Trump Decides to Own the Shutdown

This was yesterday's headline by Daviud Dayen at the far-left American Prospect, and it promoted the legacy stereotype of Trump as narcissistic, impulsive, vindictive, and erratic:

In the past 24 hours, we’ve been treated to a combination of first-term and second-term Trump. On Monday, the president agreed to a meeting with House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to negotiate a government funding compromise. . .

But by Tuesday morning, Trump realized that his dealmaker persona doesn’t exist anymore, replaced with pure hatred and vengeance. He canceled the meeting in a rambling denunciation on Truth Social, dismissing the Democrats’ “unserious and ridiculous” demands while simply lying about those demands in unserious and ridiculous ways.

Hmm, how could someone like that be elected dogcatcher, much less win two presidential elections? The answer is that the conventional wisdom seriously underestimates the guy. Even MSNBC has a smarter take:

The Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu famously wrote, “He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight.”

Congressional Democrats would be wise to keep this maxim in mind. Under pressure from their loudest supporters to stand up to President Donald Trump, they are laying the groundwork to shut down the government at the end of this month. But while there are reasonable arguments in support of a shutdown, it’s a fight that Democrats would most likely lose, and they should do everything to avoid it.

This piece, from earlier in the week, simply takes the posiition that government shutdowns heretofore have been a Republican strategy, but it's never worked for them, and there's no reason to expect it will work any better for Democrats this time. But now it looks like circumstances have given Trump a new twist.

Dayen in the first link above accuses Trump of lying about the Democrat demands, but it simply isn't clear what they wanted. He says below that he reviewed the details, and I see no reason to doubt him: Instead, it looks like Jeffries and Schumer, both from New York and thus acutely aware of the Mamdani phenomenon, whereby tired machine Democrats are losing primaries to fresh parlor leftist faces, are being forced into hard left positions to look like they're standing up to Trump -- except this is exactly what Trunp wants them to do:

The White House has instructed U.S. federal agencies to brace for mass firings as a government shutdown looms next week. This directive originated from a memo by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

Unlike previous shutdowns, the Trump administration plans to go beyond temporary furloughs. Agencies have been told to target programs that are not legally mandated to continue, as outlined in the memo sent to media on Wednesday.

The memo emphasized that programs lacking mandatory appropriations will face significant impacts. Agencies must submit their staff reduction plans and notify employees accordingly.

Even the NeverTrump Wall Street Journal sees what's happening:

Democrats will give the Trump team exactly what it’s been wanting—a shutdown—in return for Democrats’ continuing to demand something they will never get. What a deal. Even Faust got some worldly pleasure in exchange for a soul. This is trading hellfire for brimstone.

. . . The true scope of this losing proposition came clear with a memo Mr. Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, issued Wednesday night, explaining how a shutdown will roll. Shutdowns usually mean furloughed federal employees, who suffer temporary inconvenience before resuming their jobs. Not this time.

The Vought memo orders agencies to identify all programs that depend on discretionary funding (which lapses next week) and don’t align with the president’s priorities. Employees who administer those disfavored programs or projects won’t be furloughed. They will be fired.

According to The Hill,

Cracks are starting to form in the Senate Democratic caucus over whether to hold the line against a seven-week clean government funding stopgap passed by the House, according to Democratic sources who say a threat by President Trump to lay off thousands of federal workers is changing the Democratic political calculus on a shutdown.

. . . Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), who plans to retire from the Senate at the end of 2026, has been “putting out feelers” to Republican senators about reaching some sort of deal or mutual understanding to avoid a government shutdown next week, according to a source familiar with her conversations with Senate colleagues.

Shaheen told Semafor in an interview Wednesday that she sees “a number of ways” to avoid a government shutdown “that should satisfy both sides” and opened the door to voting for the House-passed stopgap next week when Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) brings it back to the Senate floor.

I keep thinking back to the business-school analysis of Trump's negotiating style that I last referred to in March:

An analysis of Trump’s negotiation behavior reveals how he embodies each of these four roles. His first preference is to negotiate with those who have few or no options, giving him both immediate maximum leverage (controller) as well as the opportunity to draw a sharp contrast between the other party’s eagerness to negotiate and his magnanimity in doing so given his many purportedly superior options (performer). If his counterparts do have options, he uses threats to denigrate the value of these alternatives, thus presenting them with a structured choice: either accept his offer (which, as performer, he promotes with his typical bravado), or face his unpredictable ire (disrupter). Accepting Trump’s offer often puts the other parties in his debt, and he can be expected to threaten retribution if they do not reciprocate (disrupter).

