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Did you know that 10 people were killed by a (potentially transgender) school shooter in Canada yesterday?
There is hardly anything about this in the American media today. It’s the third-billed story at best, behind Nancy Guthrie kidnapping updates and the FAA closing airspace over El Paso. Right-wing influencers have mentioned it, but it almost seems as if they are going through the motions. It’s not even trending on Twitter. I don’t feel the raw anger and hatred from when the Catholic school in Minnesota was hit.
The only explanation I can think of is that the shooting happened in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, which is in the middle of nowhere. Nobody wants to send reporters to Yukon-lite in February, so we get no coverage.
No wonder Bezos laid these people off.
As a data point, in Australia this was top story on ABC news 7am radio broadcast, second story on the 8am broadcast. During the second broadbast they listed off the genders of all of the victims (which I found a bit weird) but pointedly avoided saying anything about the gender or identity of the shooter. Perhaps they were giving a Straussian hint.
I see the online article now names the shooter, refers to them as a woman and no hint of a trans identity.
That was what I saw at first. It appeared as breaking news on the ABC website. I was a little surprised for it to be Canada rather than America, as is far more common, and then a later update identified the shooter as a 'woman'. I admit I wondered if it was a trans woman if only because it's so unusual for women to be involved in mass shootings. Is there any confirmation on that either way?
Yes, they're trans.
The media has 2 choices- double down on "we need to ban guns to protect women from male mass shooters" and throw trans women under the bus, or double down on TWAW and throw "it's all men's fault" out.
I think they're still figuring out which one it's going to be, but TWAW's in the lead right now.
Third option: the fact that this person was driven to commit such a horrific crime is testament to how widespread transphobic bigotry is, even in an ostensible progressive utopia like Canada.
I'm sure the TRAs themselves are pushing this one on the backchannel. Trans cannot fail, they can only be failed.
Sure, "the victims deserved it" is always an option.
Unfortunately for the TRAs, this wasn't a Christian school.
"The mass shooter was female" is the best concession they're going to get. Because the truth- that this was violence the entire progressive political stack (by its own rules) is directly and solely responsible for- is an inconvenient one.
If anything the TRAs should be signal-boosting the couple of politicians who will inevitably shoot their mouth off too quickly in blaming trans people for this. They're completely dependent on progressive success for survival.
So far, I did not see any evidence that this was politically motivated. Presumably your hedging of 'by its own rules' means something like 'if a member of the outgroup does something bad, we can blame the outgroup for it', and I am sure you have some story of some Trump supporter having a psychotic episode and shooting up a shopping mall getting spun as MAGA violence.
If there is some indication of political motive, like the shooter planning to kill some TERF teachers, then blaming the SJ movement is still a bit silly but fair.
Otherwise, bad faith behavior does not become acceptable just because the other side does it occasionally, I am sure a SJ supporter would find many spins from MAGA which I would condemn them for emulating.
Right-Wing Violence Is Not A Fringe Issue
The American Right and the Thrill of Political Violence
Analysis: What Data Shows About Political Extremist Violence
Right-wing extremist violence is more frequent and more deadly than left-wing violence − what the data shows
The Right's Violence Problem
As Right-Wing Rhetoric Escalates, So Do Threats And Violence
Right-Wing and ‘Radical Islamic’ Terror in the U.S. Are Equally Serious Threats: ADL Report
...Just a couple links grabbed off a stack that rivals Everest.
Blue Tribe wants there to be a legible, coherent category of "Red Tribe violence"; for people to have common knowledge that Red Tribe violence is a live social issue to which current events connect, that there's a history and a dataset, a conversation in progress, potential solutions ready to go.
Blue Tribe wishes to prevent "Blue Tribe violence" from being such a legible, coherent category, or indeed for any of the above features to coalesce around it.
Blue Tribe very clearly uses the dance back and forth between "this is a social problem that demands systemic solutions" and "eh, crazy random happenstance, what can you do" as one of its core political tactics. People recognize this pattern, and they see it everywhere, and charity is burned thereby. This particular front in the Culture War has been operating for much more than a decade. You should be aware of it, and you should, I personally think, account for it in your arguments. Absent such an accounting, your condemnations are meaningless, because it is obvious that they are selectively partisan.
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