Corporate media avoids mentioning Minneapolis massacre shooter was trans
USA Today appeared to link the shooting to white supremacy.
Major news outlets avoided or failed to report that the killer who massacred Catholic students at the Annunciation church and school in Minneapolis on Wednesday identified as transgender. Those outlets include CN and the New York Times, among others.
Trans-identified male Robert “Robin” Westman approached the church from the outside, barricading exit doors, before firing through the stained glass windows at the children inside during their first mass of the school year. He killed two children, injured 14 others as well as three adults.
The New York Times report on “What We Know About the Minnesota Catholic School Shooting,” the outlet used female pronouns for the shooter, failing to mention that Westman is male. 13 paragraphs into the story they reported that as a 17-year old Westman “filed a court document to change her first name to Robin from Robert,” and then mentioned that the document Westman signed said that the shooter “identified as female and wants her name to reflect that identification.”
USA Today appeared to link the shooting to white supremacy in a piece from Marc Ramirez, which did not mention the shooter’s name or transgender identity once. The report also cited a report from Voice of America that found “shootings at places of worship have grown in frequency since the mid-2000s – committed, it said, ‘by perpetrators with a history of racism, anti-Semitism, anti-Christianity and Islamophobia, with ties to white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups.'”
The manifesto from Westman appeared to glorify Luigi Mangione, the left-wing suspect on trial for the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Westman also uploaded disturbing videos online prior to the shooting, where firearms and magazines were displayed with different messages, “I’m the Woker, baby, why so queerious?” as well as “Where is your God now?” and other far-left extremist phrases.
CNN’s “How the ‘absolutely incomprehensible’ shooting unfolded at Annunciation Catholic School,” made the first mention of the suspect’s name after 20 paragraphs into the story, but did not mention that the shooter was transgender at all.
The shooting, although widely condemned, was celebrated on some corners of the internet by trans and far-left accounts.
Meanwhile, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, speaking just moments after the massacre, urged people not to use the shooting as a reason to condemn the “transgender community.” In a follow up post to his remarks, he wrote “Those using this tragedy as an opportunity to vilianize the trans community, or any community, have lost sight of our shared humanity. Children died today. We shouldn’t be operating out of a place of hate for anyone. We should be operating from a place of love for our kids.”