On May 26th, 2017, Jeremy Joseph Christian stabbed two people to death and injured a third on a MAX Light Rail train in Portland, Oregon, after being confronted for verbally assaulting two women with Islamophobic slurs.

While almost everyone who has heard of the stabbing understands what happened, there’s been a mess within the media, as people are trying their best to twist the attack to support their own political narrative.

Right-wing, jaded articles such as this one, as well as this one, describe Christian as a “Bernie Supporter” or a “radical left-wing kook.” This is, objectively speaking, bad journalism. These articles, which pick and choose which posts of Christian's they want you to see (you can see his Facebook profile here), are simply trying to paint this man as something different than what he actually is in order to further their political agenda. Not only does this mislead the public, it also trivializes the victims’ deaths.

The truth is, at least according to his public Facebook posts, Jeremy Joseph Christian’s political ideology was all over the place, and it was far more right-wing than left-wing. At least his more recent posts on his Facebook were pro-libertarianism, anti-liberalism and anti-leftism. He speaks ill of Antifa (anti-fascism, which is far left-wing). He also shares Islamophobic memes (NOT a very liberal thing to do). He also disses Communism, the Black Lives Matter movement, and feminism, all of which are inherently left-wing. He’s a known white-supremacist, and people are trying to deny that. Many people are skimming this article and don’t have/won’t take the time to actually look at Christian’s posts, and so without correcting these journalists’ mistakes, history will show that Jeremy Joseph Christian is a leftist (which he is not). Does this Nazi (a far-right ideology) salute look very leftist to you?

In conclusion, it baffles me how some journalists (and media-consumers) are willing to look past the facts in order to strengthen their political arguments. Although it is not ethical to politicize the victims’ deaths, these wrongs must be corrected, as the stabbings have already been politicized. In the end, Christian's politics contradicted itself, and so it's inaccurate to blame the attack on left-wing politics when he was all over the place, and more so on the right.

More recently, Micah Fletcher, survivor of the stabbing, posted a photo of a memorial for the attack with his own comments. He states that he is pro-Black Lives Matter, and is also upset that these misconceptions must be corrected.

For more information, look at this more credible account of Jeremy Joseph Christian’s character.