June 12, 2024 • 37 mins
Gare and Mia discuss the newest anti-trans conspiracy theory: the false rise in transgender mass shooters.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, Welcome to it could happen here. The show
about things falling apart, and often what's falling apart is
kind of our general agreed upon sense of what reality is,
and that's kind of what we're talking about here.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Today.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
We're going to talk about the latest batch of new
transgender conspiracy theories. And to join me in this exciting
journey is Mia Wong. Hello. Mia.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
You know, why is it or whatever? We're covering transgender conspiracies.
It's not like conspiracies that trans people made up. It's
always conspiracies about trans people. It's like, like, can we
never get one that?
Speaker 1 (00:40):
Like often I can't remember the last time I had
like a positive Pride Month episode, which I feel kind
of bad about, but I don't know. It's still an
interesting topic and I've not seen this discussed as much
as that should be. And you know, last week I
really thought I was going to have, you know, a
difficult work week researching Trump pornography. I thought that'd be like,
(01:02):
you know, the low part of my month. But it
turns out spending three days sifting through mass shooter data
is actually much worse, much worse than looking through Trump board.
So jaris can, I can, I can?
Speaker 3 (01:13):
I can? I recommend that you two spend your time
listening to a bunch of rioters talking about the absolute
worst time of your life. Much better, all right, so
let's get into it. We're gonna talk first about video games.
I'm gonna quote a tweet from a kind of failure
of a far right influencer, which is exciting because we're
(01:34):
mostly gonna be talking about successful ones. But is this
guy named ben Ko uk flag in bio, so opinion
immediately discarded. But he has said a few days ago,
quote Activision's Call of Duty has added transgender bullets to
the game in honor of Pride Month, so you can
literally play as a transgender mass shooter unquote. This tweet
(01:58):
was almost ripped word for word by Ian Miles. Chung
basically said the exact same thing, except you said role play,
not play. Extremely funny, and I did not realize the
bullets themselves identified as trance. But good for she her
they them, I guess. So we started to see this
claim repeated through the anti trans far right grifter media
(02:22):
space Right limbs of TikTok said that quote Call of
Duty is now enabling kids to role play being a
literal trans terrorist. And for some reason, whenever libs of
TikTok writes terrorists, she asterix out the o's. I don't
know why, but this, this, this started to pick up steam.
There was an article in Glenn Beck's The Blaze quote
(02:44):
call of Duty Pride bundle let's players simulate murder using
trans flag adorned guns and bullets. I'm so excited for
these people to think to find out about counter strike there.
There are gonna be literally so many, so many articles
just have the video cliff of the thing in place
at the an words says terrorists win.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
The Quartering wrote, call of Duty is selling trans pride
bullets whatevery mass shooter wants. So what's going on here?
Cause this, you know, if you're not as online as
some of us some other people are, you know this
is maybe confusing. Why are they saying that trans people
are all mass shooters? Now? What's going on? And you know,
(03:27):
and also if you're thinking it's kind of odd that
there would be a Call of Duty update where you
can literally play as a transgender mass shooter and shoot
transgender bullets, you would be right because that never happened.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
It's false. No, way, not this time, we created it.
Not this time, No, not this time.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
So let's get into what's really going on with this
Call of Duty Pride update, and then we'll discuss why
so many of these far right influences are pushing this
kind of trans terrorist story. So on June first, Activision
did release an update for the terrible new Call of
Duty in Warfare three. It contained anime mecha skins and
seven free weapon skins themed after various Pride flags. Now,
(04:07):
some would argue that the mechasuits are essentially also Pride themed,
but I digress. For this Pride Weapon Camo pack, it
will color your gun with the flag of your choosing.
One of the said flags is the blue, pink and
white trans flag. Yet if you apply the trans skin
to any of the regular guns in the game, the
bullets will not be trans'd. So what gives without the
(04:29):
transgender bullets, how is anyone supposed to literally roleplay a
mass shooter like libs of tech Talk and Ian Miles
Chung say we can. So it turns out these quote
unquote transgender bullets were in fact not intentionally added to
the game in honor of Pride Month, and are most
likely a bug that affects one single gun when one
exclusive attachment is equipped. I'm going to quote from Kotaku
(04:51):
quote Modern Warfare three's M four came with a special
Soul Harvester weapon blueprint, which includes a skin and a
specific attachment for the M four and quote unquote tracer
which are colorful AMMO options that also leave traces of
different visual effects like paint splatters or rose petals. This
special blueprint was for people who spend one hundred dollars
to purchase the Vault edition of the game. Based on
(05:12):
Kataku's testing, it appears the quote unquote trans bullets only
appear when applying the transgender flag Camo skin on this
specific weapon blueprint. It's unclear this is a bug. At
one point during testing, the bullets in the cartridge were
only the pink colors in the flag, or is just
an extremely adosyncratic reflection of how Call of Duty's complex
shader system interacts across thousands of items and cosmetics. During testing,
(05:35):
any other Camo skin applied to the M four Soul
Harvester blueprint resulted in bullets in the cartridge changing the
color to match that skin.
Speaker 3 (05:43):
Unquote.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
Now I do think it's a little bit silly that
there's so much uproar about these trans colored bullets but
not as much about like just a trans colored gun,
Like why is the bullet the big thing? And we
all know that you can't play as a mass shooter
in Call of Duty. You play as a war criminal,
(06:05):
and most transgender war criminals are just drone pilots or
work for Raytheon. If you want to play a mass
shooter game, you can just play GTA five or hit Man,
where you play as cis men. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know,
but the Russian terrorist airport level don't at me. I
don't care anyway. There was a great article in former
Tucker Carlson project, The Daily Caller with the headline Pride
(06:29):
Month finally comes for one of the last bastions of manhood,
and the opening tagline is gamers. They targeted gamers. Oh no,
So anyway, what's really at play here with this transmash
shooter stuff. This is just another beat in the rhetorical
strategy that conservative anti trans influencers have been building over
(06:52):
the past year and a half, using a mix of
cherry picked data, bad stats, and often outright lies to
convince people that they're an increasing epidemic of transgender mass
killing attacks sweeping the nation. When discussing this call of duty,
Pride Pack Libs of TikTok said, quote, with the uptick
in actual trans violence we've been seeing, it's alarming that
(07:15):
call of Duty would introduce this and a Blaze article
read quote. Critics have suggested activision Blizzard may want to
reconsider given the recent mass shootings executed by lgbt radicals.
There have been multiple mass shootings executed, attempted, or at
the very least planned by transvestites and LGBTQ radicals in
recent years. So this Blaze article begins by listing four
(07:40):
alleged instances of these trans mass shooters. Two of these
simply never happened, as the alleged transgender individuals, a trans
guy and a fifty six year old organ and nazi,
were arrested after they made concerning posts online. And the
other two which which did happen. These are these were shootings,
(08:02):
except these were never actually done by trans people.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
It's a made up tap, it's a total fabrication. It
never happened. It never happened. This one was invented by
a writer.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
So although this transgender mass shooter narrative might not be real.
Do you know what is real? Mia?
Speaker 3 (08:18):
Is it capitalism?
Speaker 1 (08:19):
It is, and capitalism is fueled, at least currently by
the products and sponsors that support this podcast. Okay, we
are back now. Trying to frame every new mass shooter
(08:41):
as some like crazed leftist of some variety is an
old tactic popularized by the likes of Andy Know, Which
is you know ironic? Considering the fact that political extremist
related killings for the past ten years are overwhelmingly done
by individuals tied to right wing extremism, the ADL puts
it out seventy five percent, whereas leftist extremism, which is
(09:03):
categorized as including anarchists as well as black nationalist groups,
are responsible for just four percent. Most of the rest
they categorize as Islamic violent extremists, including the twenty sixteen
Pulse nightclub massacre targeted against here people in Orlando, although
one could argue that that is also right wing extremism,
like they are also right wingers? Like It's like Yes,
(09:24):
It turns out the ADL might have some troubling ways
of collecting data breaking news anyway. Regardless of the actual facts.
