Has Trump Been A Rational Actor All Along?

Yesterday I floated the idea that we've been fed a legacy media consensus that Trump is narcissistic, impulsive, vindictive, and erratic, when in fact evidence shows he's a rational actor. This certainly got started as early as his June 16, 2015 escalator ride at Trump Tower during his campaign announcement, which was almost universally treated as a vanity project that would soon fade from view. But I think it's important to start assessing Trump's statements, his postures, and his actions through a filter that gives him credit for being a rational actor.

James Comey is a key example. Since before Trump's 2017 inauguration, Comey has sought to control the narrative over his case by feeding the very perception that Trump is narcissistic, impulsive, vindictive, and erratic. In fact, I'd say Comey has been one of the chief exponents of this perception in public life -- but this is hardly a disinterested position; Comey has been flirting with indictments over this whole period, and the idea that Trump could be acting vindictively has largely protected him, at least up to now.

Comey lasted less than four months under Trump before he was fired on May 9, 2017. Comey has largely controlled the legacy media narrative ever since. For instance, pretty much everything we know about the January 6, 2017 meeting in which Comey along with James Clapper, John Brennan, and Mike Rogers met with Trump, comes from either Comey himself or his special assistant Josh Campbell (the photo above shows the two together). Campbell in a tell-all book wrote,

The four intelligence chiefs decided Comey should brief the incoming president on the [Steele dossier] one-on-one, both because the FBI had originally received the information and because Comey was the only one in the group who was guaranteed to remain on the job when the new administration came in. (Unlike the heads of the other intelligence agencies, the director of the FBI serves a statutorily mandated ten-year term, and Comey was in year three.) Conscious of the personal embarrassment this sensitive brief might cause the president-elect, the FBI director opted to discuss it with Trump separately at the end of the larger briefing on Russian interference.

. . . Aware of the unprecedented nature of an FBI director confronting a newly elected president with explosive material about his personal life, coupled with the fact that the president’s campaign was secretly under investigation for its possible ties to Russia, Comey wanted to make certain that he fully documented the interaction in writing. He would later tell me he knew it was possible the president-elect might one day lie about the exchange if it ever came to light.

. . . When Comey got to the tawdry details contained in the dossier, Trump became defensive, cutting him off and denying the allegations. “Do I look like the kind of guy who needs prostitutes?” Trump asked. He then went on to recount, unprompted, a number of allegations against him by various women, which he claimed were all false. Comey indicated that the intelligence community was aware that the claims in the dossier were unsubstantiated, but that he nevertheless wanted Trump to be aware the information was circulating through government and media circles. Trump thanked Comey for the information, signaling the end of the short one-on-one meeting.

Let's consider this: in a one-on-one encounter with Trump, their first ever, Comey shows his hand, which is the Steele pee allegtions. Trump must certainly have been aware that these were false; at minimum, those closest to Trump say he's a germophobe, and such antics would be wildly improbable. But Trump's alleged reply, “Do I look like the kind of guy who needs prostitutes?” doesn't sit right with me, either.

Comey has just accused Trump of something both improbable and, by his own admission, unsubstantiated, thereby establishing in Trump's mind that he's completely unreliable and unserious. Trump wouldn't even want to be around someone like that. I believe the part about Trump cutting Comey off and thanking him, but not much else.

On June 8, 2017, after Trump fired him, Comey testified to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence:

I felt compelled to document my first conversation with the President-Elect in a memo. To ensure accuracy, I began to type it on a laptop in an FBI vehicle outside Trump Tower the moment I walked out of the meeting. Creating written records immediately after one-on-one conversations with Mr. Trump was my practice from that point forward. This had not been my practice in the past.

I suspect that in that first Trump Tower meeting, Comey realized he'd gotten off on the wrong foot with Trump, and that was putting it mildly. Thus he felt the need immediately to create self-serving versions of each subsequent encounter, because he was a short-timer, and he knew it. He went on in the testimony,

The President and I had dinner on Friday, January 27 at 6:30 pm in the Green Room at the White House.