It's time for legacy media to scrap the stereotype of Trump as narcissistic, boorish, impulsive, and vindictive.

"I Don't Think Biden Had A Clue About Anything."

🚨 BREAKING: President Trump says the Biden auto pen scandal has just gotten WORSE, says the Jan 6th Committee members are "GUILTY," pardons INVALID.

"Joe Biden didn't believe in open borders...He was never the brightest bulb in the ceiling 🤣"

"He didn't believe in all of this… pic.twitter.com/K1oiyuZCdz

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) September 18, 2025

Stories have kept trickling out over tbhe past week, including:

Usually, the years after a presidency are when the money pours in, but for Biden the financial future looks rather bleak.

. . . According to public records, he left office with a mortgage on his main home in Wilmington, Delaware of somewhere between $250,000 and $500,000, at an interest rate of 3.375 percent.

. . . Meanwhile, he has also been juggling a $250,000 home equity loan taken out on his holiday home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware in 2022, while he was in the White House.

. . . At age 82, Biden is too old for a new career and he has instead been working on a book, having signed a $10million deal with publisher Hachette.

However, that is dwarfed by the $60million Barack and Michelle Obama received for theirs.

The book will be entirely ghostwritten.

On top of his own obligations, he still seems burdened vy his family's parasitic lifestyle:

He confessed to people around him that he intends to pay off a personal debt of about $800,000, which includes loans for a house in Rehoboth Beach worth $2.7 million, as well as the costs of his son Hunter's legal problems. Biden also expressed a desire to help his daughter Ashley, who has filed for divorce, and to provide financial support to his grandchildren.

Back in June,

Hunter Biden owes the law firm that represented him in federal investigations, including his Delaware gun case, “substantially in excess of $50,000,” according to a lawsuit filed against the former first son on Monday.

“This is breach of contract action against Mr. Biden for unpaid legal fees,” reads the complaint against Hunter filed in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia by Winston & Strawn LLP.

. . . Abbe Lowell, Hunter’s attorney who has since left Winston & Strawn, notes that his “current hourly rate is $1,510” and that billing rates for other attorneys and legal assistants at the firm, who may work on his cases, range from $230 to $1,945 an hour.

The state of Biden's finances is just another indication of his mental decline while in office. In fact, there's nothing new about any of this, nor that there was a coordinated effort to cover things up. Trump's estimate that Biden didn't have "a clue about anything" is the only possible conclusion.

Getting College Admissions Wrong Yet Again

In a Washington Monthly essay, The College Board Capitulates to Trump, Richard D. Kahlenberg ignores what to my mind are the two most convincing discussions of selective college admissions programs since their start a century ago, Alan Dershowitz's 1991 Chutzpah and Jerome Karabel's 2005 The Chosen. Both argue that as Jews became more numerous, prosperous, and influential in the US after the late 19th century, this created a problem for the Ivy League, which had been a bastion of upper-crust WASP society since before the Revolution.

More and more Jews had the money and cultivation to send their sons to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, with the result that their student bodies were becoming noticeably Jewish. Selective admissions programs simply began as way to limit this trend. An obvious way to do this would have been to require photos with applications and reject applicants with aquiline features, or simply to cull those with identifiably Jewish surnames, but that would be too obvious, and it might not even be fully effective.

Instead, the Ivies and other elite schools developed techniques that have persisted to this day. One of the most pervasive has been to promote "geographic diversity", to advantage applicants from the Rocky Mountain and Plains states over applicants from Northeastern cities and suburbs, where many more would likely be Jewish. At the same time, applicants from legacy families, the traditional WASP upper crust, as well as the offspring of major donors, politicians, and celebrities, were also placed in separate, advantaged categories.

Jerome Karabel went so far as to examine the specific admissions office method that puts these policies into practice: each application, let's say from a hopeful in Fargo, ND as an example, is placed bn a separate "basket", where he or she competes only with other applicants from the Rocky Mountain and Plains states. On the other hand, an applicant from Great Neck, NY, with the largest Jewish population on Long Island, will go into a "basket" of other applicants from prosperous Northeastern suburbs, many of whom can be assumed to be Jewish. Applicants from Boise, Cheyenne, or Rapid City will never compete with applicants from White Plains; they will all go up a different silo.

For that matter, applicants who happen to come from the Hamptons, Bedminster, or Potomac will also go into a different silo, but this will less likely be based exclusively on location than their family surname and how much the family has donated to the institution. But all the same, they will never compete with applicants from either Great Neck or Rapid City, and their chances of admission are considerably higher no matter what.

