CNN’s Dianne Gallagher on Tuesday began a segment on the shooting in Dallas from the day before, gravely noting that “another young, white, American man launched an attack on the innocent.” And so ended the national media’s ban on observational patterns involving race and mass terror — at least if the suspect is a white guy.

There was a time, believe it or not, that noticing recurring links between ethnicity or religion and mass violence was considered a hate crime by the national news media. The media mandate that each massacre committed by a radical Muslim be referred to as an act of a “lone wolf” that in no way reflects on Islam. But a white guy fires shots outside of a federal building, resulting in no deaths other than his own, and it’s right-wing violence on the rise!

On June 17, 2019, U.S. Army veteran Brian Isaack Clyde, 22, sprayed bullets outside of a federal courthouse building in Dallas. He was seen wearing a mask and dressed in military-style clothing, with additional ammunition stocked in a waist belt.

Some early reports on the gunman’s social media activity more or less painted the picture of a geeky introvert, someone who enjoyed anime, was a fan (perhaps ironically) of internet conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and who may have posted memes that featured the swastika. In short, he was an isolated kid who probably played a lot of online video games and who most likely suffered from mental issues.

Gallagher, in her CNN package, said that Clyde used social media to spread “his hate,” citing two goofy memes he reportedly published on Facebook, one of which had an image of the Confederate flag, the other featuring a swastika.

The meme with the Confederate flag was a picture of two Shiba Inu dogs, which are often used in humorous memes. One of the dogs had a Confederate-patterned baseball cap superimposed on its head, the other was looking on sadly as both stood in front of a truck that also had a Confederate flag painted on it. The meme’s caption said, “Why did you spend my college funds on your truck dad?” The humor rests on the notion of a trashy parent using their child’s college savings to decorate a truck. I traced the meme back to Reddit, the place for Internet-savvy people to share news, information, and other comical memes, where it was published in early May.

Is the dog meme funny? Kind of. Is evidence of “hate”? Of course not.

The other meme cited in Gallagher’s report depicted a warped political compass, the meaning of which is indecipherable, and a swastika next to the text “Libertarian national socialist green party.” I traced that one back to Reddit, as well, in the same section as other memes using the political compass, including one that ranked economic and social authoritarianism using the “King of the Hill” cartoon and another that used Eminem albums.

Almost everything related to memes on Reddit are posted as inside jokes for internet dorks or shared with a heightened irony (for more on heightened irony, see “internet dorks”). No one has ever heard of the “Libertarian national socialist green party” because it sounds like a joke — probably because it is a joke. Run a search on Google and you will find no concrete definition for it, but you’ll find plenty of people guessing what it is. Clyde shared the political compass graphic on his Facebook with the caption, “I have found the solution to all of our nation’s political problems,” which was, again, likely written in sarcasm, given that the compass had no obvious meaning.

Clyde posted a lot of memes on Facebook, including one with the wry caption, “When you see your girl talking to someone else but he only has 7 scars on his wrists.” He also posted videos himself talking nonsense. In one, he’s seen looking down at the camera and saying, “You dare underestimate my power?” He then quickly gulps down a cup of some red liquid and then burps. That’s the end of the video.

In Gallagher’s segment on Clyde, anchor Jake Tapper wondered whether Clyde “represents a growing threat in the U.S. of extremist right-wing violence” and then Gallagher referenced an Anti-Defamation League study purporting to show that “nearly all the extremist murders in 2018 were committed by right-wing radicals.”

The ADL does one of these little reports every year, and the group consistently obscures crucial information, like specific examples of the violence. But even in the few concrete examples that the ADL does provide, you get incidents like this: “Richard Starry shot and killed four relatives at a local nursing center and at his home in an apparent act of domestic violence before killing himself. According to local media, Starry had been a member of a white supremacist group while in prison.” Or like this: “James Mathis, a member of the Georgia-based white supremacist prison gang Ghostface Gangsters, and his wife, Amanda Oakes, allegedly killed their six-month-old son and put his body in a freezer in a hotel room.”

These are people killing their own family members or at least other white people. That's not quite the same as political violence. They’re not rampaging through the country, indiscriminately targeting blacks, Hispanics, or Jews. Besides, FBI data shows that interracial homicide is exceedingly rare.

And simply looking at the raw total of individual violent incidents committed by a member of an ideological or racial supremacy group tells only half the story. The ADL report even admits that despite a higher number of “incidents” related to “white supremacy,” the ones perpetrated by Islamic extremists have a far higher body count.

“Compared to right-wing extremists,” said the report, “domestic Islamist extremists in the U.S. have been involved in far fewer lethal incidents — but a number of those attacks have been high-casualty events, including most notably the Pulse nightclub attack in Orlando, Florida, in 2016, which left 49 dead.”

Likewise, the Government Accountability Office in 2017 looked at "violent extremism" from 2001 to 2016. Among "right-wing" groups, it found 62 incidents of violence with 106 victims. Among radical Islamists, it just 23 incidents but with 119 victims.

That more or less tracks with the "right-wing" shooting in Dallas where, again, no one died other than the shooter.

When CNN reports that “another young, white, American man launched an attack on the innocent,” it isn’t what they want you to think. If it were, they’d begin a report on the next Pulse Nightclub-like incident with, “another young, Muslim extremist launched an attack, resulting in far more casualties than the average white supremacist murder.”

They won’t do that. Racial patterns are only important when the suspect is white.