The GOP Agenda Would Be Disastrous For Education

 

From Dan Rather

Right-Wing Quick To Spread Lies About Bridge Disaster

 From Charlie Sykes at MSNBC.com:

Early Tuesday morning, a 948-foot containership plowed into Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, which quickly collapsed. Rescue teams spent much of the day searching for victims and survivors. While the region grappled with the human and economic cost of the catastrophe, President Joe Biden and his Cabinet pledged to help local leaders rebuild. 

For most Americans it was a breathtaking disaster and human tragedy. But far-right conspiracy theorists saw it as an opportunity.

In a rapid flood of social media posts, politicians and “pundits” insisted that the disaster could not have simply been an accident. It was somehow Biden’s fault, or the fault of immigrants, or the result of a terrorist attack. Without evidence, they blamed “drug-addled” employees, diversity policies, Israel and even the recent infrastructure bill.

Many of the usual suspects weighed in, moving seamlessly from one big lie to another. Think of this week’s constellation of psychosis as an outgrowth of Bridge Denialism.

Fox News host Maria Bartiromo (whose election lies figured prominently in Dominion’s $787 million defamation lawsuit) tried to link the bridge collapse to what she called “the wide-open border.”Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., who voted against the 2021 infrastructure bill, appeared on Newsmax to complain that the Biden administration did not spend more money on bridge infrastructure. (Perhaps more hypocrisy than denial, but I digress.)

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., took to X to muse: “Is this an intentional attack or an accident?” This despite Baltimore Police Commissioner Richard Worley stating unequivocally that “there is absolutely no indication that there’s any terrorism, or that this was done on purpose.”. . .

None of this dissuaded the right’s most feculent conspiracist, Alex Jones, from declaring the accident an attack. “Looks deliberate to me,” he posted on X. “A cyber-attack is probable. WW3 has already started.”

Lara Logan, the former CBS correspondent who has drifted to the far edges of the fever swamps, was also quick to weigh in. Logan, who once promoted comparisons between Dr. Anthony Fauci and Nazi physician and murderer Josef Mengele, claimed on X that “Multiple intel sources” were telling her that the bridge collapse “was an ‘absolutely brilliant strategic attack’” on U.S. infrastructure. Striking an apocalyptic tone, she claimed with zero evidence that “our intel agencies know” about the attack and that the U.S. has just been divided “along the Mason Dixon line exactly like the Civil War.”

And she, via her unnamed "sources," blamed Barack Obama.

One after another they piled on. Former Trump aide Steve Bannonhinted at foul play: “It’s not right, and I think we need to get the full accounting of this until people say it’s not terrorism.” Right-wing media personality Benny Johnson breathlessly asked his audience: “Is this terrorism? How the hell did this happen? Is this incompetence? Who’s allowing this?”

Kandiss Taylor, who ran for Georgia governor in 2022, also suggested a conspiracy behind the collapse. Taylor — who has claimed “Satan wants to use” Taylor Swift “to elect Joe back into the White House to destroy what’s left of America” — offered no evidence for her bridge theory. Instead, she claimed that she had “watched the video several times.”

“What’s the chance that ship hit the bridge in the exact spot to crumple it up like tinfoil?” she asked. “I don’t believe in coincidences.”

The tragedy also brought racist and antisemitic trolls out of the woodwork. As Media Matters' Matt Gertz noted, blue-checked accounts were quick to try to connect the disaster with Israel. How incredibly predictable.

Other X “influencers” blamed Baltimore’s Black mayor for no other reason, it seems, than he happens to be Black. After Mayor Brandon Scott called for prayers for the victims and their families, a popular right-wing user posted to his 276,000 followers: “This is Baltimore’s DEI mayor commenting on the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge. It’s going to get so, so much worse. Prepare accordingly.” It was a revealing comment in more ways than one.