I've looked at the college admissions rat race here from time to time, and what I've consistently found has been that the only competitive and merit-based component of the process has been the particular silo of applicants from the Northeastern cities and suburbs, with numerous other silos deliberately designed to supply an applicant pool with limited numbers of Jews. As I said this past May,

If you go looking for the percentages of each such set-aside in typical Ivy entering classes, you'll get something like 80% who've come in via set-asides. This has me questioning how Princeton comes up with an "overall" admissions rate of 4.62% if as many as 80% of its students come in via set-asides where the rate is much higher.

But let's get to Mr Kahlenberg's argument:

A Trump Department of Justice memorandum, for instance, has declared that “criteria like socioeconomic status, first-generation status, or geographic diversity must not be used” if a university’s goal is to further racial integration on campus.

Given the president’s appalling history on matters of race, this development, while troubling, is not particularly surprising. What is mystifying is that a pillar of the higher education establishment recently went along with Trump. Earlier this month, the College Board, which administers the SAT, announced it would stop making a tool called Landscape available to colleges, which is designed to help identify high-achieving low-income students of all races.

. . . Landscape, as the College Board noted, “was intentionally developed without the use or consideration of data on race or ethnicity.” Instead, it allowed colleges to consider a student’s achievement in light of the socioeconomic makeup of his or her neighborhood and high school. Neighborhood factors included median family income, typical educational attainment, the share of families headed by a single parent, and crime rates. High school factors included the share of students eligible for subsidized lunch, the proportion taking AP exams, and the average SAT score. The idea was that if a student does pretty well academically despite these educational challenges, they have something special to offer.

Well, early in my tech career, I worked for the Los Angeles City statistical office. The "neigborhood factors" Mr Kahlenberg cites, including "typical educational attainment, the share of families headed by a single parent, and crime rates", simply correlate closely with African-American parts of town. All this is doing is identifying African-Americans by a different set of criteria, and it looks like both the Trump administration and the College Board have gotten wise to this particular con -- in effect, it puts African-Americans in a separate set-aside, has them compete with each other, and rewards this particular set of winners irrespective of how they measure up against anyone else. Mr Kahlenberg tries to answer this problem:

As Raj Chetty and his colleagues have found, living in a neighborhood with a large share of single-parent households predicts opportunity in America. A student of any race who lives in such a neighborhood and nevertheless does fairly well shows grit and determination. The fact that, on average, Black students face this extra disadvantage is hardly a reason to ignore this factor.

But here he's simply admitting that he wants either to create or maintain a set-aside for students "of any race" who live in such communities and "do fairly well". But there's another silo for students who in fact live in prosperous suburbs and wind up in top percentiles for standardized tests and other measures of achievement. As I've noted, the elite universities, with their elaborate systems of admissions set-asides, wind up accepting this demographic in only 20%-30% of any entering class. Mr Kahlenberg is simply arguing for yet another set-aside that will keep the high-achievers in the minority in even the most selective schools.

What would an elite-school student body look like if an admissions office simply dropped all pretense and admitted only the top performers, rather than admitting as much as 70%-80% via set-asides? What would the student experience be like?

So, Just How Many Trans Mass Shooters Have There Been?

Intrigued by the overall question of trans violence, I asked the web, "How many trans mass shooters have there been?" "AI" felt it would be important to set me straight before giving an answer:

Data on mass shootings indicate that the vast majority of perpetrators have been cisgender men, with transgender and nonbinary individuals responsible for only a tiny fraction of these crimes. While precise numbers vary depending on the definition of "mass shooting," major research sources show that trans and nonbinary shooters account for less than 2% of the total.

It then gave five names:

• Anderson Lee Aldrich: The nonbinary shooter responsible for the 2022 Club Q shooting in Colorado Springs.
• Audrey Hale: The transgender shooter of the 2023 Covenant School shooting in Nashville, Tennessee.
• Snochia Moseley: The transgender woman involved in the 2018 Rite Aid warehouse shooting in Maryland.
• Alec McKinney: A transgender male involved in the 2019 STEM School Highlands Ranch shooting in Colorado.
• Robert "Robin" Westman: The transgender woman accused of the 2025 Annunciation Catholic Church and school shooting in Minneapolis.

There are at least two possible other candidates.

• Dylan Jesse Butler, who killed three and injured two at a school in Perry, IA in January 2024
• Kimbrady Carriker, who killed five and injured two in Philadelphia in July 2024.