Lying about the political demographic of mass shooters is an
old tactic employed by far right content creators to gain
clicks and influence the talking points of more popular media
figures and politicians. And now the past few years we've
(09:45):
seen a new iteration of this tactic, where in the
confusion and chaos of the first few minutes and hours
after a shooting, anti trans influencers will do everything they
can to frame an alleged or suspected shooter of being transgender,
often using out of context social media posts, photographs, photos
of other people, or just pictures of like long or
(10:05):
dyed hair to affirm that a mass shooter must actually
be transgender. Now, even if this claim is like widely
debunked later on, most of the people that follow these
far right accounts won't be hearing about that. So all
they need to do is use this brief window of
chaos to seed the idea into people's minds. And if
you do this thing frequently enough after each new mass shooting,
(10:28):
then it's pretty easy to create a false perception of
this increasing trend. Now, this style of propaganda has been
largely spearheaded by Chaiai Trek, using her libs of TikTok account.
Here's another quote from her quote. The modern LGBTQ plus
movement is radicalizing young activists into becoming violent terrorist extremists.
(10:48):
The uptick in trans violence is going to get worse unquote.
But this sort of rhetoric has been spread by many
other online figures in this orbit, like disgraced buzzfeedwriter Benny
Johnson and chronic poster ian Miles Chung. Their rhetoric has
been spread by sitting politicians Donald Trump Junior and Elon Musk. Now,
to clarify, people have been lying about the gender identity
(11:11):
of mass shooters for like a long time. It's one
of the oldest jokes on four Chan. But what's been
going on the past two years is something different, and
it requires a little bit more in depth examination of
this propaganda trend. Now to get into more specific examples, here,
I like to break down a common meme format used
to spread this type of false propaganda. It's usually about
(11:32):
five pictures of mass shooters with text next to each
picture that reads something like the Nashville shooter identified as trans,
the X shooter identified as trans. So it will just
list all of these people that allegedly are mass shooters
and allegedly identified as trans. Now police did't identify the
Nashville Covenant School shooter as a trans man, that we
(11:56):
have to take their word for it. They've released no
other info on that. Typically this is seen as like
the first legitimate mass shooting done by a transgender individual,
and for the past year we've been waiting for more
and more context to come out about this mass shooting
and it's possible motivations. So I'm not even going to
really discuss this one right now. We'll just to say, sure,
(12:16):
this is a trans person who happened to do a
mass shooting and leave it at that, even though it's
you know, not totally clear.
Speaker 3 (12:21):
Yeah, I mean I do. I want to add one
thing briefly, which is that like trying to find out
information from the police about a mass shooting is such
a crapshoot, like they just you know, they'll they'll be
like an initial flurry of press releases or whatever, and
then they just will never talk about it again until
maybe the trial. And sometimes you get some from.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
That well, and in often cases for mass shooters who
often die, there is no never.
Speaker 3 (12:45):
Get so yeah, yeah, and if they're dead like, but.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
Even keeping this Nashville incident as a legitimate mass shooting
done by a person who happens to be trans when
talking about this meme, the thing is is that with
these five pictures that are on this meme, most typically
three out of the five people that have their pictures
here aren't even treads.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
Not this time. It never happened. It is false, It
never happened. It's a fake. It's fiction.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
Now, most famously, we have the Colorado Springs shooter Anderson
Lee Aldrich, who killed five people and injured twenty five
others at a queer club in twenty twenty two. Later on,
his lawyer claimed that the shooter was non binary, which
I believe is a disgusting and disingenuous attempt to get
out of the more than now fifty hate crime charges
that the shooter is facing. And this opinion is shared
(13:34):
not only by the DA but also all other legitimate
extremists and researchers. Prior to these claims in court, there
was no indication whatsoever that the shooter was non binary
or used they then pronouns. However, they did own rainbow
flag shooting targets. Ran a neo Nazi website that posted
gun training videos and was known by online acquaintances to
(13:57):
frequently post racist and homophobic content. Now I should clarify
when I say shooting targets, I don't mean that it's
pride theme shooting targets. It's that the people that you
are shooting are painted like they are gay. So there
you go now. Pictured next in the meme is someone
with purple colored hair, labeled as the Denver shooter. This
person is not trans, has never claimed to be trans.
(14:20):
He just has dyed hair. He killed one person in
a school shooting that he planned with a sixteen year
old trans guy.
Speaker 3 (14:27):
In shooting correct? Correct?
Speaker 1 (14:30):
Will we will get in We will get into this
later because the definition of mass shooting is getting stretched
liberally here now. The third person pictured, who is in trans,
changes more frequently in different versions of the meme that
you can find online. One version includes someone referenced as
the Philadelphia shooter. This is referencing a shooting spree that
(14:50):
resulted in five people being killed. This shooter had previously
posted photos of himself cross dressing in women's clothes, and
this was used by figures like Marjorie Taylor Green to
aim that the cis mail shooter was actually quote another
trans shooter. Family of this shooter referred to him as
a quote unquote biblical extremist, and he often posted bizarre
(15:12):
Christian spiritual conspiracy theories and was an outspoken fan of
Tucker Carlson. In another version of the meme posted by
Chaia Reichik, she identifies the Uvalde school shooter as transo
and includes a picture of a transwoman holding the trans
Pride flag. This was posted in January of this year.
Elon Musk replied to the tweet with two exclamation points. Now.
(15:34):
In the hours after the Euvaldie School shooting, pictures of
two or three different transwomen were used to falsely label
the shooter as trans, with at least one of these
transwomen being from New York, the other from Georgia. Both
these women received a great deal of harassment after the shooting.
Arizona Congressman Paul Gozar tweeted that the shooter was quote
a transsexual, leftist illegal alien unquote, which is frankly amazing
(15:57):
because every word in that sentence is wrong.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
It's a made up tip, it's a total fabrication. It
never happened. It never happened.
Speaker 1 (16:05):
Now, the other person in this meme that is typically
accepted to be trans is the Aberdeen shooter. Now, I'm
going to just quote from the Washington Post here. Quote.
In twenty eighteen, in Aberdeen, Maryland, a twenty six year
old shot and killed three people at a pharmaceuticals distribution
center before turning the weapon on themselves. The sheriff said
the shooter had been diagnosed as mentally ill. In twenty sixteen,
a close friend reported the shooter quote suffered from bipolar
(16:28):
disorder and struggled since early in high school with severe depression,
partly connected to their feelings of not being accepted when
they first came out as a gay teenage girl and
later as transgender. Unquote. By most accounts, this is a
transgender guy who began transitioning shortly before the shooting. Pronouns
and stuff are unclear. They also worked at this distribution
center a few weeks prior to them doing the shooting.
(16:49):
This incident's typically not categorized as a mass shooting because
only three people were killed excluding the shooter. Now, one
of the more recent attempts at this transgender terrorist psyop
was in the aftermath of the shooting at Joel Ostein's
megachurch in Houston earlier this February. The shooter was a
thirty six year old woman carrying her seven year old son, sadly,
(17:11):
both of whom died along with one other person. Just
hours after the shooting, far right accounts like lips of
TikTok and end Wokeness claimed that she was transgender, pointing
to documents where she used the name Jeffrey now Chia
Reichek called the shooting quote another act of trans terrorism.
We need to have a national conversation about the LGBTQ
(17:33):
movement turning youth into violent extremists unquote.
Speaker 3 (17:36):
Didn't she literally say that exact thing with the last one. Yeah,
they don't even covie with new tweets, like they really
just have the same five tweets in rotation. Marjorie Taylor
Green called her quote a trans from El Savador unquote.
Missouri Representative Josh Holly, Marco Rubio, and Elon Musk all
post about this quote unquote epidemic of trans violence. These
(17:58):
claims were boosted by Donald Trump, June and Ted Cruz.
Fox News ran a whole story with a headline about
the shooter being transgender, and guess what, she's not trans.
She is a CIS woman who gave birth to a
child and has always identified as a woman. It just
appears that she was given a masculine name at birth
(18:19):
and later changed it to a more feminine name. The
far right content sphere created so much uproar that the
police had to do a whole press conference about how
the shooter was not trans, and after the Peace lawyers
clarified she was not trans, Fox News changed their claim,
now saying on air that the shooter quote identified as
both genders and was quote a biological woman who sometimes
(18:41):
identified as a man named Jeffrey unquote, which just isn't true.
Jesus Christ.