Well-known MAGA conspiracy-monger Jack Posobiec similarly (and mindlessly) seemed to implicate diversity and inclusion, forwarding a “Titanic” meme on Telegram that used Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s sexual identity to mock DEI policies.

And then there were the commenters whom Maryland journalist Brian Griffiths called, simply, “the ghouls” — like Roger Stone.

Their crudity, along with their cruelty, is the point.

In other words, Tuesday was just another day in the perverse MAGA universe. In this world, any event can be used to spread baseless smears, conspiracy theories, evidence-free attacks, fact-free speculation and lies. All while stoking suspicion, distrust and fear.

Florida Right-Wingers Now Want To Censor Shakespeare!

The idiocy of right-wingers never seems to have a limit. Now a Florida school board wants to censor Shakespeare. Drew Lichtenberg (lecturer at Yale University and dramaturg at the Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington, D.C.) responds to this stupidity in The New York Times:

It seemed, for a moment, that Shakespeare was being canceled. Last week, school district officials in Hillsborough County, Fla., said that they were preparing high school lessons for the new academic year with some of William Shakespeare’s works taught only with excerpts, partly in keeping with Gov. Ron DeSantis’s legislation about what students can or can’t be exposed to.

I’m here to say: Good. Cancel Shakespeare. It’s about time.

Anyone who spends a lot of time reading Shakespeare (or working on his plays, as I have for most of my professional career) understands that he couldn’t have been less interested in puritanical notions of respectability. Given how he’s become an exalted landmark on the high road of culture, it’s easy to forget that there’s always been a secret smugglers’ path to a more salacious and subversive Shakespeare, one well known and beloved by artists and theater people. The Bard has long been a patron saint to rebel poets and social outcasts, queer nonconformists and punk provocateurs.

Yes, Shakespeare is ribald, salacious, even shocking. But to understand his genius — and his indelible legacy on literature — students need to be exposed to the whole of his work, even, perhaps especially, the naughty bits.

The closing lines of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 20, addressed to the poem’s male subject, are among the dirtiest — and hottest — of the 16th century. “But since she pricked thee out for women’s pleasure, / Mine be thy love and thy love’s use their treasure.” A favorite trick of Shakespeare’s was to play with word order, especially when he wanted to disclose something too daring to be said in a more straightforward way, such as the love that dared not speak its name. The untangled meaning here: Your love ultimately belongs to me, sir, even if women (sometimes) enjoy your prick. Or, from the neck up you are as beautiful as a woman, and from the waist down you are all man.

Sex is one thing. The plays are also astoundingly gory. The bloody climax of “King Lear” so horrified the playwright Nahum Tate that he felt compelled to rewrite its ending. Tate’s sanitized version of “King Lear,” premiering in 1681, held the stage until 1838. In the 18th century, Voltaire called “Hamlet” the apparent product of a “drunken savage” who wrote without “the slightest spark of good taste”— which didn’t stop Voltaire, who also recognized Shakespeare’s “genius,” from openly borrowing from the Bard for one of his own plays.

In 1872 in “The Birth of Tragedy,” Friedrich Nietzsche praised this savagery. To him, Shakespeare contained the ne plus ultra of grisly truths. Hamlet, he wrote, “sees everywhere only the horror or absurdity of existence.” Nietzsche being Nietzsche, he considered this a good thing. Art, wrote Nietzsche, transforms “these nauseous thoughts about the horror or absurdity of existence into notions with which one can live.”

In light of Nietzsche’s counterintuitive epiphany, the notion of Shakespeare-the-hipster caught fire. Hamlet, uniquely among male roles in the classical canon, became an aspirational part for female theatrical stars looking to prove their bona fides and upend gender preconceptions: Sarah Bernhardt most famously, but also the great Danish actor Asta Nielsen. Shakespeare’s sonnets were a source of succor to decadent aesthetes such as Oscar Wilde, just as they had been to Charles Baudelaire. The writings and teachings of queer poets such as W.H. Auden and Allen Ginsberg suggests they saw themselves in Shakespeare’s works, as did anti-racist writers from James Baldwin to Lorraine Hansberry and Ann Petry.

