Media outlets like Reuters and the Associated Press are often blatantly false. However, some professionals, including Jon Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, point out that debunking propaganda doesn’t always reverse the damage it might have caused. Lewis claims that while debunking can help establish a scientific record and alleviate untrue or misleading information among the general public, it does little to stop misinformation from being spread in virtual communities that share its views. This is especially true in extreme right-leaning areas, where there is a high level of internet hostility.
“You can’t fact-check your way out of a crime,” Lewis says. “And we have repeatedly witnessed that. You have a traditional news organization with excellent fact-checking, monitoring, reliability, and other important factors. But by the time the fact-checking article is published two weeks later, you have already moved on. The church or the synagogue, or the university has now received a bomb threat.”
Some extremism professionals use the term “stochastic terrorism” to refer to this particular type of anti-trans campaign in response to these repeated assertions made by the far right.
According to Ophir, Lewis, and other experts, the anti-trans misconceptions about mass shootings actually serve two purposes, advancing liberal agendas, particularly in a crucial election year when transgender rights are a hot-button issue. This scapegoating gives far-right numbers more ammunition in their fight against the very presence of transgender people, as well as allowing them to deflect condemnation from gun control activists while avoiding the far right’s individual culpability in extraordinary acts of gun violence.
In a number of mass shootings — including those in El Paso, Texas, Buffalo, New York, Charleston, South Carolina, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania — perpetrators have posted online or made claims that echo sexist, anti-Semitic, and racist attitudes generally espoused by the far right. Carriker has frequently stated online that he supports Donald Trump in the case of the Philadelphia shooting. Right-wing activists seldom, if ever, acknowledge that these mass shooters share some of the same worldviews they espouse.
“If you persuade conservatives that LGBTQ+ people are inherently flawed, that they are aggressive, that they are a threat to society, then any legislation against them will be justified,” Ophir says. “And you don’t have to stop at policy. Every person who acts violently against them may have a justification.”
Drennen claims that this language is part of a decades-old traditional effort to remove gay and trans people from public life, whether through legislation or violent terrorism, despite the fact that it differs from other anti-trans arguments, such as those opposing gender-affirming care or trans inclusion in sports. There’s a throughline, Drennen says, from liberal society warrior Anita Bryant’s “Save Our Children” campaign in the 1970s to what we are seeing regurgitated by the right now.
“Throughout this whole current anti-trans hysteria, there’s been the gradual raising of the stakes,” Drennen says.
“First, transgender people are a threat to your daughter’s ability to win a college scholarship. And then, it’s that trans people are threatening your child by trying to make them trans,” Drennen continues. “And then they go with ‘trans people are a danger to you wherever you go,’ after failing to make the impact they want.”