Speaker 1 (18:48):
But the thing about this one is that it wasn't
just far right influencers in Fox News who ran with
this transgender narrative. MSNBC jumped on very early to say
that the shooter was quote a Hispanic transgender woman who
quote unquote identified as a woman unquote.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
It is totally made up, pure fiction. It's fiction. It's fiction.
We made it up.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
M s NBC.
Speaker 3 (19:11):
More like MSNB shit, great, great, great, I'm doing great
this morning.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
Do you know what's also doing great mia.
Speaker 3 (19:25):
Is it the products and services support this podcast.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
They're pretty consistent. Yeah they are. They are still around
and here you can listen to their important messages. All right,
we are so back. So there's there's so many more
(19:49):
cases like the ones that I've talked about. Right. The
reason I started working on this episode in the first
place was due to far right accounts claiming that a
man named Jared Rivierrez, who killed his seventy year old
roommate and went on a mass stabbing spree last month
outside of an AMC theater and a McDonald's in Massachusetts,
was claimed to be a quote mentally ill trans terrorist
by limbs of TikTok and a transactivist quote unquote who's
(20:15):
a man who thinks he's a woman, which is a
line Libs of TikTok loves using. Now, Jared claims to
be an artist and a model, but was actually like
this really weird like grifter entrepreneur. He kind of reminds
me of that weird Canadian cat killer Luke Megnan YadA
who like created a whole bunch of fake posts to
(20:35):
like pretend to be famous and like created like fake
fans It's very similar to this case and later this
guy Luke in Canada also killed a gay man, very
similar cases. Honestly, Jared here again, he's like pretending to
be like an international entrepreneur. He looks like this weird
like hippie surfer dude with long bleached hair. Jared's father
(20:59):
is a wealthy Christian therapist who looks very similar and
anti trans influencers have pointed to the word she on
Jared's Instagram profile, but Jared's actual gender identity is really unclear.
He's never pictured wearing women's clothing. He would frequently post
shirtless buff selfies. Jared has never claimed to be trans
or a woman, and has never used transgender language or iconography.
(21:22):
Jared did file a name change request last April, but
it was to change his last name. He goes by
Jared that same month, April, So two months ago, Jared
sexually harassed a model at a Beverly Hills hotel, saying
that he wanted to have kids with her and proposed
to her, saying I'm going to be a good husband.
You're gonna be my wife unquote. This person simply, we
(21:45):
have no reason to think they're trans. They do this.
They do like weird like art stuff, and I don't know.
They're like California Beverly Hills poison brained, and it seems
to they see to have gone through some kind of
mental health breakdown which resulted in them killing their roommate,
two dogs, and stabbing like six or seven people in Massachusetts.
(22:09):
But another trans terrorist, sure, why not? In January of
this year, in Iowa, teenager open fire at a school,
killing one person and then himself again. The usual suspects
were super quick to label him as another trans terrorist,
Elon Musk saying, this is happening a lot. Something is
deeply wrong. This kid largely seemed like a regular gen
(22:30):
Z liberal. He listed his pronouns as he they. He
posted things like nominally in support of trans people. He
used the hashtag gender fluid a single time in a
TikTok video filmed with what appears to be a trans
friend of his. He also posted on Reddit two years
ago that he didn't want to transition because he didn't
quote wants to look ugly. He never specifically identified as trans.
(22:54):
This is just kind of a tragic case. I don't
know what the deal with this kid was. They seemed
deeply confused and upset and killed someone and then killed themselves.
It sucks, but it's not a mass shooting, and it
doesn't it doesn't link to anything being a pattern of
transgender terrorism. That does not stop someone like Donald Trump
(23:17):
Junior saying, quote, the modern LGBTQ plus movement is radicalizing
our youth and becoming violent extremists per capita, Is there
a more violent group of people anywhere in the world
than radicalized transactivists Given the tiny fraction of the population
they make up, it doesn't seem like anyone else comes
even close. We have a lot of claims like this,
(23:37):
which is why I need to start talking about statistics
my least favorite thing, because this sort of messaging is
repeated a lot. We have this post from I think
Benny Johnson or Donald Trump Junior. I can't twelve which
one because unfortunately it got deleted before I was able
to log who did it, so apologies for that. But
it's a very similar sort of thing, saying there's been
(23:58):
at least five massive tax by transgner people since twenty eighteen.
Considering the group makes up less than point five percent
of the population, that's massive overrepresentation. We'll get into that
in a sec. So, boy, often when these people are
talking about this, this trend of trans mass shooters, they're
focusing specifically on the period of time between twenty eighteen
(24:20):
and twenty twenty four because largely a lot of conservatives
think that trans people were kind of like invented around
twenty eighteen, because that's when they first started to kind
of like notice that people were trans, which is something
we've talked about before in terms of like the arc
of homophobia and transphobia in relation to like gay marriage
and like a few other things. This is something we've
reported on consistently on the show. So they're very often
(24:43):
only looking at data from select years, and as we've
discussed here, they largely inflate the number of quote unquote
mass shooters as well as the number of mass shooters
who they call transgender. They will often, you know, very
loosely define what a mass shooting is when it's soon them,
and then very strictly define it when it doesn't. In
the Blaze article about that Call of Duty Pride pack,
(25:06):
they say, quote trans identifying suspects a share of public
mass shootings nationwide over the twenty eighteen or twenty twenty
three period is reportedly well over seven times their share
of the population, which links to a very sketchy right
wing crime stats website that doesn't publish any of their data.
So sure, so, there is a few different ways to
(25:28):
categorize what a mass shooting is. There's no universal definition
for what makes a mass shooting versus a mass killing,
so different groups categorize things kind of differently. The Mass
Killing Database is a partnership between the ap USA Today
and Northwestern University, and it defines mass killings quote as
the intentional killing of four or more victims, excluding the
(25:50):
deaths of unborn children and the offenders by any means,
within a twenty four hour period. Their database currently lists
five hundred and ninety such killings since two thousand and six.
James Allen Fox, professor of criminology and law at Northwestern
University who manages the database, has said, quote, you can
count the number of transgender and non binary shooters on
one hand, they're actually underrepresented unquote, and again it's possible
(26:15):
that because of how successful the right has been at
this syop. When you're counting these number of transgender, non
binary shooters on one hand, that's also super overrepresented because
they're most likely containing like the Colorado spring shooter and
a lot of these other people. Now, trans people on
average are reported to make up about one percent of
the US population, but that number is steadily growing. We
(26:37):
got to pump those numbers up. Those are rookie numbers. Now.
It's also just kind of unclear what that number actually is.
That's the current one from the US Census Bureau, and
kind of an average, doubt because a lot of stats
of like people older than twenty five say the numbers
at like around zero point five point six percent versus
people under twenty five reportedly it's like one point five percent.
(26:58):
So you know, I'm just gonna say around one percent.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
Now.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
Under most criterias for mass killings, only one incident, the
one in Nashville, qualifies for inclusion. Another data source called
the Violence Project has recorded data on mass shootings in
the US since nineteen sixty six. They more narrowly define
a mass killing as four more people killed in a
public unconnected to other criminal activity. Their current database has
(27:22):
one hundred and ninety three entries. A spokesperson for their
organization told Reuters that the twenty twenty three Nashville shooting
quote is the first case of a trans perpetrator in
their database, per their methodology. Another more broad data collection
project is called the Gun Violence Archive. I'm just going
to quote from Reuter's here quote. The Gun Violence Archive,
(27:43):
which began collecting data on gun violence in the US
in twenty thirteen, recorded more than four thousand and four
hundred mass shootings in the last decade. Its definition of
a mass shooting is four or more people shot resulting
in injury or death, excluding the perpetrator of those quote.