Where the avant-garde led, pop culture followed. Shakespeare’s plays have always lent themselves to all manner of interpretations and they found new life in the postwar era, with landmark works like Basil Dearden’s “All Night Long,” a neo-noir film from 1962, which set “Othello” in a British jazz soiree. Franco Zeffirelli’s “Romeo and Juliet” in 1968 plugged into a different cultural zeitgeist, capturing onscreen the summer of love, while Roman Polanski’s film version of “Macbeth” in 1971 feels like an encomium for the dying utopian dreams of the ’60s.

In the transgressive ’90s, Shakespeare was everywhere: taboo, art house, alternative and cool. Gus Van Sant’s “My Own Private Idaho” reimagined Prince Hal and Hotspur as gay grunge gods and Baz Luhrmann’s “Romeo + Juliet” featured Leonardo DiCaprio at the peak of his androgyne allure. Even “Shakespeare in Love,” a relatively middlebrow Oscar winner, presented a vision of the brooding, bearded, sexy Shakespeare, as embodied by Joseph Fiennes.

In many other cultures, the bawdy lowbrow and the poetic highbrow are often personified by separate champions: In France, it’s Rabelais and Racine; in Spain, Cervantes and Calderón. In English literature Shakespeare has always combined both brows into something rich, special and strange. In “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” one of Shakespeare’s most magical and sensual plays, Bottom — a man with the head of a donkey — spends the night in bed next to the fairy queen. He wakes up having had something close to a religious experience. Every play in the canon features something similarly subversive and transcendent — and all of them are essential.

One can no more take out the dirty parts of Shakespeare than one can take out the poetry. It’s all intertwined, so that Shakespeare seems almost purposefully designed to confound those who want to segregate the smutty from the sublime. His work is proof that profundity can live next to, and even be found in, the pornographic, the viscerally violent and the existentially horrifying. So if you’re looking for sex, gore and the unspeakable absurdity of existence in Shakespeare, you will definitely find it. That’s the genius of Shakespeare. And it’s precisely what makes his work worth studying. 

Putin Uses U.S. Culture War To Appeal To Right-Wingers

Putin knows he has followers among GOP right-wingers, and he's trying to grow their numbers by siding with them in the U.S. culture war. Here's part of how E.J. Dionne Jr. describes it in The Washington Post:

Here’s a scoop for you: Vladimir Putin is sounding like someone who wants to enter the 2024 Republican presidential primaries.

How else do you explain that in the middle of his bellicose speechTuesday promising success in his assault on Ukraine, the Russian dictator fired a series of heat-seeking verbal missiles into our culture wars.

“Look at what they’ve done to their own people,” he said of us Westerners. “They’re destroying family, national identity, they are abusing their children. Even pedophilia is announced as a normal thing in the West.” Never mind that Russia is a world leader in sex trafficking.

Putin didn’t stop there. In one rather convoluted passage, he came out against same-sex marriage, backed off a bit, and then doubled down:

“And they’re recognizing same-sex marriages,” he said. “That’s fine that they’re adults. They’ve got the right to live their life. And we always, we’re very tolerant about this in Russia. Nobody is trying to enter private lives of people, and we’re not going to do this.”

Well, not quite, but he pressed on: “However, we need to tell them, but look at the scriptures of any religion in the world. Everything is said in there. And one of the things is that family is a union of a man and a woman.”

Among his enemies, Putin charged, “even the sacred texts are subjected to doubt.” Also, watch out, Britain: The “Anglican Church is planning to consider the idea of a gender-neutral God,” Putin mourned. “What can you say here? Millions of people in the West understand that they are being led to spiritual destruction.”

It has become a habit to cast the struggle over Ukraine in Cold War terms. Maybe that’s natural, given Putin’s old job as a KGB agent and his determination to expand Russia’s imperial reach to something closer to the hegemony once enjoyed by the old Soviet Union.

