Former teacher and analyst Eoin Lenihan has been banned from Twitter after revealing major links between so-called "anti-extremism" campaigners and the hard-left AntiFa group.
Lenihan published his findings in Quillette, revealing links between journalists who write for the the Guardian newspaper, HuffPost, Al Jazeera, and various other publications to the hard left group.
Lenihan was suspended early Wednesday morning, prompting speculation about the ban.
Andy Ngo, a Wall Street Journal contributor and editor at Quillette, alleges that Lenihan was suspended following mass reports by members of AntiFa on Twitter.
It has long been suspected that establishment journalists maintain close ties to far-left activists including AntiFa. Until now, these connections remained largely in the realm of speculation.
The researcher identified over a dozen verified “national-level journalists,” who were in his estimation never “markedly critical of AntiFa in any way” in their coverage of leftist political violence.
[caption id="attachment_177411" align="aligncenter" width="1024"]
AntiFa Network Map (via Eoin Lenihan/Quillette)[/caption]
“In all cases, their work in this area consisted primarily of downplaying AntiFa violence while advancing AntiFa talking points, and in some cases quoting AntiFa extremists as if they were impartial experts,” wrote Lenihan, who cited Jason Wilson, a Portland-based writer for the Guardian as one such example.
“One of his recent articles focused on a U.S. regional intelligence report whose authors concluded that Antifa and the far right share responsibility for street violence. “Experts say the report mischaracterizes the dynamics of the street violence,” Wilson complained.
One of Wilson’s main “experts” in the piece, it turned out, was none other than Antifa handbook author Mark Bray, who, predictably, denounced the report’s contents as “ludicrous.” In fact, Bray makes regular appearances in Wilson’s articles. So does fellow Portland resident and eco-extremist Alexander Reid Ross, who regularly writes for Antifa publications such as the It’s Going Down anarchist news site. (Ross also contributed to a 30-year-anniversary edition publication for Earth First!, an extremist environmentalist collective that advocates what activists euphemistically call “direct action.”)
Following publication of the report and subsequent coverage from conservative outlets like PJ Media, Lenihan faced a barrage of insulting remarks and attacks from AntiFa-affiliated accounts.
It’s Going Down, a far-left publication dedicated to AntiFa activism identified Lenihan as the proprietor of the @ProgDadTV satirical Twitter account created years ago in the same vein as the satirical accounts Titania McGrath and Godfrey Elfwick.
In his analysis, Lenihan revealed:
We created a data set of 58,254 Antifa or Antifa-associated Twitter accounts based on the follows of 16 verified Antifa seed accounts. Using a software tool that analyzed the number and nature of connections associated with each individual account, we winnowed the 58,254 Antifa or Antifa-associated Twitter accounts down to 962 accounts. This represents a core group of Twitter users who are connected in overlapping ways to the most influential and widely followed Antifa figures. Of these 962 accounts, 22 were found to be verified Twitter accounts of journalists—of which 15 were journalists who work regularly with national-level news outlets.
Lenihan’s suspension on Twitter follows the ban of another independent journalist, Nick Monroe, best known for his news aggregation of political news.
Ian Miles Cheong is the managing editor of Human Events