In the case of Dylan Jesse Butler, social media postings and images at least raised the question:

While law enforcement has not commented about the alleged shooter’s gender identity or sexual orientation, social media users focused on the appearance of a Pride flag on an account allegedly linked to the shooter, and it led to a narrative amplified by right-wing influencers online. That account is no longer available, but screen grabs of its content have circulated widely on social media.

Florida Gov Ron DeSantis said,

“This was somebody who was really hopped up on this gender ideology and you saw it in the profile, you know, the media doesn’t want to talk a lot about that because it doesn’t fit their narrative,” DeSantis said in Dubuque on Saturday.

Yahoo! notes that the shooter’s social media account featured “rainbow and transgender flag emojis and an image of graffiti that says ‘LOVE YOUR TRANS KIDS.'”

Regarding Kimbrady Carriker, Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene posted, based on photos in his social media,

Another trans shooter.https://t.co/w8zJ0GLc3e

— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) July 4, 2023

According to NBC News,

“The suspect has not identified themselves as trans. They have only identified themselves as male,” [member of the LGBTQ advisory committee for the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office Asa] Khalif said at Wednesday’s news conference. “But the language spewed out by the conservative press is violent and is dangerous, and it’s targeting trans women of color. It’s rallying the community to be violent, and we’re better than that.”

Typical discussions of this question say it all depends on what qualifies as a "mass shooting", while almost none say it depends on who qualifies as trans. But trans can mean almost anything. According to Wikipedia,

Transgender does not have a universally accepted definition, including among researchers; it can function as an umbrella term. The definition given above includes binary trans men and trans women and may also include people who are non-binary or genderqueer. Other related groups include third-gender people, cross-dressers, and drag queens and drag kings; some definitions include these groups as well.

. . . Accurate statistics on the number of transgender people vary widely, in part due to different definitions of what constitutes being transgender. Some countries collect census data on transgender people. Canada was the first country to introduce collection of census data on its transgender and non-binary population in 2021. Generally, less than 1% of the worldwide population is transgender, with figures ranging from <0.1% to 0.6%.

There are other questions about other shootings, especially the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando, FL on June 12, 2016. Omar Mateen, a US-born Muslim from an Afghan family, killed 59 and injured 53 at the gay nightclub. According to Wikipedia,

Despite numerous anonymous and named reports of LGBTQ connections, the FBI was unable to verify any claims that Mateen was homosexual or frequented gay bars. The FBI investigation found the witnesses claiming Mateen's homosexuality were mistaken or refused to go on the record, and doubts that Mateen was gay. Law enforcement sources said the FBI found no photographs, text messages, smartphone apps, pornography, or cell tower location data to suggest Mateen lived a gay life, closeted or otherwise.

On the day of the shooting, Mateen's father, Mir Seddique Mateen, said that he had seen his son get angry after seeing a gay couple kiss in front of his family at the Bayside Marketplace in Miami months prior to the shooting, which he suggested might have been a motivating factor. Two days later, after his son's sexual orientation became a subject of speculation, Mateen's father said he did not believe his son was homosexual. Mateen's ex-wife, however, claimed that his father called him gay while in her presence. Speaking on her behalf, her current fiancé said that she, his family, and others believed he was gay, and that "the FBI asked her not to tell this to the American media."

From this, it sounds like the FBI was eager not to be able to verify any claims of Mateen's sexual orientation, which only goes to the issue that both official agencies and legacy media tend to minmimize or gaslight the public over such information. In addition, the lack of any meaningful definition of "trans" makes any verifiable statements about "trans mass shooters" impossible. For instance, was Tyler Robinson trans if he identified as cis male but had a trans partner, if indeed that's how he identified? How in fact did he identify? Does that matter?

Nor was Tyler Robinson a mass shooter; he was simply an assassin. So how do we characterize what's beginning to emerge as growing evidence of LGBTQ+ public violence? In the past few days, I've been able to quantify five definite trans mass shootings plus two possibles, five trans arsons, and two more if we add perps who are at least maybe this or that. The numbers just keep growing.

A better term might be "LGBTQ+ performative violence".

More Gay And Trans Violence

As I said yesterday, every time I go looking for specificallly gay and trans-connected violent episodes, even in idle web searches, I come up with more. Yesterday I noted that Armed Queers SLC is a pro-gay-and-trans gun group that's surfaced in connection with the Charlie Kirk assassination. For instance,

🧵🚨 MAJOR BREAKING 2: The 2025 May Day trip of SLC Armed Queers to Cuba: "Well, if we're terrorists, we're proud to be terrorists"

I've obtained a now-deleted video.