The number of known suspects mass shooting which are trans
is under ten for the last decade, which translated to
(28:04):
zero point one one percent of the four four hundred
shootings unquote, which is about nine times lower than SIS
people per capita if we use the one percent trans
population stat and even using the more conservative mass killing
data set, the rate of this sort of violence by
trans people is far lower than what would match our
(28:25):
population margin. I'm going to add in a short quote
from the Washington Post to kind of add in some
context here quote. The Gun Violence Archive methodology would allow
for inclusion of the Aberdeen and Denver cases with zero
point six percent of the population. One would expect at
least sixteen mass shootings to be conducted by people identifying
as trans in the past five years. Instead, there are
(28:45):
just three possible cases cited by most conservatives unquote. So
after looking over all of this data, it would actually
appear that transgender people are less likely to commit a
mass shooting than CIS people, even by some of the
more conservative estimate. It's the other side of this is
that not only are trans people less likely to you know,
(29:05):
do this sort of violence, they are way more likely
to be on the receiving end than sispeople. For the
National Archive of Criminal Justice Data, LGBTQ plus people are
more than twice as likely to be a victim of
gun violence than their cisgender and straight peers. According to
the Human Rights Campaign, twenty nine percent of transgender youth
have been threatened or injured with a weapon on school property,
compared to seven percent of cisgender youth. So even for
(29:28):
school shootings, you are so much, so much more likely
to face gun violence at school if you are trans, transgender,
non binary, gender questioning people have reportedly higher rates of
being impacted or knowing someone who's been impacted by a
mass shooting compared to their cisgender queer peers. This is
you know, a data average, but it's usually around twenty
two percent to nineteen percent. And this whole topic gets
(29:50):
so much more like dark and grounded when you know
that three hundred and twenty trans people were killed last
year according to data from the annual Trans Murder Monitoring Report,
which is like, it's so dark that we even have
something called the Trans Murder Monitoring Report.
Speaker 3 (30:05):
Also, we need to mention this because I don't think
people this is really badly understood people who aren't trans.
But those numbers are always significant undercounts, because yes, those
projects are people scraping. Basically, news reports are trying to
find like the families of victims, and there are a
lot of people who get killed who the only people
who know are their friends and those people fucking either
aren't talking to the press, or the precious never like
(30:27):
covers it, or you know, the police give their dead
name and never talk about it, so they just are
dead and everyone thinks they're si.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
And just in the United States last year, thirty three
trans people were murdered, and again this is a vast
undercount like MIA said, Meanwhile, you have all these people
on the right who will talk about all of these
all these alleged mass shootings by alleged trans people, and
one of their favorite lines when they try to like
affirm that a shooter is actually trans is quote watch
(30:55):
how quickly this story will now disappear unquote, which is
just ironic for a few reasons. One, because that's how
news works, is that we move on to a new thing.
But also it'll probably disappear as well because they're not
actually trans, you know, when you're in the case of
the Uvaldi shooter, in the case of the megachurch shooter
(31:15):
from last year. Yeah, people move on. But also they're
not gonna keep harping on your weird conspiracy theory because
it's a weird conspiracy theory. It's not true even if
this is even if they were right, which they are not.
It also is just like, imagine in like nineteen twenty
or like, we have a problematic rise in left handed
mass shooters, so we're like, well, yeah, because there's more
left handed people, there's gonna be at least some level
(31:37):
of correlation statistically. Again, these people act like trans people
were only invented in twenty eighteen and are just like
slowly like recruiting in numbers, which, hey, you know, at
least we are kind of slowly recruiting. And like the
actual goal of this rhetoric, beyond just you know, altering
the fabric of reality, is to just encourage violence against
trans people. That is what they're doing. It's it's to
(31:59):
see trans people as a threat so that you feel
justified in doing violence against them. Just a few weeks ago,
a very popular gun YouTuber made this joke where they
were talking about, you know, getting ready to shoot a
te word and they stopped and they were like, oh, sorry,
I mean a school shooter. Wink wink. So like they're
(32:21):
trying to use school shooter to be a dog whistle
for trans people. This is all just to justify violence.
That's all this is doing, and to some degree it's working.
Just last week, a trans kid was assaulted in the
men's bathroom at school and reportedly one of their teeth exploded.
This was a trans girl who was using the men's
bathroom like all of these freaks want them to, and
(32:43):
she still got assaulted. I think it's super important when
talking about this sort of unreality propaganda is that like
these people like Limbs of TikTok and Miles Schong, they're
not just like falling further into a delusional conspiracy theory.
Same thing with Elon Musk, Right, it's easy. I think
it's easy to be like, oh, they just actually like
legitimately are like falling into this like conspiratorial delusion. And
(33:07):
it's not that. What it is is they are actually
intentionally crafting reality. It's not them like falling victim to
this like unfortunate delusion. They are choosing which a version
of reality to believe in because it's the one that
they want, and that's what they're doing, and they want
it to be a reality where more people feel comfortable
assaulting and killing trans People's that's the actual goal of
(33:29):
this propaganda.
Speaker 3 (33:30):
We need to be very clear about this about what's
sort of happening here. Which is one of one of
the fastest ways to get a group of people to
commit a genocide is by convincing them that they are
all about to be killed.
Speaker 2 (33:43):
Right.
Speaker 3 (33:43):
This is one of the things behind this or behind
the Bosnian genocide. This is one of the things behind Rwanda.
Is if you can convince a lot of people that
their neighbors are about to fucking kill them. That's how
you get them to do the genocide, because the thing
that they believe is that like, oh, like this is
self defense, Like these people are about to kill us,
and that is the kind of reality tunnel being mobilized.
Here is a is it called genocide? And the other
(34:06):
side of this that I think is so grim is
that there used to be a time as a society
where you know, we attempted to explain why there are
mass shootings. Right, this is something that I remember living through,
Like if you go back to like twenty sixteen, two thousand, seventeen,
twenty fifteen, like we used to there used to be
people other than these just like genocidal fascists, attempting to
(34:28):
explain why why these shootings were happening. The actual data
on trans mass shooters and how few of them there
are is quietly devastating to a lot of the theories
that used to be sort of bandied about, Right. The
theories of this was about sort of objection, the theory
that this was about this, you know, like sort of
de industrialization and like the consequences that this has had
(34:49):
on people, and that there were you know, it was
this sort of like downward social mobility that was causing
this violence. Right, If any of that were true, there
would be a fucking million mass shooters, because again, the
transproverty rate is like it's a right's around thirty percent, right,
for the rest of the country it is like a
quarter as well, it's that quarter. It's like a third
of that much, right there should be if it was
(35:12):
just purely a product of like material conditions, there would
be a lot more transmitant shooters. But there aren't because again,
you know, the actual theory that fits this data and
fits also the behavior of all of these people, like
all of these sort of FasTIS trying to explain mass
shootings as being about trans people. The thing that it
fits is this is the theory that this is basically
(35:32):
the replacement of plan rallies. Right, we don't have we
don't have collective lynchings anymore. We have individual ones. And
all of these fucking people are trying to make sure
that there's just more lynchings, and that these lynchings are
you know, is like it's there there sort of like
armed follower fanatics go and shoot a bunch more trans
people in a nightclub, and then you know, once that happens,
(35:53):
they will disavow it by saying, oh, hey, this this
nightclub shooting was this is actually done by a fucking transperson.
They'll keep doing this until they have enough political power
to openly come out and claim that all of these
people were their fucking revolutionary heroes in their new fucking
pantheon of the fascist state.
Speaker 1 (36:10):
And there was that trans boy who was assaulted in
the bathroom a few months ago and died days later
in the hospital. There's this this It keeps happening. And
I didn't want this to be like a depressing episode.
I wanted this to break down a conspiracy theory I've
been seeing more frequently talk about, you know what's fueling it,
actually go over the instances that are included in it
(36:31):
to kind of you know, debunk for lack of a
better term, uh, this sort of rhetoric, and just so
you can be more aware of it when you see it,
because often you'll see this this you know, this meme
with five five pictures, you'll see a copy pasta version
of it. So just just being aware of what this is,
(36:51):
what the what this rhetoric is trying to do, and
the you know, unfortunate fact that trans people are far
are far far more likely to be a victim of
gun violence and mash and mass shootings, yeah than people
than they ever then than sis people, and are actually
less likely to to to participate in such violence statistically speaking.
(37:14):
So yeah, that is that is the episode today. Not
meant to be depressing, just meant to be informative. But
you know, when it comes to me, those things often overlap.
But these such cases, I hope you have I hope
you have a good pride. Mounth Stay safe and stay dangerous.
Speaker 3 (37:35):
It could Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from.
Speaker 1 (37:38):
Cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zonemedia dot com,
check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for
It could Happen here, updated monthly at cool zonemedia dot
com slash sources. Thanks for listening.