But it’s closer to the truth to see Putin as trying to build a right-wing nationalist international movement (no pun intended). And it’s obvious that his embrace of social and religious traditionalism is aimed at winning over right-wing opinion in the democracies and splitting the traditional right.

You don’t have to watch Fox News commentators waxing warm about the Russian president to see that this strategy is working. Opposition to helping Ukraine is growing among rank-and-file Republicans.

A Pew Research survey in January found that 40 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said that the United States was providing too much help to Ukraine, up from 32 percent in the fall and 9 percent last March. A Jan. 27-Feb. 1 Washington Post/ABC News pollfound 50 percent of Republicans saying that the United States was doing too much to support Ukraine, up from 18 percent in April. . . .

The much larger problem is for U.S. foreign policy. For the medium term, enough Republicans share Biden’s view of the Russian threat and Ukraine’s heroism to maintain assistance to the war effort.

But Putin is very shrewd about opinion on the right end of politics — in the United States and in Western Europe, too. He is counting on a backlash against social liberalism and the idea of a “gender-neutral” God to rustle up support for ungodly aggression. 

Abandoning Truth, Right-Wingers Are Trying To Intimidate

Right-Wingers don't have truth or logic on their side, so they are trying to intimidate by bringing firearms to demonstrations. Here is part of how Mike McIntire describes it in The New York Times: 

Across the country, openly carrying a gun in public is no longer just an exercise in self-defense — increasingly it is a soapbox for elevating one’s voice and, just as often, quieting someone else’s.

This month, armed protesters appeared outside an elections center in Phoenix, hurling baseless accusations that the election for governor had been stolen from the Republican, Kari Lake. In October, Proud Boys with guns joined a rally in Nashville where conservative lawmakers spoke against transgender medical treatments for minors.

In June, armed demonstrations around the United States amounted to nearly one a day. A group led by a former Republican state legislator protested a gay pride event in a public park in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Men with guns interrupted a Juneteenth festival in Franklin, Tenn., handing out fliers claiming that white people were being replaced. Among the others were rallies in support of gun rights in Delaware and abortion rights in Georgia.

Whether at the local library, in a park or on Main Street, most of these incidents happen where Republicans have fought to expand the ability to bear arms in public, a movement bolstered by a recent Supreme Court ruling on the right to carry firearms outside the home. The loosening of limits has occurred as violent political rhetoric rises and the police in some places fear bloodshed among an armed populace on a hair trigger.

But the effects of more guns in public spaces have not been evenly felt. A partisan divide — with Democrats largely eschewing firearms and Republicans embracing them — has warped civic discourse. Deploying the Second Amendment in service of the First has become a way to buttress a policy argument, a sort of silent, if intimidating, bullhorn.

“It’s disappointing we’ve gotten to that state in our country,” said Kevin Thompson, executive director of the Museum of Science & History in Memphis, Tenn., where armed protesters led to the cancellation of an L.G.B.T.Q. event in September. “What I saw was a group of folks who did not want to engage in any sort of dialogue and just wanted to impose their belief.”

A New York Times analysis of more than 700 armed demonstrations found that, at about 77 percent of them, people openly carrying guns represented right-wing views, such as opposition to L.G.B.T.Q. rights and abortion access, hostility to racial justice rallies and support for former President Donald J. Trump’s lie of winning the 2020 election.

The records, from January 2020 to last week, were compiled by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, a nonprofit that tracks political violence around the world. The Times also interviewed witnesses to other, smaller-scale incidents not captured by the data, including encounters with armed people at indoor public meetings.

Pelosi's Attacker Is A Q-anon Nut, A Bigot, And A Trumper

It should come as no surprise that the man attacking Mr. Pelosi was a right-wing scumbag. Here's some of what the Los Angeles Times says about him:

In the months before police accused him of attacking House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Friday morning, David DePape had been drifting further into the world of far-right conspiracies, antisemitism and hate, according to a Times review of his online accounts.

