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Social Media Posts From Person Of Interest In Connection To Subway Shooting Show Leftist Views: Report

   DailyWire.com
NEW YORK, NEW YORK - APRIL 12: New York City police investigate an incident on an Uptown 4 subway after an emergency brake was pulled near Union Square on April 12, 2022 in New York City. Security has been heightened after a gunman in a gas mask and construction vest set off a smoke grenade and opened fire on a subway today at the 36th Street and Fourth Avenue station in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. At least 29 people were injured - 10 of them by gunshot - amid a fusillade of 33 rounds, according to reports. Authorities have named 62-year-old Philadelphia man Frank R. James as a person of interest.
Alexi J. Rosenfeld / Getty Images

Social media posts from a person of interest in connection to a mass shooting attack on New York City’s subway on Tuesday showed leftist, racist, anti-Trump views, according to reports.

“Police identified [the person of interest], 62, of Philadelphia as a person of interest in the case,” CBS News reported. “They say [the person of interest] rented a U-Haul van that might be connected to the shooting.”

Videos from the attack on the subway showed that the air was filled with smoke from smoke bombs that had been detonated. The suspect fired dozens of rounds during the attack, hitting at least 10 people. Another 19 people were injured in the chaos that ensued from the attack.

Heavy.com, a fact-finding website, identified a Facebook page allegedly belonging to the person of interest which contained numerous posts that talked about shooting people and expressed other extreme views, including “black nationalism.”

Andy Ngo, Editor-at-large for The Post Millennial, tweeted out screenshots from the Facebook account that showed posts that promoted the Black Liberation Army, Black Lives Matter, a photo of the man who murdered five police officers in Dallas in 2016, a photo calling to “kill all the whiteys,” posts quoting communist Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, posts expressing support for shooting people, and posts demonizing former President Donald Trump.

YouTube videos allegedly uploaded by the person of interest also showed extreme views, including one where he allegedly called 9/11 “the most beautiful day, probably in the history of this fucking world.”

The person of interest also allegedly ranted in the videos about white people, saying “the vast majority of people, white mother******* are racist.”

The Daily Wire normally withholds the names and faces of suspects in mass shooting attacks and other terrorist attacks due to company policy. However, The Daily Wire does publish names and faces of persons of interest and suspects who are at-large in an effort to assist law enforcement in locating the suspect.

The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro explained the company policy following the Parkland massacre in 2018, writing in-part:

Studies suggest that media coverage of mass shootings can have a significant impact on the psyches of potential mass shooters — that such potential mass shooters have a cognitive craving for attention, which they know they will receive for committing atrocities.

As Professor Jennifer Johnston and Andrew Joy of Western New Mexico University found in a paper presented to the American Psychological Association’s annual convention in 2016, “media contagion” can help make mass shootings more common. “Unfortunately,” said Johnston, “we find that a cross-cutting trait among many profiles of mass shooters is desire for fame.” The rise of such a trait in mass shooters, she claimed, rose “in correspondence to the emergence of widespread 24-hours news coverage on cable news programs, and the rise of the internet during the same period.” Johnston recommended a media pact to “no longer share, reproduce, or retweet the names, faces, detailed histories or long-winded statements of killers,” predicting that if the media did so, “we could see a dramatic reduction in mass shootings in one to two years.” While other studies do not make such a dramatic statistic prediction, they do support similar conclusions.

We at The Daily Wire would like to do our part. We will still report the backgrounds of mass shooters, biographical details, the type of weapons used in such shootings, how such weapons were obtained, and other details that could make a difference in the public debate with regard to policymaking. But we will not contribute to the unintentional glorification of shooters themselves by giving their names and faces airtime. Instead, we will continue to focus on the victims of such awful attacks, and the heroes who all too often must give of themselves to stop them.

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