In it, Ermiya Fanaeian and an unidentified man named Connor talk openly about:

👉 Palestinian students at… pic.twitter.com/CBkStDYjEO

— DataRepublican (small r) (@DataRepublican) September 16, 2025

Ermiya Fanaeian, the founder of AQSLC, is a biological male who identifies as female:

AQSLC, a socialist group of pro-gun activists, was founded in 2021 by the former March for Our Lives activist, Ermiya Fanaeian, who that year parted ways with a nationwide group advocating self-defense for LGBT people known as Pink Pistols.

Fanaeian was identified by the press as a “trans woman” as early as September 2020, when Fox 13 Now profiled the activist shortly after the relaunch of the Salt Lake City chapter of Pink Pistols, which is now defunct.

. . . In an interview published in June 2021, apparently not long before parting ways with Pink Pistols, Fanaeian additionally identified himself as a member of “the trans community especially.”

Speaking of his hopes for Salt Lake City Pink Pistols, he said later in the interview, “We’re trying to move away from this world where police are roaming our communities and the only way we can protect ourselves is by calling these cops who largely are harming us.”

Though it is not clear when Fanaeian began identifying as a transgender woman, he was using his current first name during a 2019 profile published by the University of Utah, where he previously attended, suggesting he might have transitioned while in high school.

It was in this first-person account where the activist revealed he is an immigrant to the United States.

“I’m originally from Iran, a country where LGBT people are facing severe persecution. They don’t have legal protections and they can’t obtain educational degrees, so to be at the U is incredibly liberating,” said Fanaeian in the profile.

Elsewhere, Fanaeian is described as Palestinian, which can only mean we know less about him than we should:

A Palestinian and transgender immigrant, Ermiya Fanaeian, leads a far-left terrorist movement and LGBT in the United States, Utah, the state where right-wing activist Charlie Kirk was murdered.

Fanaeian leads the organization called "Armed Queers Salt Lake City" (AQSLC), a group that combines armed self-defense with LGBT activism and communist militancy, with the goal of "promoting a broader struggle against capitalism and state violence," according to a publication by the organization.

. . . A concerning piece of news is that this movement had as its Facebook cover the phrase "Ben Shapiro should be the next one killed," which reflects the hatred and left-wing extremism of its members. For this reason, AQSLC ended up deleting its account after the controversy that arose.

. . . The group defines itself as an openly communist organization. During a meeting held in July, one of its leaders stated: "We are a Marxist-Leninist organization led by queer and trans people."

But the group's associations go beyond Salt Lake City.

Federal investigators are expanding their scrutiny of the assassination of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk to include potential ties between a Dallas-area antifa-aligned gun club and a pro-trans activist organization. . . .

The Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club (EFJBGC), a North Texas-based outfit known for providing armed "security" at drag events and pro-trans protests, has surfaced in the investigation due to past collaborations with Armed Queers SLC (AQS), a Utah-based pro-trans group now under federal review for possible foreknowledge of Kirk's killing. AQS, led by trans activist Ermiya Fanaeian, reportedly deleted its Instagram account shortly after the September 10 shooting of Kirk in Utah, prompting heightened interest from the FBI.

. . . The connection to EFJBGC traces back to at least 2023, when AQS co-hosted educational workshops and events with the Texas group, including a now-deleted Instagram post advertising a joint meeting. EFJBGC, part of a broader network of John Brown Gun Clubs that advocate armed antifascist resistance, has a history of confrontational actions. Members were implicated in a 2021 arson attack on a Texas ICE facility in Alvarado, where suspect Benjamin Song—named in a separate 2023 lawsuit as an EFJBGC affiliate—allegedly rammed a vehicle into protesters before fleeing.

The John Brown Gun Clubs are a national organization generally characterized as left-wing and anti-fascist, but there is an association with violent demonstrations in favor of drag events.

The groups are known to show up in defense of events like drag shows that draw protesters.

On April 24, 2023, three members of the Elm Fork club were arrested after they allegedly pepper sprayed a group of Christian Nationalist protesters from the New Columbia Movement outside a drag brunch in Fort Worth.

The lawsuit claims [Benjamin] Song was also there to provide security for the event.

Benjamin Song earned headlines again this past July:

An armed mob arrested for shooting up a Texas immigration detention center last month are reportedly members of a secretive network of far-left “anti-fascists” trained in self-defense and firearms.