Also media, Welcome to it could happen here. The show
about things falling apart, and often what's falling apart is
kind of our general agreed upon sense of what reality is,
and that's kind of what we're talking about here.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Today.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
We're going to talk about the latest batch of new
transgender conspiracy theories. And to join me in this exciting
journey is Mia Wong. Hello. Mia.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
You know, why is it or whatever? We're covering transgender conspiracies.
It's not like conspiracies that trans people made up. It's
always conspiracies about trans people. It's like, like, can we
never get one that?
Speaker 1 (00:40):
Like often I can't remember the last time I had
like a positive Pride Month episode, which I feel kind
of bad about, but I don't know. It's still an
interesting topic and I've not seen this discussed as much
as that should be. And you know, last week I
really thought I was going to have, you know, a
difficult work week researching Trump pornography. I thought that'd be like,
(01:02):
you know, the low part of my month. But it
turns out spending three days sifting through mass shooter data
is actually much worse, much worse than looking through Trump board.
So jaris can, I can, I can?
Speaker 3 (01:13):
I can? I recommend that you two spend your time
listening to a bunch of rioters talking about the absolute
worst time of your life. Much better, all right, so
let's get into it. We're gonna talk first about video games.
I'm gonna quote a tweet from a kind of failure
of a far right influencer, which is exciting because we're
(01:34):
mostly gonna be talking about successful ones. But is this
guy named ben Ko uk flag in bio, so opinion
immediately discarded. But he has said a few days ago,
quote Activision's Call of Duty has added transgender bullets to
the game in honor of Pride Month, so you can
literally play as a transgender mass shooter unquote. This tweet
(01:58):
was almost ripped word for word by Ian Miles. Chung
basically said the exact same thing, except you said role play,
not play. Extremely funny, and I did not realize the
bullets themselves identified as trance. But good for she her
they them, I guess. So we started to see this
claim repeated through the anti trans far right grifter media
(02:22):
space Right limbs of TikTok said that quote Call of
Duty is now enabling kids to role play being a
literal trans terrorist. And for some reason, whenever libs of
TikTok writes terrorists, she asterix out the o's. I don't
know why, but this, this, this started to pick up steam.
There was an article in Glenn Beck's The Blaze quote
(02:44):
call of Duty Pride bundle let's players simulate murder using
trans flag adorned guns and bullets. I'm so excited for
these people to think to find out about counter strike there.
There are gonna be literally so many, so many articles
just have the video cliff of the thing in place
at the an words says terrorists win.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
The Quartering wrote, call of Duty is selling trans pride
bullets whatevery mass shooter wants. So what's going on here?
Cause this, you know, if you're not as online as
some of us some other people are, you know this
is maybe confusing. Why are they saying that trans people
are all mass shooters? Now? What's going on? And you know,
(03:27):
and also if you're thinking it's kind of odd that
there would be a Call of Duty update where you
can literally play as a transgender mass shooter and shoot
transgender bullets, you would be right because that never happened.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
It's false. No, way, not this time, we created it.
Not this time, No, not this time.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
So let's get into what's really going on with this
Call of Duty Pride update, and then we'll discuss why
so many of these far right influences are pushing this
kind of trans terrorist story. So on June first, Activision
did release an update for the terrible new Call of
Duty in Warfare three. It contained anime mecha skins and
seven free weapon skins themed after various Pride flags. Now,
(04:07):
some would argue that the mechasuits are essentially also Pride themed,
but I digress. For this Pride Weapon Camo pack, it
will color your gun with the flag of your choosing.
One of the said flags is the blue, pink and
white trans flag. Yet if you apply the trans skin
to any of the regular guns in the game, the
bullets will not be trans'd. So what gives without the
(04:29):
transgender bullets, how is anyone supposed to literally roleplay a
mass shooter like libs of tech Talk and Ian Miles
Chung say we can. So it turns out these quote
unquote transgender bullets were in fact not intentionally added to
the game in honor of Pride Month, and are most
likely a bug that affects one single gun when one
exclusive attachment is equipped. I'm going to quote from Kotaku
(04:51):
quote Modern Warfare three's M four came with a special
Soul Harvester weapon blueprint, which includes a skin and a
specific attachment for the M four and quote unquote tracer
which are colorful AMMO options that also leave traces of
different visual effects like paint splatters or rose petals. This
special blueprint was for people who spend one hundred dollars
to purchase the Vault edition of the game. Based on
(05:12):
Kataku's testing, it appears the quote unquote trans bullets only
appear when applying the transgender flag Camo skin on this
specific weapon blueprint. It's unclear this is a bug. At
one point during testing, the bullets in the cartridge were
only the pink colors in the flag, or is just
an extremely adosyncratic reflection of how Call of Duty's complex
shader system interacts across thousands of items and cosmetics. During testing,
(05:35):
any other Camo skin applied to the M four Soul
Harvester blueprint resulted in bullets in the cartridge changing the
color to match that skin.
Speaker 3 (05:43):
Unquote.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
Now I do think it's a little bit silly that
there's so much uproar about these trans colored bullets but
not as much about like just a trans colored gun,
Like why is the bullet the big thing? And we
all know that you can't play as a mass shooter
in Call of Duty. You play as a war criminal,
(06:05):
and most transgender war criminals are just drone pilots or
work for Raytheon. If you want to play a mass
shooter game, you can just play GTA five or hit Man,
where you play as cis men. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know,
but the Russian terrorist airport level don't at me. I
don't care anyway. There was a great article in former
Tucker Carlson project, The Daily Caller with the headline Pride
(06:29):
Month finally comes for one of the last bastions of manhood,
and the opening tagline is gamers. They targeted gamers. Oh no,
So anyway, what's really at play here with this transmash
shooter stuff. This is just another beat in the rhetorical
strategy that conservative anti trans influencers have been building over
(06:52):
the past year and a half, using a mix of
cherry picked data, bad stats, and often outright lies to
convince people that they're an increasing epidemic of transgender mass
killing attacks sweeping the nation. When discussing this call of duty,
Pride Pack Libs of TikTok said, quote, with the uptick
in actual trans violence we've been seeing, it's alarming that
(07:15):
call of Duty would introduce this and a Blaze article
read quote. Critics have suggested activision Blizzard may want to
reconsider given the recent mass shootings executed by lgbt radicals.
There have been multiple mass shootings executed, attempted, or at
the very least planned by transvestites and LGBTQ radicals in
recent years. So this Blaze article begins by listing four
(07:40):
alleged instances of these trans mass shooters. Two of these
simply never happened, as the alleged transgender individuals, a trans
guy and a fifty six year old organ and nazi,
were arrested after they made concerning posts online. And the
other two which which did happen. These are these were shootings,
(08:02):
except these were never actually done by trans people.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
It's a made up tap, it's a total fabrication. It
never happened. It never happened. This one was invented by
a writer.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
So although this transgender mass shooter narrative might not be real.
Do you know what is real? Mia?
Speaker 3 (08:18):
Is it capitalism?
Speaker 1 (08:19):
It is, and capitalism is fueled, at least currently by
the products and sponsors that support this podcast. Okay, we
are back now. Trying to frame every new mass shooter
(08:41):
as some like crazed leftist of some variety is an
old tactic popularized by the likes of Andy Know, Which
is you know ironic? Considering the fact that political extremist
related killings for the past ten years are overwhelmingly done
by individuals tied to right wing extremism, the ADL puts
it out seventy five percent, whereas leftist extremism, which is
(09:03):
categorized as including anarchists as well as black nationalist groups,
are responsible for just four percent. Most of the rest
they categorize as Islamic violent extremists, including the twenty sixteen
Pulse nightclub massacre targeted against here people in Orlando, although
one could argue that that is also right wing extremism,
like they are also right wingers? Like It's like Yes,
(09:24):
It turns out the ADL might have some troubling ways
of collecting data breaking news anyway. Regardless of the actual facts.
