As Nashville families grapple with the loss of their friends and young children, the media have managed to make the murderer a martyr.
The perpetrator responsible for the school shooting in Nashville last week apparently identified as a man despite being a woman, and this feature of identity has earned her victim status — even though she executed six people in a premeditated attack. The radical left and corporate media’s attempt to frame the attack as anything other than evil reveals that identity politics now establishes the ultimate standard by which an individual’s behavior is judged.
Trans Lobby Claims Victimhood
In the aftermath of the atrocity, some on the left have portrayed the killer, and trans-identifying Americans, as victims. “Our hearts go out to the trans community, as they are under attack right now,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at a briefing Thursday, three days after the attack. Media outlets, too, have opted for the jarring narrative that shifts blame from the transgender-identifying murderer to external institutions and influences that, it’s implied, might excuse a mass shooting.
This pivot from murderer to martyr reflects a deliberate strategy the transgender movement has long employed. Instead of condemning a grotesque act of violence, the trans lobby and its mouthpieces are using the deaths of children as a platform to elevate their own victimhood, feigning immunity from blame or culpability.
Identity politics requires Americans to give a pass to members of a group according to their rank on the victim totem pole. It requires others to affirm the absurd, including the denial of the biological reality of sex differences. And it outlaws criticism of the group’s preferred policies, including the butchering and dismembering of healthy body parts and the promotion of regular drug injections targeted at children.
The problem goes well beyond the hypocritical treatment of those identifying as transgender, given their incessant calls for violence against those who refuse to pander to their radical ideology.
The Left’s Rhetoric Encourages Violence
Leftists have also taken the opportunity to redefine the meaning of violence. They push the idea that a person’s thoughts about someone can pose an existential threat to his life, and the media have been active accomplices in amplifying the trans lobby’s fever dream that legislation barring child mutilation amounts to genocide.
This incendiary rhetoric is designed to convince vulnerable people, some of whom are mentally ill, that they are at risk of extermination. Unwelcome opinions, faiths, and ideas are considered violence against someone. In the minds of people who buy into such twisted logic, this helps to excuse why a transgender-identifying psychopath, who felt invalidated or offended by traditional religious values, shot up a school.
Examples of extreme rhetoric are not hard to find. A letter from trans activists on Twitter following the event proclaimed “hate has consequences,” referencing Tennessee’s recent law protecting minors from mutilative transgender surgeries.
“F-ck this. Oppressed minorities strike back, and if you don’t want it to happen, stop oppressing them. People with nothing left to lose will sometimes not kts [kill themselves], but instead become martyrs. See: all of history. I won’t pretend like this wasn’t caused by the recent legislation in TN,” one activist posted on Twitter.
Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs’ press secretary came under fire when she tweeted a meme of a woman holding a gun with the caption “Us when we see transphobes” hours after the shooting took place, insinuating violence against those who disagree with trans ideology.
The past week of protests and violence was planned to end with a “Trans Day of Vengeance” in Washington D.C. on Saturday. It was announced Friday that the demonstration had been called off — not because such an event only encourages further division and incites ancillary terror, but rather because the trans activists claimed victimhood once again. Organizers of the event literally threatening “vengeance” claimed it was canceled due to “credible threats” of violence against them.
They are always the victims, never the problem.