An ex-US Marine Corps reservist and 10 others were nabbed after the group, who were clad in black military-style clothing, opened fire outside the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado back on July 4 — leaving one cop shot in the neck.

. . . Some of them were allegedly trained by Benjamin Hanil Song — the former reservist charged with attempted murder in connection with the attack.

. . . The group of alleged agitators, which includes some transgender activists, is believed to have met during the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020.

Song's gender identity and sexual preference are currently unknown, but according to the news stories linked, trans activists appear to belong to many "anti-fascist" groups like the John Brown Gun Clubs, and they appear to be prominent among those involved in violent episodes like the one in Texas.

What I'm discovering in just this exercise, doing simple web searches on Armed Queers Salt Lake City and John Brown Gun Clubs, is that these groups network, they plan violence, and while they claim primarily to be Marxist-Leninist or "anti-fascist", they appear to attract significant numbers of trans activists as well.

I also did some searching to find out how trans activism fits into classical Marxism-Leninism. Karl Marx died in 1883, before sexual deviance became a matter for serious study via figures like Richard von Krafft-Ebing, whose Psychopathia Sexualis was published in 1886. Sexual deviance was never a component of Marx's social theory.

But I suspect that Marx, if questioned on homosexuality, would likely have classed gays either among the Lumpenproletariat, the underclass that included prostitutes, or the bourgeoisie, the cultured, respectable gays among the British and European upper classes. Neither group would be allies of the worklng class, so the current self-asserted congruity of interests among trans, queers, and workers seems fanciful at best.

But this is all new, and it's new to the Justice Department and the FBI. There's a lot more to learn.

Toward A Definition Of Trans Ideology

The excerpt embedded above from yesterday's Morning Meeting with panelists Mark Halperin, Dan Turrentine, and Sean Spicer is a good indication of how clueless mainstreram commentators have been over trans ideology. At 2:20:

HALPERIN: There are people in MAGA who believe that trans culture, or a strain of trans culture, is violent and wants radical change in this country and is using violence to get it. That's a strong belief amongst many in MAGA, and thqt this has been a story that's been covered up by the left and the media for a long time, and that based on what they know, that's at issue here, and they want to go hard after anything that they think is a violent subculture of the trans community and those that support them. What do you think of that, and what do you think the Democratic party's posture should be on that strong belief held by those people??

TURRENTINE: I don't know of other instances of trans people lashing out like that. Perhaps there are some. I don't know. I mean, obviously this issue has been part of our politics now for the last two years, front and center, and I imagine it's going to be part of our politics for the foreseeable future. I don't see examples of the trans community engaging in violence. I know what people in the trans community feel conmes the other way a lot, but I would; hope there is not this kind of, you know, . . . I think it is going to be part of the debate now.

SPICER: There's two examples right off the top of my head, one is Nashville, two is Catholic Annunciation Church last week in Minnesota.

Well, at least give Halperin credit for raising the issue, but on one hand, Turrentine basically says, "It's news to me," while Spicer -- who is a longtime professional Republican edged out early from Trump 45 -- has only the most basic grasp of it. But even Newsweek was on the case back in 2023:

A United Nations investigator is among several voices raising the alarm about a rise in far-left transgender activists, amid reports of some intimidating and physically assaulting those who disagree with them.

In an interview with the British Daily Mail newspaper on Sunday, Reem Alsalem, the international body's special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, said it was an "increasing trend" that she had been observing, calling on officials to protect freedom of speech regarding conversations around gender.

. . . The debate around transgender inclusion has often become heated, with both sides facing incendiary remarks and threats of violence. Some transgender activists have distanced themselves from "extreme" rhetoric.

Trantifa is a portmanteau of "transgender" and "Antifa," the latter being itself a truncation of "anti-fascist" and a left-wing movement that rose to prominence in 2017. The antifa movement has faced criticism from right-wing figures, including Donald Trump, who have accused them of acts of violence.

In March, I was making the point that a remarkable number of anti-Tesla vandals and firebombers were trans. In one post, I linked to a piece at Hot Air that identified three, and I added a fourth, but that was before I saw a fifth, Owen McIntire of Kansas City, MO, whose case I brought up yesterday. In fact, there have been additional shootings, at least one at a school, involving trans perps -- Alec McKinney, a trans 16-year-old, killed one and injured eight at STEM School Highlands Ranch in Colorado in 2019.

In fact, there's no authoritative total of trans-involved school shootings, arsons, or other violent crimes. When I go searching for others, I inevitably find them. The conventional response is along the line of "only 1% of all murders are committed by trans people", but that neglects the very small number of trans people in the population. The number of these who go postal seems to be notable.