Lying about the political demographic of mass shooters is an
old tactic employed by far right content creators to gain
clicks and influence the talking points of more popular media
figures and politicians. And now the past few years we've
(09:45):
seen a new iteration of this tactic, where in the
confusion and chaos of the first few minutes and hours
after a shooting, anti trans influencers will do everything they
can to frame an alleged or suspected shooter of being transgender,
often using out of context social media posts, photographs, photos
of other people, or just pictures of like long or
(10:05):
dyed hair to affirm that a mass shooter must actually
be transgender. Now, even if this claim is like widely
debunked later on, most of the people that follow these
far right accounts won't be hearing about that. So all
they need to do is use this brief window of
chaos to seed the idea into people's minds. And if
you do this thing frequently enough after each new mass shooting,
(10:28):
then it's pretty easy to create a false perception of
this increasing trend. Now, this style of propaganda has been
largely spearheaded by Chaiai Trek, using her libs of TikTok account.
Here's another quote from her quote. The modern LGBTQ plus
movement is radicalizing young activists into becoming violent terrorist extremists.
(10:48):
The uptick in trans violence is going to get worse unquote.
But this sort of rhetoric has been spread by many
other online figures in this orbit, like disgraced buzzfeedwriter Benny
Johnson and chronic poster ian Miles Chung. Their rhetoric has
been spread by sitting politicians Donald Trump Junior and Elon Musk. Now,
to clarify, people have been lying about the gender identity
(11:11):
of mass shooters for like a long time. It's one
of the oldest jokes on four Chan. But what's been
going on the past two years is something different, and
it requires a little bit more in depth examination of
this propaganda trend. Now to get into more specific examples, here,
I like to break down a common meme format used
to spread this type of false propaganda. It's usually about
(11:32):
five pictures of mass shooters with text next to each
picture that reads something like the Nashville shooter identified as trans,
the X shooter identified as trans. So it will just
list all of these people that allegedly are mass shooters
and allegedly identified as trans. Now police did't identify the
Nashville Covenant School shooter as a trans man, that we
(11:56):
have to take their word for it. They've released no
other info on that. Typically this is seen as like
the first legitimate mass shooting done by a transgender individual,
and for the past year we've been waiting for more
and more context to come out about this mass shooting
and it's possible motivations. So I'm not even going to
really discuss this one right now. We'll just to say, sure,
(12:16):
this is a trans person who happened to do a
mass shooting and leave it at that, even though it's
you know, not totally clear.
Speaker 3 (12:21):
Yeah, I mean I do. I want to add one
thing briefly, which is that like trying to find out
information from the police about a mass shooting is such
a crapshoot, like they just you know, they'll they'll be
like an initial flurry of press releases or whatever, and
then they just will never talk about it again until
maybe the trial. And sometimes you get some from.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
That well, and in often cases for mass shooters who
often die, there is no never.
Speaker 3 (12:45):
Get so yeah, yeah, and if they're dead like, but.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
Even keeping this Nashville incident as a legitimate mass shooting
done by a person who happens to be trans when
talking about this meme, the thing is is that with
these five pictures that are on this meme, most typically
three out of the five people that have their pictures
here aren't even treads.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
Not this time. It never happened. It is false, It
never happened. It's a fake. It's fiction.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
Now, most famously, we have the Colorado Springs shooter Anderson
Lee Aldrich, who killed five people and injured twenty five
others at a queer club in twenty twenty two. Later on,
his lawyer claimed that the shooter was non binary, which
I believe is a disgusting and disingenuous attempt to get
out of the more than now fifty hate crime charges
that the shooter is facing. And this opinion is shared
(13:34):
not only by the DA but also all other legitimate
extremists and researchers. Prior to these claims in court, there
was no indication whatsoever that the shooter was non binary
or used they then pronouns. However, they did own rainbow
flag shooting targets. Ran a neo Nazi website that posted
gun training videos and was known by online acquaintances to
(13:57):
frequently post racist and homophobic content. Now I should clarify
when I say shooting targets, I don't mean that it's
pride theme shooting targets. It's that the people that you
are shooting are painted like they are gay. So there
you go now. Pictured next in the meme is someone
with purple colored hair, labeled as the Denver shooter. This
person is not trans, has never claimed to be trans.
(14:20):
He just has dyed hair. He killed one person in
a school shooting that he planned with a sixteen year
old trans guy.
Speaker 3 (14:27):
In shooting correct? Correct?
Speaker 1 (14:30):
Will we will get in We will get into this
later because the definition of mass shooting is getting stretched
liberally here now. The third person pictured, who is in trans,
changes more frequently in different versions of the meme that
you can find online. One version includes someone referenced as
the Philadelphia shooter. This is referencing a shooting spree that
(14:50):
resulted in five people being killed. This shooter had previously
posted photos of himself cross dressing in women's clothes, and
this was used by figures like Marjorie Taylor Green to
aim that the cis mail shooter was actually quote another
trans shooter. Family of this shooter referred to him as
a quote unquote biblical extremist, and he often posted bizarre
(15:12):
Christian spiritual conspiracy theories and was an outspoken fan of
Tucker Carlson. In another version of the meme posted by
Chaia Reichik, she identifies the Uvalde school shooter as transo
and includes a picture of a transwoman holding the trans
Pride flag. This was posted in January of this year.
Elon Musk replied to the tweet with two exclamation points. Now.
(15:34):
In the hours after the Euvaldie School shooting, pictures of
two or three different transwomen were used to falsely label
the shooter as trans, with at least one of these
transwomen being from New York, the other from Georgia. Both
these women received a great deal of harassment after the shooting.
Arizona Congressman Paul Gozar tweeted that the shooter was quote
a transsexual, leftist illegal alien unquote, which is frankly amazing
(15:57):
because every word in that sentence is wrong.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
It's a made up tip, it's a total fabrication. It
never happened. It never happened.
Speaker 1 (16:05):
Now, the other person in this meme that is typically
accepted to be trans is the Aberdeen shooter. Now, I'm
going to just quote from the Washington Post here. Quote.
In twenty eighteen, in Aberdeen, Maryland, a twenty six year
old shot and killed three people at a pharmaceuticals distribution
center before turning the weapon on themselves. The sheriff said
the shooter had been diagnosed as mentally ill. In twenty sixteen,
a close friend reported the shooter quote suffered from bipolar
(16:28):
disorder and struggled since early in high school with severe depression,
partly connected to their feelings of not being accepted when
they first came out as a gay teenage girl and
later as transgender. Unquote. By most accounts, this is a
transgender guy who began transitioning shortly before the shooting. Pronouns
and stuff are unclear. They also worked at this distribution
center a few weeks prior to them doing the shooting.
(16:49):
This incident's typically not categorized as a mass shooting because
only three people were killed excluding the shooter. Now, one
of the more recent attempts at this transgender terrorist psyop
was in the aftermath of the shooting at Joel Ostein's
megachurch in Houston earlier this February. The shooter was a
thirty six year old woman carrying her seven year old son, sadly,
(17:11):
both of whom died along with one other person. Just
hours after the shooting, far right accounts like lips of
TikTok and end Wokeness claimed that she was transgender, pointing
to documents where she used the name Jeffrey now Chia
Reichek called the shooting quote another act of trans terrorism.
We need to have a national conversation about the LGBTQ
(17:33):
movement turning youth into violent extremists unquote.
Speaker 3 (17:36):
Didn't she literally say that exact thing with the last one. Yeah,
they don't even covie with new tweets, like they really
just have the same five tweets in rotation. Marjorie Taylor
Green called her quote a trans from El Savador unquote.
Missouri Representative Josh Holly, Marco Rubio, and Elon Musk all
post about this quote unquote epidemic of trans violence. These
(17:58):
claims were boosted by Donald Trump, June and Ted Cruz.
Fox News ran a whole story with a headline about
the shooter being transgender, and guess what, she's not trans.
She is a CIS woman who gave birth to a
child and has always identified as a woman. It just
appears that she was given a masculine name at birth
(18:19):
and later changed it to a more feminine name. The
far right content sphere created so much uproar that the
police had to do a whole press conference about how
the shooter was not trans, and after the Peace lawyers
clarified she was not trans, Fox News changed their claim,
now saying on air that the shooter quote identified as
both genders and was quote a biological woman who sometimes
(18:41):
identified as a man named Jeffrey unquote, which just isn't true.
Jesus Christ.
