In 2023, the Media Research Center reacted to the gun massacre at a private school in Nashville by ignoring the gun part and obsessing over the shooter’s transgender identity. That scenario unsurprisingly played out again in the wake of a gun massacre aimed at Catholic school students in Minnesota. Jorge Bonilla spent an Aug. 28 post raging that others were not obsessed with the shooter’s transgender identity as he was:
In what appears to be a perverse “don’t say transgender challenge”, the legacy newscasts went out of their way to mention that the coward who entered into the Annunciation Catholic Church and opened fire on an ongoing Mass was in fact a transgender individual. The networks were equally circumspect about divulging the shooter’s motives.
The tone was set early on by ABC’s Aaron Katersky, who during live coverage almost made it seem like the shooter was a Trump supporter:
[…]If Robert [Westman] changed his name to Robin, what does that mean? Why the intentional effort to deemphasize the shooter? The same applies for Thomas’s descriptions of things depicted in the manifesto. The video manifesto clearly depicts a magazine with “Kill Donald Trump” scrawled on it. Why qualify that with “Kristi Noem said”, as if it were hearsay?
Why the effort by the MRC to intentionally freak out over the shooter’s sexuality? Bonilla refused to explain.
Curtis Houck worked his obsessive hatred of Oliver Darcy into the mix:
Conservative media Benedict Arnold and former CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy threw a weapons-grade hissy fit Wednesday night at his newsletter site Status over YouTube TV striking a carriage agreement with our friends at One America News Network (OANN), declaring it a “deal with the devil” and incomprehensible they’d “breath[e] life into a network that has trafficked in lies and conspiracies for years.”
Worse yet, Darcy determined the real villain in the coverage of the Minneapolis Catholic school shooting was conservative media and the victims are transgender people with the former “vilifying the vulnerable” and “weaponiz[ing]” the hateful transgender shooter “into an indictment of an entire community.”
Houck didn’t dispute OANN’s record of lies and conspiracies; instead, he sneered that Darcy was a “censorship tyrant” for calling those lies and conspiracies out, going on to further claim he “threw a childish fit” that “Google cav[ed]” because “Donald Trump is back in the White House” and “has conditioned corporate America to bend the knee,” so Google did this as “a political olive branch to the autocratic wannabe” — which Houck also didn’t dispute. And at no point did Houck counter Darcy’s claim that right-wing media was vilifying the entire transgender community over the shooting.
Alex Christy spent a post whining that a therapist asked that transgender people be shown respect while referencing the shooting:
It was likely just a coincidence, but on Thursday, one day after a transgender individual shot up a Catholic school in Minnesota and brought questions of mental illness to the front pages of our national conversation, Washington Post therapist and advice columnist Sahak Kaur Kohli told a distraught mother to stop referring to her daughter as her daughter because she identifies as a he, even though the daughter clearly has some issues.
Christy did not explain why he thinks all transgender people should be demonized because of the shooting. He also spent a post defending guns post-massacre (and, of course, bashing transgender people):
Former White House Press Secretary-turned MSNBC host Jen Psaki attacked President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and others on Wednesday’s The Briefing for offering “little more to offer than thoughts and prayers” after the Minneapolis shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church that left two children dead during a school Mass that also saw 17 individuals wounded. According to Psaki, the problem isn’t that the shooter was transgender, or anti-Trump, or anti-Semitic, but guns, which also led her to paint a false picture of Minnesota’s gun laws and gun violence in the U.S. as a whole.
[…]Psaki isn’t wrong that there are transgender people all over the world, but American liberals are increasingly outliers in how they approach the issue of giving hormones to minors. Likewise, anti-Semitism is a cancer seen elsewhere, but that doesn’t mean we should just put it to the side in order to only talk about guns.
But that is what Psaki wanted to do, “But this is the only country where shootings like this, this one happen this often. The United States not only has the highest rate of gun violence of any country in the world, it’s become a leading cause of death for young people and teenagers in this country. That should make everybody angry.”
The U.S. does not have the highest rate of gun violence in the world. In 2023, the U.S. was sixth, but that could be due to insufficient data from other countries. In 2022 it was 19th.
Bonilla returned to whine that someone had an opinion on the massacre:
As predictable as the Sun rising in the East, death, and taxes: CBS’s John Dickerson delivering an insufferable editorial to close out the day’s broadcast of CBS Evening News Plus. Last night was no different, after a transgender individual shot up a Catholic church during a back-to-school Mass, killing two children and injuring many others.
[…]Given that the shooting occurred inside a church, it is not unexpected that Dickerson would open with a Bible verse. Scriptural citation is intended to lend a veneer of gravitas and spirituality to everything that follows thereafter. Unfortunately, what followed was the kind of boilerplate gun control do-somethingism we get fed after each mass shooting.
Before working school shooter drills into his prose, Dickerson condemned “the American communion of violence”, and vaguely calls for action “whether in laws, whether in mental health care, or in personal responsibility.” But Dickerson never addresses the underlying cause of THIS shooting, and an increasing rash of recent others. If there is an “American communion of violence”, there must be a willingness to address its officiants in a manner not yet seen. That much is evident by the legacy news’ refusal to even address the shooter as transgender. To put a finer point: a deranged, self-hating transgender who hated minorities, Donald Trump, saw himself as a demon, and was obsessed with other mass shooters.
Dickerson’s plea for action, while florid, falls flat. And insofar as it fails to address what happened in Minneapolis, it is an appearance of piety devoid of substance. These false pieties were also addressed in the Gospel of St. Matthew (23:27) from whence Dickerson began his sermon:
Houck served up another post making sure to identify the shooter as a “transgender psychopath”:
On Wednesday, our Jorge Bonilla examined what the flagship network evening newscasts had to offer vis-à-vis the Minneapolis Catholic school shooting and found zero appetite to consider the transgender shooter’s motive was a hatred of Christianity and God Himself. Sadly, their lead Thursday morning shows felt the same way, sticking to the dishonest narrative the shooter’s scribbles on guns left no clue as to why Annunciation Catholic Church was the target.
ABC chief business and economics correspondent Rebecca Jarvis set the table as she anchored Good Morning America’s coverage from her native Minnesota, stating in a report summarizing the last 24 hours that “[a]uthorities say the shooter, identified as 23-year-old Robin Westman, born Robert Westman” and “had ties with the church” as both a student and mother having “worked there as recently as 2021.”
But the real discussion of investigating the why for the transgender psychopath fell to chief Justice correspondent Pierre Thomas, who chose to emphasize the thug possessed a “darkness,” was “obsessed with violence,” and “want[ed] to kill people generally”:
Houck did not explain why he is seeking to portray transgenderism as a motive when he has no evidence to back that up. He went on to grouse in one more post:
In the midst of a tough reelection fight and overseeing a city grappling with the mass shooting at Annunciation Catholic School, Minneapolis Democrat [sic] Mayor Jacob Frey made the rounds Thursday morning on national TV news and, while he was largely left to ramble on ABC (and spin utter falsehoods as seen on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, CBS Mornings made an effort to simply do their jobs and made Frey sweat.
Houck then cheered how CBS co-host Tony Dokoupil “drilled down on this namby pamby talk because “people are passionate about their right to own a gun and defend themselves” and many Americans believe a way to express ‘love’ for our children and loved ones is defending our household.” That’s quite a flip-flop from the days when Houck smeared Dokoupil as a “socialist” because he once did a segment about income inequality.
This was all on Aug. 28, the day after the massacre. There was more to come.