The Kirk assassination in Utah has surfaced local trans activist groups that appear to have a violent agenda.

BREAKING - A Utah-based trans militia group, Armed Queers Salt Lake City, which trains individuals to use weapons to defend trans rights, deleted its account the day Charlie Kirk was killed. pic.twitter.com/ZzzztXqy8T

— dustin mills (@dustinemills24) September 14, 2025

''

Further,

[A]s state law enforcement and FBI now say they are expanding their investigation to identify if there was a network working with Tyler Robinson (which seems obvious based on the Discord chat), attention is now being paid to militant transgender groups and NGO’s in the Utah area who seem to connect to Robinson and his transgender boyfriend Lance Twiggs.

. . . “Armed Queers SLC” and a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) known as “Utah Global Diplomacy,” partly funded by the UN appear to be two groups in the region with connections to the overall militant transgender movement: a preliminary motive being explored by federal investigators.

Trump's Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Stephen Miller has indicated that he will pursue the role dark-money-funded NGOs have played in what amounts to domestic terrorism, especially as it appears to have been connected with the Kirk assassination. But basic to the trans self-image appears to be the idea that some type of vengeance needs to be secured:

But against whom? For what? Who "put them in the wrong body", for instance? The overall justification for violence seems elusive indeed -- we can acknowledge that trans people have a tendency toward it, but the reasons seem to be something added after the fact. They basically just want to be violent. Isn't that odd?

Just What Is "Gender Affierming Care"? And What Is "Trans Ideology"?

These are questions that nobody's asked in the wake of horrific shootings within just two weeks, the Annunciation Church attack on August 27 and the Charlie Kirk assassination on September 10. The Annunciation shooter, Robin Westman, accordiong to reports, had previously undergone some type of medical treatment for gender transition, although he had apparently discontinued it at some point:

In a twisted handwritten journal he shared on YouTube before the massacre — much of which is encrypted in a homespun code of Russian Cyrillic script and English words — Westman groaned about his long hair and his decision to transition.

“I only keep [the long hair] because it is pretty much my last shred of being trans. I am tired of being trans, I wish I never brain-washed myself,” he wrote, according to a translation by The Post.

. . . “I can’t cut my hair now as it would be an embarrassing defeat, and it might be a concerning change of character that could get me reported. It just always gets in my way. I will probably chop it on the day of the attack.”

. . . “I regret being trans.. I wish I was a girl I just know I cannot achieve that body with the technology we have today. I also can’t afford that,” he said.

Elsewhere, he wrote:

Gender and weed [redacted] up my head. I wish I never tried experimenting with either. Don’t let your kids smoke weed or change gender until they are like seventeen.

Lance Twiggs, the trans romantic partner of Tyler Robinson, apparently referred to hormone treatment as part of his medical program for transition on social media:

In November 2024, Twiggs posted about his anxiety with injecting cross-sex hormones. Replying to a thread on injection pain, he wrote: “seriously. sometimes it’s just muscle memory, sometimes i gotta get buzzed on something so i’m not too anxious about it.”

In another post, he appears to have at least a general familiarity with hormone treatments:

Old Reddit comments linked to Lance Twiggs under the username “lancelott3” have resurfaced, showing discussions about hormone replacement therapy (HRT). In one post, Twiggs explained that hip growth depends largely on genetics, while HRT can slow beard growth but not fully stop facial hair.

Back in May, I discussed the case of Owen McIntire of Kansas City, MO, who allegedly firebombed a Tesla dealership but was released from custody "due to 'serious and ongoing' medical needs — which include gender-affirming medical care that requires daily medication as well as mental health support, according to KMBC." Just what did his medical treatment consist of? Are there any similarities among the treatments violent trans offenders have received?

Similar questions have been raised over Audrey/Aiden Hale, the female-to-male trans shooter at the Nashville, TN Covenant School, when it was revealed that she had been a mental health patient at Vanderbilt University Medical Center from the age of six to the day of her death. That therapy presumably included "gender affirming care", but questions that were raised at the time have never been answered.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican representative for the state of Georgia, tweeted a statement regarding the shooting, implying that the shooter's testosterone level was a reason for the shootings.

"How much hormones like testosterone and medications for mental illness was the transgender Nashville school shooter taking?" she tweeted. "Everyone can stop blaming guns now."

Journalist Andy Ngô also suggested that the hormones may have contributed to the crime.

