Fake Transgender Terrorists

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?

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 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 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 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.

are all mass shooters? Now? What's going on? And you know, 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.

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 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 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 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, 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.

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 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 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 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 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, except these were never actually done by trans people.

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 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, 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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, 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.

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 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. He just has dyed hair. He killed one person in a school shooting that he planned with a sixteen year old trans guy.

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 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. 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 because every word in that sentence is wrong.

the shooter had been diagnosed as mentally ill. In twenty sixteen, a close friend reported the shooter quote suffered from bipolar 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. 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,

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 movement turning youth into violent extremists unquote.

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

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 identified as a man named Jeffrey unquote, which just isn't true. Jesus Christ.

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 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 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 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. 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 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.

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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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

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 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 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 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. So you know, I'm just gonna say around one percent.

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, 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 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

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

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, 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 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 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.

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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 this propaganda.

Here is a is it called genocide? And the other 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

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 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 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 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, 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.

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 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, 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. 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.