Former President Donald Trump called it “fake news” for a reason.
In short, the liberal-dominated establishment media has pushed lies and concealed truth in order to advance a sinister agenda.
Establishment media reporting on the identities and probable motives of mass shooters constitutes one of the more egregious examples of this detestable phenomenon.
The most brazen instances of media gaslighting have often occurred when credible evidence has emerged to suggest that a mass shooter identified as “transgender.” When that has happened, so-called “news” outlets have gone to astonishing lengths to shift focus or even bury the story altogether.
Response to the Perry High School Shooting
On the morning of Jan. 4, 17-year-old Dylan Butler opened fire inside Perry High School in Perry, Iowa, killing sixth-grade student Ahmir Jolliff. School principal Dan Marburger later died from wounds suffered while trying to protect students from the gunman.
On the day of the shooting, Butler’s TikTok account was deleted, but not before social media users captured screen shots.
Chaya Raichik, who operates “Libs of TikTok” — a prominent conservative account with 2.8 million followers on X — posted photos allegedly from Butler’s social media profile.
One of the photos featured a message spray-painted in red: “LOVE YOUR TRANS KIDS.”
Another image from the Iowa shooter’s now deleted tiktok account says “love your trans kids.” Watch this story disappear. pic.twitter.com/Nwp4YHMCPj
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) January 4, 2024
“This is the trans genderfluid [terrorist] who shot up a school in Iowa today. Trans extremists are a serious threat. The media will bury this,” Libs of TikTok posted that afternoon.
“I Meme Therefore I Am,” another conservative account with nearly 300,000 followers on X, echoed Raichik’s sentiment.
“Dylan Butler has been identified as the mass shooter at Perry High. It seems that Butler was [an] LGBTQ online activist and part of [the] community. I give a few hours for the story to vanish,” I Meme Therefore I Am posted.
One user expected the establishment media to demonize anyone who noticed that Butler might have embraced transgender ideology.
“The media will accuse Chaya of violence for acknowledging the epidemic of trans violence,” Paul A. Szypula wrote.
The media will accuse Chaya of violence for acknowledging the epidemic of trans violence
— Paul A. Szypula 🇺🇸 (@Bubblebathgirl) January 4, 2024
True to form, the establishment media did indeed try to discredit anyone who noticed Butler’s social media activity.
Newsweek, for instance, wrote that “some right-wing figures have taken to social media to say that Butler identified as transgender, although no solid evidence can prove the claim.”
“Far-right social media personalities and conservative provocateurs were quick to pounce on these revelations,” NBC News reported.
The point, of course, is twofold.
One, the establishment media tried to discredit (“no solid evidence”) reports of a mass shooter’s transgender sympathies or professed identity.
Two, the establishment media inferred that supposed ideologues (“far-right”) who noticed such evidence had dishonorable motives (“quick to pounce”).
Dylann Roof vs. Audrey Hale
To illustrate a pattern, let us recall how the establishment media responded to two other notorious mass shootings.
On June 17, 2015, Dylann Roof killed nine people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
On March 27, 2023, Audrey Hale killed six people — including three children, all aged 9 — at the Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, where she had once been a student. Hale identified as transgender. She called herself a man.
It bears noting, of course, that in both cases the targets and victims were Christians. And both shooters left behind manifestos that offered unsettling glimpses into their troubled minds.
In Roof’s case, the public learned very quickly that a disgusting racist and white nationalist had murdered those nine worshipers.
On June 20, 2015 — three days after the shooting — NPR described Roof’s online manifesto as a “diatribe against non-whites.”
“I chose Charleston because it is most historic city in my state, and at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to Whites in the country. We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me,” Roof wrote before the shooting.
The establishment media rightly reported the contents of Roof’s manifesto. We expect our journalists to do exactly that.
How different the behavior, though, in Hale’s case.
Not only did the establishment media take no interest in the contents of her manifesto, but in some cases it openly justified their suppression.
For instance, even the right-leaning Daily Mail ran an astonishing story with a disingenuous headline.
“Experts explain why you may never get to read Nashville shooter Audrey Hale’s screed, and why it may not be the blueprint for transgender terrorism that many expect,” the headline read.
Furthermore, the Mail told readers that Hale simply did not fit the established mass shooter profile.
“Hale’s writings do not appear to be akin to the lengthy manifestos left behind by other mass killers, typically right-wing, white nationalist, anti-immigrant types, such as Buffalo supermarket shooter Payton Gendron.”
If that were the case, then why did authorities suppress her writings? Why did it take seven months for those writings to leak to the public?
When they finally did become public, we learned that Hale had expressed, among other things, a desire to kill white children.
The establishment media’s eagerness to cover up Hale’s motives reflected its early coverage of the shooting itself.
“Former Christian school student kills 3 children, 3 staff in Nashville shooting,” Reuters posted on March 28.
The “news” organization described Hale as a “former Christian school student” so as to deflect attention from the fact that she thought she was a man — as if that part of her identity had no relevance.
Instead, Reuters chose a deceptive headline that subtly and despicably connected the shooter to Christianity.
How to Characterize a Female Murderer
Hale’s professed transgender identity created a conundrum for the establishment media. And the manner in which it resolved that conundrum spoke volumes.
“A police spokesperson told ABC News that Hale was assigned female at birth and pointed to a social media account linked to Hale that included use of the pronouns he/him,” ABC News reported two days after the shooting.
The same ABC story, however, used female pronouns and referred to Hale as Audrey instead of by her preferred name, Aiden.
On March 28 — the day after the shooting — Quin Hillyer of the Washington Examiner noted the curious trend.
“In the case of the Nashville shooter … the media made much, in the first few hours, of the fact she was a woman,” Hillyer wrote.
When it turned out that Hale had identified as a man, “the [Associated Press] still, … a full 27 hours after the murders, was referring to her by her given female name, not by her preferred name” — a violation of the AP’s own style guide.
As one might expect, the usual suspects complained.
“Gender identity advocates accused mainstream news outlets who scrambled to cover the story of ‘misgendering’ and ‘deadnaming’ Hale by not referring to her as a man or as a transman,” the U.K.’s TalkTV reported.
So, as Hillyer noted, the establishment media chose to ignore the matter altogether.
“CBS Mornings … spent more than 10 minutes opening its show Tuesday with reports about Nashville. Not a single time did anybody make a single reference to the killer’s transgender status.”
In other words, the establishment media preferred to lay responsibility for the mass shooting on a woman than to identify the shooter as transgender.
Few insights could better illustrate the fundamentally anti-female doctrines at the core of transgender ideology.
Likewise, few facts provide stronger evidence of the establishment media’s maniacal quest to promote transgenderism and protect it from negative associations at all costs.
Those costs have always included the truth about mass shootings.
