Ta Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic has a habit of banning those who disagree with him or show how he's wrong, and that means that what he writes can't be trusted: he's disabled fact-checking. Instead of engaging those who disagree and trying to present a counter-argument he's more interested in creating an echo chamber of those who agree with him. And, those who are mostly on his side have to be on their guard: unless they agree with him completely, he might ban them too.

For an example, let's say he says a statistic is 41% when it's actually 42%. Are his followers going to risk being banned by pointing out how he's wrong? Those who've been banned won't be able to point out he's wrong. Because he bans those who disagree, every single thing he says has to be double-checked.

And, he's banned me not just once but twice; both instances are below. If he were capable he would have tried to show how he thinks I'm wrong; instead, he just acted like a very petty fascist.

July 28, 2010 banning

The latest banning happened today, on the guest post by Sara Mayeux (theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/07/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-immigration-part-i/60523)

I left the following comment:

Speaking about myths, the author of the post is engaging in what I call the immigration tradition fallacy.

It might be helpful to step back and think about this whole issue, and try and follow the money.

Who does The Atlantic help with blog posts like this? Not most Americans: most oppose illegal immigration. Articles like this help crooked businesses, corrupt politicians, corrupt foreign governments, those who want an exploitable cheap labor force, those who want to profit from illegal activity, and so on.

TaNehisi Cotes responded by quoting the last paragraph and then simply adding "Banned." That's then followed by his lil' fascist readers applauding the move. One of them lies about me, but I can't reply due to the ban (unless, of course, I use a different account).

June 22, 2009 banning
The following comment was posted on theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2009/06/layers-upon-layers-of-fail/19885:

ThinkProgress - the first link in this post - is like an MMFA for grade schoolers. MMFA frequently smears and comes to the wrong conclusion, but they mostly get the basic facts rights. TP can't even rise to that low level.

If Ta-Nehisi Coates were smart and interested in the truth, he would have pointed that out to you. He would have also acknowledged that highlighting one misspelled banner is in itself "fail". He would have also pointed out the other things the TP link got wrong. For instance, compare what TP says about vdare.com to this: vdare.com/pb/060724_vdare.htm

And, if Ta-Nehisi Coates were smart and interested in the truth, he would have noted that Obama promoted English speakers learning Spanish rather than encouraging the opposite. I'm going to guess that Ta-Nehisi Coates doesn't even know about even more shocking Obama statements like this one, or the various lies he's told such as 24ahead.com/blog/archives/008027.html or 24ahead.com/blog/archives/008013.html

I then pointed out that I'd made a grammatical error:

Uh oh. I set Ta-Nehisi Coates up with a counter-argument:

they mostly get the basic facts rights

That was then following by TaNaheesi Coates making this highly intelligent comment: "lawl. ur so banned." As with the latest, a couple of his other readers were happy with the move.