Speaker 1 (18:48):
But the thing about this one is that it wasn't
just far right influencers in Fox News who ran with
this transgender narrative. MSNBC jumped on very early to say
that the shooter was quote a Hispanic transgender woman who
quote unquote identified as a woman unquote.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
It is totally made up, pure fiction. It's fiction. It's fiction.
We made it up.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
M s NBC.
Speaker 3 (19:11):
More like MSNB shit, great, great, great, I'm doing great
this morning.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
Do you know what's also doing great mia.
Speaker 3 (19:25):
Is it the products and services support this podcast.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
They're pretty consistent. Yeah they are. They are still around
and here you can listen to their important messages. All right,
we are so back. So there's there's so many more
(19:49):
cases like the ones that I've talked about. Right. The
reason I started working on this episode in the first
place was due to far right accounts claiming that a
man named Jared Rivierrez, who killed his seventy year old
roommate and went on a mass stabbing spree last month
outside of an AMC theater and a McDonald's in Massachusetts,
was claimed to be a quote mentally ill trans terrorist
by limbs of TikTok and a transactivist quote unquote who's
(20:15):
a man who thinks he's a woman, which is a
line Libs of TikTok loves using. Now, Jared claims to
be an artist and a model, but was actually like
this really weird like grifter entrepreneur. He kind of reminds
me of that weird Canadian cat killer Luke Megnan YadA
who like created a whole bunch of fake posts to
(20:35):
like pretend to be famous and like created like fake
fans It's very similar to this case and later this
guy Luke in Canada also killed a gay man, very
similar cases. Honestly, Jared here again, he's like pretending to
be like an international entrepreneur. He looks like this weird
like hippie surfer dude with long bleached hair. Jared's father
(20:59):
is a wealthy Christian therapist who looks very similar and
anti trans influencers have pointed to the word she on
Jared's Instagram profile, but Jared's actual gender identity is really unclear.
He's never pictured wearing women's clothing. He would frequently post
shirtless buff selfies. Jared has never claimed to be trans
or a woman, and has never used transgender language or iconography.
(21:22):
Jared did file a name change request last April, but
it was to change his last name. He goes by
Jared that same month, April, So two months ago, Jared
sexually harassed a model at a Beverly Hills hotel, saying
that he wanted to have kids with her and proposed
to her, saying I'm going to be a good husband.
You're gonna be my wife unquote. This person simply, we
(21:45):
have no reason to think they're trans. They do this.
They do like weird like art stuff, and I don't know.
They're like California Beverly Hills poison brained, and it seems
to they see to have gone through some kind of
mental health breakdown which resulted in them killing their roommate,
two dogs, and stabbing like six or seven people in Massachusetts.
(22:09):
But another trans terrorist, sure, why not? In January of
this year, in Iowa, teenager open fire at a school,
killing one person and then himself again. The usual suspects
were super quick to label him as another trans terrorist,
Elon Musk saying, this is happening a lot. Something is
deeply wrong. This kid largely seemed like a regular gen
(22:30):
Z liberal. He listed his pronouns as he they. He
posted things like nominally in support of trans people. He
used the hashtag gender fluid a single time in a
TikTok video filmed with what appears to be a trans
friend of his. He also posted on Reddit two years
ago that he didn't want to transition because he didn't
quote wants to look ugly. He never specifically identified as trans.
(22:54):
This is just kind of a tragic case. I don't
know what the deal with this kid was. They seemed
deeply confused and upset and killed someone and then killed themselves.
It sucks, but it's not a mass shooting, and it
doesn't it doesn't link to anything being a pattern of
transgender terrorism. That does not stop someone like Donald Trump
(23:17):
Junior saying, quote, the modern LGBTQ plus movement is radicalizing
our youth and becoming violent extremists per capita, Is there
a more violent group of people anywhere in the world
than radicalized transactivists Given the tiny fraction of the population
they make up, it doesn't seem like anyone else comes
even close. We have a lot of claims like this,
(23:37):
which is why I need to start talking about statistics
my least favorite thing, because this sort of messaging is
repeated a lot. We have this post from I think
Benny Johnson or Donald Trump Junior. I can't twelve which
one because unfortunately it got deleted before I was able
to log who did it, so apologies for that. But
it's a very similar sort of thing, saying there's been
(23:58):
at least five massive tax by transgner people since twenty eighteen.
Considering the group makes up less than point five percent
of the population, that's massive overrepresentation. We'll get into that
in a sec. So, boy, often when these people are
talking about this, this trend of trans mass shooters, they're
focusing specifically on the period of time between twenty eighteen
(24:20):
and twenty twenty four because largely a lot of conservatives
think that trans people were kind of like invented around
twenty eighteen, because that's when they first started to kind
of like notice that people were trans, which is something
we've talked about before in terms of like the arc
of homophobia and transphobia in relation to like gay marriage
and like a few other things. This is something we've
reported on consistently on the show. So they're very often
(24:43):
only looking at data from select years, and as we've
discussed here, they largely inflate the number of quote unquote
mass shooters as well as the number of mass shooters
who they call transgender. They will often, you know, very
loosely define what a mass shooting is when it's soon them,
and then very strictly define it when it doesn't. In
the Blaze article about that Call of Duty Pride pack,
(25:06):
they say, quote trans identifying suspects a share of public
mass shootings nationwide over the twenty eighteen or twenty twenty
three period is reportedly well over seven times their share
of the population, which links to a very sketchy right
wing crime stats website that doesn't publish any of their data.
So sure, so, there is a few different ways to
(25:28):
categorize what a mass shooting is. There's no universal definition
for what makes a mass shooting versus a mass killing,
so different groups categorize things kind of differently. The Mass
Killing Database is a partnership between the ap USA Today
and Northwestern University, and it defines mass killings quote as
the intentional killing of four or more victims, excluding the
(25:50):
deaths of unborn children and the offenders by any means,
within a twenty four hour period. Their database currently lists
five hundred and ninety such killings since two thousand and six.
James Allen Fox, professor of criminology and law at Northwestern
University who manages the database, has said, quote, you can
count the number of transgender and non binary shooters on
one hand, they're actually underrepresented unquote, and again it's possible
(26:15):
that because of how successful the right has been at
this syop. When you're counting these number of transgender, non
binary shooters on one hand, that's also super overrepresented because
they're most likely containing like the Colorado spring shooter and
a lot of these other people. Now, trans people on
average are reported to make up about one percent of
the US population, but that number is steadily growing. We
(26:37):
got to pump those numbers up. Those are rookie numbers. Now.
It's also just kind of unclear what that number actually is.
That's the current one from the US Census Bureau, and
kind of an average, doubt because a lot of stats
of like people older than twenty five say the numbers
at like around zero point five point six percent versus
people under twenty five reportedly it's like one point five percent.
(26:58):
So you know, I'm just gonna say around one percent.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
Now.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
Under most criterias for mass killings, only one incident, the
one in Nashville, qualifies for inclusion. Another data source called
the Violence Project has recorded data on mass shootings in
the US since nineteen sixty six. They more narrowly define
a mass killing as four more people killed in a
public unconnected to other criminal activity. Their current database has
(27:22):
one hundred and ninety three entries. A spokesperson for their
organization told Reuters that the twenty twenty three Nashville shooting
quote is the first case of a trans perpetrator in
their database, per their methodology. Another more broad data collection
project is called the Gun Violence Archive. I'm just going
to quote from Reuter's here quote. The Gun Violence Archive,
(27:43):
which began collecting data on gun violence in the US
in twenty thirteen, recorded more than four thousand and four
hundred mass shootings in the last decade. Its definition of
a mass shooting is four or more people shot resulting
in injury or death, excluding the perpetrator of those quote.