. . ,. The President began by asking me whether I wanted to stay on as FBI Director, which I found strange because he had already told me twice in earlier conversations that he hoped I would stay, and I had assured him that I intended to. He said that lots of people wanted my job and, given the abuse I had taken during the previous year, he would understand if I wanted to walk away.

My instincts told me that the one-on-one setting, and the pretense that this was our first discussion about my position, meant the dinner was, at least in part, an effort to have me ask for my job and create some sort of patronage relationship. That concerned me greatly, given the FBI’s traditionally independent status in the executive branch.

I replied that I loved my work and intended to stay and serve out my ten-year term as Director. And then, because the set-up made me uneasy, I added that I was not “reliable” in the way politicians use that word, but he could always count on me to tell him the truth. I added that I was not on anybody’s side politically and could not be counted on in the traditional political sense, a stance I said was in his best interest as the President.

My reading of this account of the conversation is that, three weeks after Comey had given Trump a highly unfavorable impression at Trump Tower, Trump was giving Comey a chance to reset things. Not "an effort to have me ask for my job", but under the circumstances a very generous opportunity for Comey to admit that he'd blundered by bringing up the pee dossier and, in effect, set things right. Instead, Comey doubled down and made it plain that he would continue to work against Trump, and he seems to have put it in almost as many words. Next:

On February 14, I went to the Oval Office for a scheduled counterterrorism briefing of the President.

. . . The President signaled the end of the briefing by thanking the group and telling them all that he wanted to speak to me alone.

When the door by the grandfather clock closed, and we were alone, the President began by saying, “I want to talk about Mike Flynn.” Flynn had resigned the previous day. The President began by saying Flynn hadn’t done anything wrong in speaking with the Russians, but he had to let him go because he had misled the Vice President.

. . . The President then made a long series of comments about the problem with leaks of classified information – a concern I shared and still share.

. . . The President returned briefly to the problem of leaks. I then got up and left out the door by the grandfather clock, making my way through the large group of people waiting there, including Mr. Priebus and the Vice President.

I immediately prepared an unclassified memo of the conversation about Flynn and discussed the matter with FBI senior leadership.

It's very hard not to read this as Comey being remarkably obtuse. Trump announces that he wants to talk about Mike Flynn, who had been accused of lying to the FBI in circumstances Trump must already have recognized were questionable, but what he really wanted to talk about was leaks. Let's fast forward to late September 2025:

The two-page indictment is short on detail, but it says Mr Comey has been charged with one count of making false statements and another of obstruction of justice.

. . . The first count relates to Mr Comey telling the congressional committee he had not authorised someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports about an FBI investigation into what the indictment describes as "PERSON 1", believed to be Clinton.

I take Trump's subtext in this meeting to mean that he's fully aware that Comey had been leaking, and that he made a regular practice of it. This was an implicit warning of grounds for termination. I would take this from any supervisor of mine that this was precisely that, and whatever I was doing in that direction, I should immediately stop. In fact, again, in a normal working context, I would take this as remarkably generous, since it effectively means that the boss already has grounds to show you the door but is giving you one more chance.

Comey's attitude seems to have been that he's in year three of his ten-year term, and he can't be fired. On May 9, Trump disabused Comey of any such assumption. In fact, the actual circumstances of Comey's firing struck me as consistent with a corporate firing for misconduct: Trump did it while Comey was out of the office in Los Angeles, and his electronic access and physical access to his office were terminated immediately at the same time. He would have had no way to spirit any files out before he was barred.

This isn't the usual case of a senior official being eased out "to spend more time with my family". In fact, given termination circumstances like those, I would have expected indictment for something like fraud or embezzlement to happen quickly in an ordinary business environmnent.

The more I look at Comey's accounts of his brief relationship with Trump, the more I get the impression that Trump was working with a great deal of insight into human nature, and insight into Comey in particular; and I have a sense that he almost immediately recognized that Comey wasn't just unreliable, he was completely untrustworthy and should never have been at the FBI. Under those circumstances, I think we're justified in recognizing that Trump was a rationial actor from the start of his first administration.

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?