The Scapegoat!

I’ve been kicking this later and later as other articles came up, we are being used as a whipping boy for all the ills in society.

U.S. News and World Report, reported that there were 351 school shootings last year!

Back in the beginning of the month a gunman opened fired in a school and reports say that he was a gay or trans student who was bullied in school.

Right-wing influencers seem happy that Iowa school shooter might be LGBTQ+
Without confirmation about his gender identity or sexual orientation, anti-LGBTQ+ extremists focused on pushing the false notion that transgender and nonbinary people are often mass shooters — they aren't.
The Advocate
By Christopher Wiggins
January 04 2024

Following a tragic Thursday morning Iowa shooting at Perry High School in the town of Perry, where one child was killed, multiple people were seriously injured, and the suspected shooter died of a presumed self-inflicted wound, right-wing extremists and influencers have centered on the shooter’s speculated LGBTQ+ identity based on a Pride flag emoji on a since- disabled TikTok profile.

Late Thursday afternoon, Mitch Mortvedt, assistant director of the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation, provided updates on the alleged shooter and the situation.

The Perry Police Department responded to the active shooter event, and upon arrival, they found students and faculty either sheltering in place or fleeing the school, Mortvedt reported. Inside, multiple victims with gunshot wounds were discovered. The shooter, identified as 17-year-old Dylan Butler, a student at Perry High School, was found with what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Mortvedt mentioned that Butler was armed with a shotgun and a handgun and had made several social media posts around the time of the shooting.

In another Advocate article,

After Iowa shooting, Candace Owens says LGBTQ+ community is ‘sexual plague on our society’
The far-right media personality falsely associated the LGBTQ+ community, particularly transgender and nonbinary individuals, with a rise in violent incidents.
By Christopher Wiggins
January 05 2024

In the wake of a recent school shooting in Perry, Iowa, right-wing influencer Candace Owens has sparked controversy with her comments linking the LGBTQ+ community, particularly transgender and nonbinary individuals, to acts of violence.

Owens, the founder of BLEXIT and a prominent conservative voice, took to social media platform X, formerly Twitter, to voice her unfounded claims that gender-affirming healthcare is contributing to a rise in mass shootings.

“I am not interested in engaging in another discussion about a school shooter that does not begin and end with discussing big Pharma and its clinical promotion of insanity,” Owens wrote. “We are mass drugging children and conducting psychiatric experiments on them in classrooms across America.”

She continued with a second post, “Gender dysphoria is a mental disorder, and the entire LGBTQ movement brought with it a sexual plague on our society.”

NBC News says this about the shootings,

Musk and far-right figures seize on Iowa shooter’s possible LGBTQ identity
A 17-year-old student at Perry High School in Iowa fatally shot a sixth grader and wounded five others on Thursday before apparently killing himself, officials said.
By Matt Lavietes
January 5, 2024

As authorities and journalists scrambled to uncover information about the shooter who opened fire at an Iowa school on Thursday, far-right figures zeroed in on the likelihood that the assailant was LGBTQ and once again suggested that queer people are more likely to pose a danger to others.

Early Thursday morning, a 17-year-old student at Perry High School, in the Des Moines suburb of Perry, fatally shot a sixth grader and wounded five others before apparently killing himself, officials said. Authorities identified the shooter as Dylan Butler and said he acted alone. They have not commented publicly about his sexuality or gender identity.

[…]

Far-right social media personalities and conservative provocateurs were quick to pounce on these revelations.

“This is the trans genderfluid te*ror*st who shot up a school in Iowa today,” the account Libs of TikTok posted that same day on X, where it has over 2.7 million followers. “Trans extremists are a serious threat. The media will bury this.”

Funny how they don’t say anything about the 351 other school shooting being straight? AP News writes about mass killings in the U.S.,

The number of U.S. mass killings linked to extremism over the past decade was at least three times higher than the total from any other 10-year period since the 1970s, according to a report by the Anti-Defamation League.

Not one peep about this from the conservatives. Why haven’t they said anything about this? Could it be because most of their listeners are part of the radical base?

And look who else is on this anti-LGBTQ+ band wagon, the Advocate article goes on to say…

Chaya Raichik, known for running the anti-LGBTQ+ Libs of TikTok social media accounts, began posting hours before the shooter was identified, alleging him to be gender fluid, based upon a hashtag allegedly included in the person’s social media footprint. She later posted a meme inaccurately linking several mass shooters to the LGBTQ+ community. Elon Musk amplified this idea on the platform X, formerly Twitter.

Musk is going far right, the more that I hear about him the more I think that he is a MAGA Republican.

In a third Advocate article about the shooting…

No, transgender and nonbinary people are not frequently mass shooters
In the wake of a tragic mass shooting in Iowa, conservatives and far-right extremists have falsely peddled the claim that the LGBTQ+ community is dangerous, but data refutes that claim.
By Christopher Wiggins
January 05 2024

A shooting at an Iowa school just days after the start of 2024 that left a sixth-grade child dead, four other students, and an administrator injured has ignited discussions on mass shootings and the gender identity of perpetrators of this type of violence. Even before police identified the shooter, far-right influencers online began pushing a narrative that the 17-year-old Perry High School student was a member of the LGBTQ+ community based on a Pride flag on one social media profile and a reference to genderfluid in a post. Others, including Elon Musk, amplified the false notion that transgender and nonbinary people pose a significant risk to the population regarding mass shootings—they don’t.

[…]

According to Clymer [Charlotte Clymer, a prominent trans writer and activist], if the Iowa shooter were transgender, this would represent an exceedingly small proportion of mass shooters; out of 4,684 mass shootings documented by the Gun Violence Archive since 2014, at most six involved transgender individuals. This represents about 0.128 percent of all mass shooters, in stark contrast to the 99.9 percent of mass shootings carried out by non-trans individuals, Clymer noted.

[…]

Further insights come from Reuters Fact Check, which clarifies that the majority of mass shooters in the U.S. are cisgender men. This investigation also debunks certain viral claims on social media, pointing out that the few cases often cited (in Nashville, Colorado Springs, Denver, and Aberdeen) do not represent the more significant trend.

The truth never stopped the right-wing from lying to stir up animosity against the LGBTQ+ community and us in particular. Anything that gets their base riled up and out to vote and it would seem to also take violent actions against us according to the data in the AP News article.