New Twitter standards let extremists escape scrutiny

Glory Hallelujah, you might proclaim, righteous voices for harmony within our increasingly diverse nation have overcome hate.

It’s safe to say that Americans of all races were mortified in 2017 to see video of racist thugs marching with torches through the streets of Charlottesville, Va. It was a bone-chilling spectacle.

So Twitter’s move to silence the neo-Nazis and various other bands of white supremacists that gathered in Virginia might feel like the perfect reply.

On Dec. 18, Twitter began halting such rants through its new community standards.

So far, accounts associated with American Renaissance, Britain First, the American Nazi Party, the Traditionalist Worker Party, the League of the South, the New Black Panther Party and Nordic Frontier have been suspended.

Any threads that can be traced to violence are grounds for having an account suspended, an understandable decision. But how far this will go, and whose account might be next, is a bit trickier. Any post that Twitter deems to “threaten or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability or serious disease” is subject to suspension.

The danger of this new policy might not be immediately obvious.

Hate shoved underground doesn’t dissipate. It settles in to root. And, as any good gardener knows, the roots of an invasive plant pop up, often where you least expect to find them. We’ve seen it happen before.

The hateful militancy on display in Charlottesville is traceable to antecedents in the 1990s. The bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995 is significant to the timeline. There is a hauntingly beautiful memorial on the site, an empty chair for each of the 168 victims, many of them children from the day care center.

Timothy McVeigh devised his scheme to avenge the government siege of a heavily armed, anti-government, white supremacist family at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992, and to avenge the more deadly federal siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, in 1993.

After Oklahoma City, much of this counterculture movement went underground.

The nation further took its eye off of such domestic terrorism after Sept. 11.

But we still should be concerned about what these folks might do.

As unsettling as it may be to contemplate, rightwing extremists have done much to shape debate in common discourse, be it on immigration enforcement, Black Lives Matter, NFL players taking a knee in solidarity, the dominance of English vs. foreign languages, and who is allowed to speak at college campuses.

The public needs to be informed, aware and engaged. They must grasp how extreme views can infect the wider discourse.

Charlottesville was targeted by racists over the issue of removing Confederate monuments. Reasonable people can disagree on that issue.

But they need to also be aware of how nuanced, informed views can be overtaken by emotional and incendiary provocation.

And to do that, we have to be able to see where those prone to violence, to extreme views that no American should stand for, express themselves.