In a personal blog that DePape maintained, posts include such topics as “Manipulation of History,” “Holohoax” and “It’s OK to be white.” He mentioned 4chan, a favorite message board of the far right. He posted videos about conspiracies involving COVID-19 vaccines and the war in Ukraine being a ploy for Jewish people to buy land.

DePape’s screeds included posts about QAnon, an unfounded theory that former President Trump is at war with a cabal of Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring and control the world. In an Aug. 23 entry titled “Q,” DePape wrote: “Either Q is Trump himself or Q is the deepstate moles within Trumps inner circle.”. . .

DePape followed a number of conservative creators online, including Tim Pool, Glenn Beck, DailyWire+ and the Epoch Times. He also followed an account on YouTube called Black Pilled and reposted several of its videos on his blog. “Blackpilling” is internet slang for coming to believe supposedly unacceptable facts about society, and the reposted videos include accusations such as the FBI covering up child rape. . . .

When DePape was sounding off about QAnon, he posted: “Remember when the UK arrested parents for trying to rescue their children from being gang banged at pedo rape parties and f— LET the pedo’s CONTINUE their kiddie rape orgies,” he continued.

Another post referenced “pizzagate,” a bogus conspiracy theory that posited that children were trapped in a sexual abuse ring in a Washington, D.C., pizzeria run by Hillary Clinton and a chief aide.

“Pizza gate is connected to Epstien hahahahha,” a post from Aug. 23 read. “My friends would be like pizza gate was debunked their is NO such thing as elite pedophile sex rings and I’m like HELLO Epstein what planet are you on?”

In another, he called “equity” a leftist dog whistle “for the systematic oppression of white people” and “diversity” a “dog whistle for the genocide of the white race.” In others, he posted separate videos questioning the Holocaust and alleging Jewish bankers were responsible for Hitler’s rise to power. . . .

DePape posted videos to Facebook by MyPillow Chief Executive Mike Lindell saying that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, according to reports.

He also linked to sites with claims about the deadliness of COVID-19 vaccines.

Christian Right Has A Serious Problem With Ethics/Morality

Right-wing christians want you to believe they occupy the moral and ethical high ground. That's not reality. Here's an op-ed by Ja'han Jones at MSNBC.com:

The conservative, Christian movement is better positioned to impose its will on American politics today than at any other time in recent memory, thanks to right-wing judges ex-President Donald Trump put on the federal bench and Supreme Court. 

On everything from abortion to education, courts have sided with Christian ideology across the land. Meanwhile, the facade of Christian moral superiority continues to crumble.

A couple of incidents come to mind. First, there’s the scandal still unfolding at Agapè Boarding School, a Christian facility for young men in Missouri that's facing a slew of child abuse allegations. Agapè pitches guardians on its ability to “biblically teach your child the importance of submission to authority and the joys of being an obedient law-abiding citizen.”

It’s unclear what that means, but if you believe allegations from several students who attended the school, it translates too frequently into assault. The Missouri State Highway Patrol has been investigating Agapè for systemic child abuse for more than a year now. On Monday, The Daily Beast reported new details about several students who have filed lawsuits alleging they were sexually abused and beaten by workers at the school. (Agapè denied the allegations in a statement to The Daily Beast.)

That alleged culture of abuse sounds similar to the one victims say was fostered by the Southern Baptist Convention, an ultraconservative denomination of Christian nationalists. In May, church leaders released a report showing hundreds of pastors and church workers have been accused of sexual abuse. The SBC, which is in ideological lockstep with the conservative movement, has since released the names of pastors it says were accused between 2000 and 2019. When the news dropped, SBC President Ed Litton said in a statement there “are not adequate words to express my sorrow at the things revealed in this report,” and that Southern Baptists “must resolve to change our culture and implement desperately needed reforms.”

