The biggest development coming out of Charlie Kirk’s murder last week is that the gun isn’t to blame. This time, “social media” did it.

On Sunday, The New York Times published an idiotic op-ed to that effect by Nathan Taylor Pemberton, who “writes about extremism and American politics,” and whose last article for The Nation magazine was presciently titled: “Why the Right Fantasizes About Death and Destruction.” So we know he’s a fair broker.

Long after it had been established that Kirk’s shooter, Tyler Robinson, was in a romantic relationship with a transgender, Pemberton proclaimed: “The only thing that can be said conclusively about Mr. Robinson, at this moment, is that he was a chronically online, white American male.”

Really? Was that the only thing that stuck out about the accused shooter?

If Pemberton’s right, we can narrow down future assassins to the 99% of the population that’s online — with the exception of people over 65, only a paltry 90% of whom are online, according to Pew Research.

I don’t know how the FBI’s profiling unit missed this.

On further thought, the usefulness of “chronically online” as a red flag is severely hampered by the fact that it encompasses the entire f-ing population. Most Americans spend more than 10 hours a day online, according to a recent survey. The only less helpful characterization would have been “mammal.”

Is there something — anything else — that stands out about a murderer who was living with his transgender partner?

Transgenders are, at most, 1% of the population. That’s about the same as the percentage of Americans who are deaf, missing a limb, have eyes of two different colors or support Stacey Abrams for any elected office.

Here are some of the most notorious recent public murders. Would it be at all odd if each of these had been committed by a deaf person?

In 2018, transgender Snochia Moseley, one year into her pre-surgery hormone therapy, shot and killed four people at a pharmaceuticals distribution center in Aberdeen, Maryland.

In 2019, transgender Maya McKinney, born female, but who “identified” as male (“Alec” McKinney), shot nine students, killing one, at a STEM high school in Denver, Colorado, allegedly because they’d mocked her identity.

In 2022, nonbinary (“they/them”) Anderson Lee Aldrich opened fire at a gay night club in Colorado Springs, Colorado, killing five. Liberals deny that Aldrich is really nonbinary – but you’re a Nazi if you deny that Joe Biden’s assistant secretary for health “Rachel Levine” (born Richard Levine) is really a woman.

In 2023, transgender Audrey Elizabeth Hale, who went by “Aiden” and “he/him” and was “miserable being raised a girl,” shot up a Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee, killing six, including three children.

In 2024, transgender Genesse Ivonne Moreno fired around 30 rounds from an AK-47 into a Houston, Texas, megachurch before being taken out by a couple of off-duty law enforcement officers.

Just last month, transgender Robin Westman, who changed his name from Robert because, as court documents put it, he “identified as female and wants her name to reflect that identification,” fired dozens of rounds from a rifle at the children attending Mass at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, Minnesota, injuring 21 and killing two, ages 8 and 10.

Taking into account their percentage of the population, economist John Lott determined that, between 2018 and 2024, transgenders committed a wildly disproportionate number of the mass public shootings — 6.8 times their share of the population.

But it would be difficult to discern any pattern to these crimes from listening to the American media. As far as they’re concerned, trans shooters might as well have been Muslims.

The media have only three responses to any heinous murder committed by a transgender, nonbinary or transgender-linked shooter:

1) Bury the story;

2) Doggedly refuse to believe the transgender’s chosen identity — something that gets you labeled a fascist in any other context;

3) Sneer at right-wingers for commenting, Say, isn’t the transgender community producing a lot of homicidal lunatics?

For example, there’s this classic New York Times headline: “Conservatives Use Minneapolis Shooting in Anti-Transgender Campaigns.”

One transgender shooting that got gobs of media attention was the attack on the Houston megachurch.

AP’s “fact check” was typical:

“CLAIM: The shooter who carried out an attack injuring two people at a Texas megachurch on Sunday has been identified as transgender.

"AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. Houston police said on Monday that its investigation has thus far determined that the shooter, Genesse Ivonne Moreno, identified as female …”

Hmmm. On the other hand, the attorney who represented her in divorce proceedings from 2021 to 2022 said that, at the time, she was going by the name “Jeffrey Moreno Carranza,” and even the police commander who claimed she only identified as female admitted she went by several aliases — “including Jeffrey Escalante.”

Apparently, in the case of a trans shooter, “deadnaming” is not white supremacist, it’s mandatory.

Why this burning animosity toward “social media”? One big reason is that liberals lose in any competitive environment, such as dating apps, Little League baseball and the internet. Pemberton can’t even figure out how it works, falsely claiming that a relative of Robinson’s described him as “full of hate,” when it was Robinson who described Kirk as “full of hate.” See, the internet can prevent stupid mistakes like that.

Without the internet, we’d be trapped in a media bubble, forced to rely on geniuses like Pemberton who informed Times readers that Robinson “most likely committed” Kirk’s murder as “an ironic gesture”; that Kirk “used his platform to coarsen our political discourse”; and that he was “a showman who attracted disaffected young Americans into the conservative movement with fantasies of white replacement or racial grievance.”

Obviously, ideas like this can only survive in a sensory deprivation chamber, stripped of dissenting voices – no conservative guests, no op-eds by Sen. Tom Cotton, no conservative college speakers, no unapproved economists who’ve calculated the transgenders per capita rate of mass shootings.

First, they came for our guns, now our computers. Let’s just hope none of the transgenders drove cars to the crime scene.

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