FOX'S JESSE WATTERS GOES RADIO RWANDA ON TRANS PEOPLE (updated)

Two children died and 17 victims were wounded in a shooting in Minneapolis yesterday. The 23-year-old shooter, Robin Westman, who later committed suicide, was trans:

As a 17-year-old, she filed a court document to change her first name, to Robin from Robert. It was also signed by her mother. The document noted that Ms. Westman “identified as female and wants her name to reflect that identification.”

On social media, some conservative activists have seized on the shooter’s gender identity to broadly portray transgender people as violent or mentally ill.

That's true.

The right-wing political commentator Matt Walsh suggested [on X that] Wednesday’s shooting was the result of growing anger within the trans community that their “agenda is losing.”

“They’re losing on every playing field, in every area of American life. We’ve defeated them politically. We’ve defeated them culturally,” he said. “But understand this: now is precisely the moment when trans militants are the MOST dangerous. They’ve lost. The game is over. Now they’re more desperate than ever. More full of hatred and anger than ever. They’re going down, but they’ll take as many sane, normal people with them as they can. It’s going to get worse from here. Be on your guard.”

“Today’s evil church school shooter was a trans who was likely groomed and transitioned as a teenager,” said Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. “Congress MUST PASS my bill ‘Protecting Children’s Innocence Act’ to make it a FELONY to perform sex change surgeries and all forms of medications on minors!”

Bo Loudon, who has been described as Barron Trump’s best friend, was among those who linked the entirety of the trans community to Westman’s horrific acts.

America does NOT have a "gun problem."

America HAS a transgender problem.

Transgenderism needs to be labeled as a MENTAL ILLNESS!

— Bo Loudon (@BoLoudon) August 27, 2025

Breitbart's top editor agrees, and has some draconian policy proposals:

On Wednesday’s “Alex Marlow Show,” host and Breitbart Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow discussed the shooting in Minneapolis and mass shootings.

Marlow stated, “We need to take guns, probably from the trans, provided that there is a legit process.... Open up the asylums, start diagnosing the trans stuff as a mental disorder as fast as humanly possible.”

The right has been blaming trans people for America's epidemic of mass shooting for a while now. Reuters published a fact-check in 2023 debunking this notion:

A list of perpetrators in four shootings in the U.S. who identified as transgender or non-binary represent the minority of suspects in mass shootings, but users online are sharing the list without this context. Data collection on mass shootings varies by methodology, but experts told Reuters data shows the majority of mass shootings are carried out by cisgender men....

One tweet said: “The Colorado Springs shooter identified as non binary. The Denver shooter identified as trans. The Aberdeen shooter identified as trans. The Nashville shooter identified as trans. One thing is VERY clear: the modern trans movement is radicalizing activists into terrorists” (here). Another example can be seen (here). Other posts with similar language can be seen (here).

Reuters notes that several high-profile mass shooters have, in fact, said they were trans or non-binary. However:

The Gun Violence Archive, which began collecting data on gun violence in the U.S. in 2013 (here), (here), recorded more than 4,400 mass shootings in the last decade, Executive Director Mark Bryant told Reuters via email. Its definition of mass shooting is four or more people shot resulting in injury or death (excluding the perpetrator).

Of those, “the number of known suspects in mass shootings which are trans is under 10 for the last decade,” which translated to “1:880 [or 0.11%] of the 4,400 shootings” they recorded, he said.

Further, the U.S. Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center (NTAC), which studies all forms of targeted violence including mass casualty attacks, published a report with data from 2016 to 2020 (here).

The report examined 173 attacks in the U.S. that “that resulted in harm to three or more individuals in public locations,” Justine Whelan, press secretary for the U.S. Secret Service, told Reuters via email, and “three attackers (2%) were transgender, assigned female at birth, but were known to identify as male at the time of their attacks.”

But the right is coming for trans people the way it has already come for immigrants. I think we should be ready for the possibility that there'll be efforts to ban transitioning altogether, even for adults, and that there'll be involuntary incarceration of trans people, at least in red states. And as noted above, Breitbart's Alex Marlow makes clear that trans people are among the few groups the right would be happy to disarm. To conservatives, gun ownership is the most fundamental right citizens have, so Marlow is essentially saying that trans people can't be citizens.

But the most chilling response to the Minneapolis shooting came from the man with the highest-rated prime-time show on cable, Fox's Jesse Watters. You might still think of Watters as a lightweight, but he's fully capable of going fascist with the menace of the man he replaced in Fox's 8:00 P.M. slot, Tucker Carlson. Just watch this:

VERY IMPORTANT: Everybody stop what you’re doing and watch this.

Jesse Watters just delivered his most important and powerful monologue ever.

He blew the lid off the trans violence epidemic, the media’s cover-up, and how Democratic leaders created it:

"The media is bad at… pic.twitter.com/rblfklypKQ

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) August 28, 2025

Here's some of what Watters says:

So a suicidal transgender who hates Trump, Christians, and Jews shoots up kids at a Catholic school, and the media wants to take away your handgun. So how are we supposed to protect ourselves from trans shooters?

The media is bad at pattern recognition. We aren't. Just two years ago, another trans twenty-something walked into a Christian school in Nashville with a rifle and shot three kids and three adults. They buried the manifesto and locked down the case.

We've seen trans shootings in Colorado and in Maryland. They even shot up an ICE facility in Texas. And it seems like half of Antifa is trans. A couple of they/thems just got popped for firebombing Teslas....

I don't hate anyone who thinks they're trans. I feel sorry for them. But statistically, the trans population has been prone to violence. That's not villainizing, that's reality. And if you can't recognize reality, you're in danger....

Society shouldn't be trying to produce more trans kids. We shouldn't be encouraging an emotional disorder....

But the left's weaponizing trans kids and turning them into culture warriors, and they've been turned loose against the church, schools, and Trump. You see it, I see it. The trans clan has a militant wing, and it's out for blood.

All this is intercut with clips of politicians such as Minnesota governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey talking about respect and empathy. The message is clear: Trans people and the evil cities and states that try to make them feel welcome are killing Real Americans.

Watters pays condescending lip service to the idea that adult Americans are free to be trans. ("A grown man can wear a dress if he wants to do that in America. He has that right. We're a pretty darn tolerant society.") But he ignores the fact that, at 23, Robin Westham was an adult choosing to continue identifying as a woman.

Watters is stirring up hate, and if it's not exactly done the way Hutus in the early 1990s stirred up hate against Tutsis on Radio Rwanda and other stations, it's a lot closer than mainstream American media should ever get.

But the non-Republican press will ignore this hate speech, the same way it spent the post-Reagan era ignoring the hatemongering of right-wing talk radio, which radicalized millions of Americans and helped build the foundations of the Tea Party and then MAGA.

They're coming for trans people. Pastor Niemoller can probably tell you what will happen after that.

*****

UPDATE: The eliminationist rhetoric in the dialogue below includes "respectable" Chris Rufo. The tweet immediately below is from an influencer who's followed on X by, among others, Donald Trump Jr., Dan Scavino, Sebastian Gorka, Rudy Giuliani, and Kellyanne Conway.

They're openly calling to lock up every trans person by force. We need every ally to speak out forcefully against this because trans folks cannot do this on our own.

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— Alejandra Caraballo (@esqueer.net) August 28, 2025 at 1:05 PM