"Was the #Nashville trans mass shooter on cross-sex hormones (in this case, testosterone)? Women committing mass shootings are exceptionally rare, but if Audrey "Aiden" Hale took testosterone, it could explain part of the male-typical mass violence the Christian school tragically experienced," he tweeted.

The Tyler Robinson-Lance Twiggs connection brought renewed attention to the 2024 case of another Washington, UT male-to-female trans offender:

Mia Bailey, 28, was arrested Wednesday and charged with 11 felony counts related to the double homicide of parents Joseph, 70, and Gail Bailey, 69, and the attempted murder of her brother, according to the Washington City Police Department.

"We have some good news. We have the suspect in custody." St. George Police Officer Tiffany Mitchell announced in a Facebook live broadcast, telling residents of the Bloomington Hills and Fort Pierce they were no longer urged to shelter in place. "Everyone is safe. No one else was injured."

. . . Bailey filed a petition to change her name and gender legally in July 2023, according to 5th District Court records reviewed by KSL. She was granted both in August 2023, with the court writing that "there is clear and convincing evidence that [Bailey] has transitioned to the sex sought in the petition and a uniform manner for at least six months," including "evidence of appropriate clinical care or treatment for gender transitioning or change provided by a licensed medical professional."

According to The Gaterway Pundit,

Robinson’s parents and Bailey’s parents both lived in Washington, Utah, approximately 5 minutes apart, in a small town of 27,993 people as of 2020.

. . . Mia Bailey, 28, born Collin Troy Bailey, identifies as transgender and has confessed to fatally shooting his parents, Joseph and Gail Bailey, in their Washington City home at 1039 E. Chinook Drive, St. George, on June 18, 2024.

. . . In a later incident while in custody, Bailey was accused of assaulting two correctional officers in October 2024.

But this brings up another question. Tyler Robinson and Lance Twiggs belonged to what appears to have been close-knit social media groups whose posts suggest foreknowledge of the Kirk shooting:

[A]s details emerge, a web of disturbing connections points to a possible broader conspiracy involving online radicalism, transgender networks, and even hints of foreknowledge among left-wing activists.

Adding to the chilling narrative are Robinson's own flippant jokes made in Discord chats with 20 other users while he was on the run. He reportedly quipped to friends that a "doppelganger" was responsible for the shooting after the FBI released images of the suspect.

. . . On September 9, an account under the handle "NajraGalvz" posted, "Charlie Kirk is coming to my college tomorrow I rlly hope someone evaporates him literally," followed several hours later by, "Lets just say something big will happen tomorrow," accompanied by a grinning dog image.

Earlier, on September 5, a social media user named "Fujoshincel" teased "something BIG coming soon" and urged followers to watch the news; after the shooting on September 10, the same account gloated, "Well that’s that" and "Another Chud Bites the Dust."

A transgender user followed by Robinsom's boyfriend Lance Twiggs on X, and who followed them back, celebrated with "WE F-CKING DID IT" as reports emerged, followed by "LET IT DIE. LET IT DIE" when Kirk was reported to be in critical condition.

According to the Urban Dictionaty, "a 'chud' is a person, usually male, who holds reactionary or far-right sociopolitical views." I asked the web, "What is trans ideology?" "AI" replied,

The term "trans ideology" is a pejorative and misleading phrase used primarily by opponents of transgender rights and visibility to frame gender identity as a political movement rather than an aspect of human diversity. There is no single, unified "trans ideology," but rather a range of academic concepts, social movements, and lived experiences related to gender identity and expression.

I'll agree that there's no single, unified "trans ideology", in large part because the most visible trans people we've begun to recognize are deeply addled. On the other hand, in the manifestos and journals they leave behind, as well as in social media posts to trans-affirming groups, there seems to be a deep sense of aggression against the non-trans-affirming world, to the point that there seems to be a general consensus that parents and other figures who don't accept trans identity should be killed, or at least are the ones at fault for the violence trans people commit.

Certainly we don't see any internalized sense that these views are in any way bizarre. Could recreational drug use, mentioned by both Robin Westman and Lance Twiggs, somehow increase the bad effects of hormone treatment? And why do we see such frequent conjunction of gender affirmng treatment with therapy for serious psychiatric problems, as in the cases of Audrey Hale and Owen McIntire? To what extent was Tyler Robinson, who wasn't trans himself, somehow converted to "trans ideology" so that he shared the view of his trans friends that Christopher Kirk should be killed?

You know what? I think Secretary Kennedy is right to be investigating the unacknowledged effects of vaccines -- but isn't it at least just as important that there be a serious investigation of what passes for "gender affirming care"?