Given its anti-LGBT agenda, WorldNetDaily unsurprisingly obsessed over the alleged transgender identity of the perpetrator of a mass shooting at a Catholic church. Joe Kovacs pushed that agenda again in an Aug. 31 article:
A top White House official went to war with CNN on Sunday as a network anchor used deceptive data to downplay deadly attacks against Christians by transgenders.
Sebastian Gorka, the White House senior director for Counterterrorism, appeared on “State of the Union” with guest host Brianna Keilar, as the pair discussed Wednesday’s mass-casualty shooting at the Annunciation Catholic Church and School in Minneapolis that killed two children and wounded 17 others.
The perpetrator, Robert Westman, a transgender who had changed his name to Robin Westman, killed himself at the conclusion of the horror.
Keilar asked Gorka: “When you are looking at the U.S. Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center looking 172 mass attacks in the U.S. between 2016 and 2020. 96% of the attackers were non-trans men.
“So I know you’re focusing on the shooter being trans, uh, the shooter was trans, and that is certainly of note. But are you missing the bigger picture here when you zero in on that instead of more broadly these school shooters as an epidemic and you perhaps miss through line that connects them all?”
Gorka responded: “Well, no, because your facts obfuscate two things: You are using data based on the predominant gun violence, which is gang-on-gang violence with zero ideological content.
[…]Keilar, in an attempt to “narrow it down,” told Gorka, “By CNN’s count, when you look at 32 school shootings since 2020 in which you have four or more people who have been killed … only three of 32 of those shootings were committed by transgender shooters.”
Gorka blasted back: “Forgive me if I don’t go with CNN stats. OK? CNN has proven itself to be wholly inaccurate in all kinds of things for the last 10 years, uh, perpetrators of the Russia Russia hoax and that we didn’t have an open border. So please forgive me if I don’t take your stats for granted.”
“It’s simple math,” stressed Keilar.
“No it’s not. It’s distortions,” Gorka said. “You are distorting the facts. Let me be clear. In just a couple of years, we have seen SEVEN mass shootings involving people of transgender nature or who were confused in their gender, SEVEN in just the last couple of years. That is inordinately high. … I’m gonna stick with the facts and not CNN’s pseudo-facts.”
But it seems Gorka is the one peddling “pseudo-facts.” FactCheck.org reports:
The Gun Violence Archive, an independent organization that tracks gun-related violence in the U.S., defines mass shootings as incidents in which there are “a minimum of four victims shot, either injured or killed, not including any shooter who may also have been killed or injured in the incident.” Under this standard, there were 5,748 mass shootings between Jan. 1, 2013, and Sept. 15, 2025, according to the GVA. “OF THAT NUMBER OF INCIDENTS, there have been FIVE CONFIRMED Transgender shooters,” Mark Bryant, the GVA’s founding executive director, told us in an email.
The five mass shootings in the GVA’s database with a transgender shooting suspect are the August shooting in Minneapolis, the March 2023 shooting at a school in Nashville, the November 2022 shooting at a gay bar in Colorado Springs, Colorado, the May 2019 shooting at a school in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, and the September 2018 shooting at a warehouse in Aberdeen, Maryland. However, Anderson Lee Aldrich, the convicted shooter in Colorado Springs, identified as nonbinary, according to Aldrich’s lawyer. A transgender individual identifies with a gender that does not match their sex assigned at birth, while a nonbinary individual identifies as neither exclusively male nor female. While many nonbinary individuals identify as transgender, not all do, the Human Rights Campaign says.
Gorka included those same five shootings on his list and added shootings in Perry, Iowa, and Philadelphia. But the gender identity of the alleged Jan. 4, 2024, Perry shooter, Dylan Butler, hasn’t been established, and local law enforcement officials said Kimbrady Carriker, who was charged with the July 3, 2023, mass shooting in Philadelphia, is not transgender, as some falsely claimed.
Kovacs is not going to tell you this, of course — Gorka’s lies benefit WND’s anti-LGBT agenda, and Kovacs won’t let inconvenient facts get in the way of that agenda.