops in that attack, and tried to kill more. During the time that all of that was going on, an image of person clad in all black slitting the throat of a uniformed cop was being shared all over Facebook by Black Lives Matter supporters. That image was reported thousands of times, but Facebook refused to remove it. I wrote a blog post talking about all of that on my personal blog. That post got extensively shared, so much so that a reporter from NPR contacted me and wanted to interview me about Facebook refusing to remove the image. Since I was still an active employed cop at the time, I had to decline the interview.
The extreme double standards that are used in enforcing Facebook’s rules is not new or surprising. In fact, it is par for the course with gun grabbers. They want you and I to give up our guns, while they are guarded 24/7 by men with guns. They claim they support free speech, so long as that speech is in agreement with them. They say they want an “honest discussion” about gun violence, but as soon as you try to discuss it with them, they call you an “ammo-sexual” and insist you have the blood of dead children on your hands because you are an NRA member. They say we need to listen to the will of the people when 100 angry moms show up to protest guns, but when 20,000+ gun rights supporters show up at a state capital, they pretend nothing happened and push through more gun control laws anyway.
If it were not for double standards, gun grabbers would have no standards at all.