The number of known suspects mass shooting which are trans
is under ten for the last decade, which translated to
(28:04):
zero point one one percent of the four four hundred
shootings unquote, which is about nine times lower than SIS
people per capita if we use the one percent trans
population stat and even using the more conservative mass killing
data set, the rate of this sort of violence by
trans people is far lower than what would match our
(28:25):
population margin. I'm going to add in a short quote
from the Washington Post to kind of add in some
context here quote. The Gun Violence Archive methodology would allow
for inclusion of the Aberdeen and Denver cases with zero
point six percent of the population. One would expect at
least sixteen mass shootings to be conducted by people identifying
as trans in the past five years. Instead, there are
(28:45):
just three possible cases cited by most conservatives unquote. So
after looking over all of this data, it would actually
appear that transgender people are less likely to commit a
mass shooting than CIS people, even by some of the
more conservative estimate. It's the other side of this is
that not only are trans people less likely to you know,
(29:05):
do this sort of violence, they are way more likely
to be on the receiving end than sispeople. For the
National Archive of Criminal Justice Data, LGBTQ plus people are
more than twice as likely to be a victim of
gun violence than their cisgender and straight peers. According to
the Human Rights Campaign, twenty nine percent of transgender youth
have been threatened or injured with a weapon on school property,
compared to seven percent of cisgender youth. So even for
(29:28):
school shootings, you are so much, so much more likely
to face gun violence at school if you are trans, transgender,
non binary, gender questioning people have reportedly higher rates of
being impacted or knowing someone who's been impacted by a
mass shooting compared to their cisgender queer peers. This is
you know, a data average, but it's usually around twenty
two percent to nineteen percent. And this whole topic gets
(29:50):
so much more like dark and grounded when you know
that three hundred and twenty trans people were killed last
year according to data from the annual Trans Murder Monitoring Report,
which is like, it's so dark that we even have
something called the Trans Murder Monitoring Report.
Speaker 3 (30:05):
Also, we need to mention this because I don't think
people this is really badly understood people who aren't trans.
But those numbers are always significant undercounts, because yes, those
projects are people scraping. Basically, news reports are trying to
find like the families of victims, and there are a
lot of people who get killed who the only people
who know are their friends and those people fucking either
aren't talking to the press, or the precious never like
(30:27):
covers it, or you know, the police give their dead
name and never talk about it, so they just are
dead and everyone thinks they're si.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
And just in the United States last year, thirty three
trans people were murdered, and again this is a vast
undercount like MIA said, Meanwhile, you have all these people
on the right who will talk about all of these
all these alleged mass shootings by alleged trans people, and
one of their favorite lines when they try to like
affirm that a shooter is actually trans is quote watch
(30:55):
how quickly this story will now disappear unquote, which is
just ironic for a few reasons. One, because that's how
news works, is that we move on to a new thing.
But also it'll probably disappear as well because they're not
actually trans, you know, when you're in the case of
the Uvaldi shooter, in the case of the megachurch shooter
(31:15):
from last year. Yeah, people move on. But also they're
not gonna keep harping on your weird conspiracy theory because
it's a weird conspiracy theory. It's not true even if
this is even if they were right, which they are not.
It also is just like, imagine in like nineteen twenty
or like, we have a problematic rise in left handed
mass shooters, so we're like, well, yeah, because there's more
left handed people, there's gonna be at least some level
(31:37):
of correlation statistically. Again, these people act like trans people
were only invented in twenty eighteen and are just like
slowly like recruiting in numbers, which, hey, you know, at
least we are kind of slowly recruiting. And like the
actual goal of this rhetoric, beyond just you know, altering
the fabric of reality, is to just encourage violence against
trans people. That is what they're doing. It's it's to
(31:59):
see trans people as a threat so that you feel
justified in doing violence against them. Just a few weeks ago,
a very popular gun YouTuber made this joke where they
were talking about, you know, getting ready to shoot a
te word and they stopped and they were like, oh, sorry,
I mean a school shooter. Wink wink. So like they're
(32:21):
trying to use school shooter to be a dog whistle
for trans people. This is all just to justify violence.
That's all this is doing, and to some degree it's working.
Just last week, a trans kid was assaulted in the
men's bathroom at school and reportedly one of their teeth exploded.
This was a trans girl who was using the men's
bathroom like all of these freaks want them to, and
(32:43):
she still got assaulted. I think it's super important when
talking about this sort of unreality propaganda is that like
these people like Limbs of TikTok and Miles Schong, they're
not just like falling further into a delusional conspiracy theory.
Same thing with Elon Musk, Right, it's easy. I think
it's easy to be like, oh, they just actually like
legitimately are like falling into this like conspiratorial delusion. And
(33:07):
it's not that. What it is is they are actually
intentionally crafting reality. It's not them like falling victim to
this like unfortunate delusion. They are choosing which a version
of reality to believe in because it's the one that
they want, and that's what they're doing, and they want
it to be a reality where more people feel comfortable
assaulting and killing trans People's that's the actual goal of
(33:29):
this propaganda.
Speaker 3 (33:30):
We need to be very clear about this about what's
sort of happening here. Which is one of one of
the fastest ways to get a group of people to
commit a genocide is by convincing them that they are
all about to be killed.
Speaker 2 (33:43):
Right.
Speaker 3 (33:43):
This is one of the things behind this or behind
the Bosnian genocide. This is one of the things behind Rwanda.
Is if you can convince a lot of people that
their neighbors are about to fucking kill them. That's how
you get them to do the genocide, because the thing
that they believe is that like, oh, like this is
self defense, Like these people are about to kill us,
and that is the kind of reality tunnel being mobilized.
Here is a is it called genocide? And the other
(34:06):
side of this that I think is so grim is
that there used to be a time as a society
where you know, we attempted to explain why there are
mass shootings. Right, this is something that I remember living through,
Like if you go back to like twenty sixteen, two thousand, seventeen,
twenty fifteen, like we used to there used to be
people other than these just like genocidal fascists, attempting to
(34:28):
explain why why these shootings were happening. The actual data
on trans mass shooters and how few of them there
are is quietly devastating to a lot of the theories
that used to be sort of bandied about, Right. The
theories of this was about sort of objection, the theory
that this was about this, you know, like sort of
de industrialization and like the consequences that this has had
(34:49):
on people, and that there were you know, it was
this sort of like downward social mobility that was causing
this violence. Right, If any of that were true, there
would be a fucking million mass shooters, because again, the
transproverty rate is like it's a right's around thirty percent, right,
for the rest of the country it is like a
quarter as well, it's that quarter. It's like a third
of that much, right there should be if it was
(35:12):
just purely a product of like material conditions, there would
be a lot more transmitant shooters. But there aren't because again,
you know, the actual theory that fits this data and
fits also the behavior of all of these people, like
all of these sort of FasTIS trying to explain mass
shootings as being about trans people. The thing that it
fits is this is the theory that this is basically
(35:32):
the replacement of plan rallies. Right, we don't have we
don't have collective lynchings anymore. We have individual ones. And
all of these fucking people are trying to make sure
that there's just more lynchings, and that these lynchings are
you know, is like it's there there sort of like
armed follower fanatics go and shoot a bunch more trans
people in a nightclub, and then you know, once that happens,
(35:53):
they will disavow it by saying, oh, hey, this this
nightclub shooting was this is actually done by a fucking transperson.
They'll keep doing this until they have enough political power
to openly come out and claim that all of these
people were their fucking revolutionary heroes in their new fucking
pantheon of the fascist state.
Speaker 1 (36:10):
And there was that trans boy who was assaulted in
the bathroom a few months ago and died days later
in the hospital. There's this this It keeps happening. And
I didn't want this to be like a depressing episode.
I wanted this to break down a conspiracy theory I've
been seeing more frequently talk about, you know what's fueling it,
actually go over the instances that are included in it
(36:31):
to kind of you know, debunk for lack of a
better term, uh, this sort of rhetoric, and just so
you can be more aware of it when you see it,
because often you'll see this this you know, this meme
with five five pictures, you'll see a copy pasta version
of it. So just just being aware of what this is,
(36:51):
what the what this rhetoric is trying to do, and
the you know, unfortunate fact that trans people are far
are far far more likely to be a victim of
gun violence and mash and mass shootings, yeah than people
than they ever then than sis people, and are actually
less likely to to to participate in such violence statistically speaking.
(37:14):
So yeah, that is that is the episode today. Not
meant to be depressing, just meant to be informative. But
you know, when it comes to me, those things often overlap.
But these such cases, I hope you have I hope
you have a good pride. Mounth Stay safe and stay dangerous.
Speaker 3 (37:35):
It could Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from.
Speaker 1 (37:38):
Cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zonemedia dot com,
check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for
It could Happen here, updated monthly at cool zonemedia dot
com slash sources. Thanks for listening.
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Hosts And Creators
Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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