These revelations are quite damning for the conservative, Christian movement and its members. For months, we've seen members of the Christian right framing themselves as protectors of children and ethical stewards of our world. But it's an impossible sell when the worlds they operate appear even more broken than the one they want to “fix.”

NOTE - They are also big supporters of Trump's coup attempt, and seem to have a disdain for our democracy.

Republicans Are Waging A War Against Women Having Sex

 Mara Gay exposes the GOP's war on women having sex in this op-ed in The New York Times:

One day I hope to become a mother. But for now I have sex just because I like it. Sex is fun.

For the puritanical tyrants seeking to control our bodies, that’s a problem. This radical minority, including the right-wing faction on the Supreme Court, probably won’t stop at banning abortion. If we take Justice Clarence Thomas at his word — and there’s no reason not to — the right to contraception could be the next to fall. Why? Because many in this movement are animated by an insatiable desire to punish women who have sex on our own terms and enjoy it.

State laws restricting or banning abortion are an attack on American women who decide whether, when and how to have children. They are part of a movement intended to curb the hard-won freedom to pursue careers and joys outside the confines of wifehood and motherhood. Some Republicans have said just this, and it’s important that we believe them.

Take J.D. Vance, the G.O.P. nominee for Senate in Ohio, who apparently thinks women like me belong at home, not writing opinions in national newspapers: “If your worldview tells you that it’s bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at The New York Times or Goldman Sachs, you’ve been had,” Mr. Vance wrote recently on Twitter.

Charlie Shepherd, an Idaho state representative, said he voted against using federal funds to increase early childhood education because “any bill that makes it easier or more convenient for mothers to come out of the home and let others raise their child, I don’t think that’s a good direction for us to be going.”

One tweeter said the quiet part out loud: “If you’re scared for your daughter’s future, maybe focus on raising her to not be a slut.”

A radical minority of Americans wants to make an example of women who have sex outside marriage, women who compete with men in the workplace, women who are independent and who cannot be controlled. That’s part of why birth control is likely their next target. That’s why the same movement that claims to care about babies is so uninterested in the health and lives of the people who bring them into this world, and so hostile to the policies that would support those children and their families after they are born.

In the America where I came of age, I was told my life was worth more than my ability to have babies. And my sexuality was nothing to be ashamed of.

I read Audre Lorde, who years earlier had explored the power of the erotic, a resource that, she wrote, “lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane” within each of us as women. I learned about the Black feminists who proclaimed that “choice is the essence of freedom” and saw reproductive rights as essential to the fight against white supremacy and its insidious attempts to control the lives and bodies of Black people. “Oh yes, we have known how painful it is to be without choice in this land,” a 1989 declaration signed by a group of prominent Black women in support of abortion rights read. “We who have been oppressed should not be swayed in our opposition to tyranny, of any kind.”

At the large and diverse public suburban New York City schools I attended in the early 2000s, we weren’t shamed or taught that abstinence was the only righteous path. The focus was on how to practice sex safely and responsibly, and with consent. We were taught that our sexuality was part of our humanity, and that it belonged to us alone.

Later, when I was a student at the University of Michigan, the movement for sex positivity was thrilling and liberating. We learned that pleasurable sexual experiences between consenting adults of all genders and orientations were to be celebrated. Every year the school held a safe-sex fair, handing out condoms and prescriptions for Plan B. One year the students erected a giant replica of a vulva, tall enough to walk through, complete with a working bell at the top where the clitoris would be. That used to be a fun memory for me. Now what I think about is how I had more rights then, over a decade ago, than I have today.

One reason I practice safe sex is thanks to that comprehensive, humane sex education. Another is the basic self-respect that comes from growing up in an America that, while imperfect, has come to view women as equal citizens and human beings.

It’s clear that a radical minority in the United States — from the right-wing zealots on the Supreme Court to a group of sexually illiterate politicians who clearly weren’t paying attention in health class — sees us differently.

Just one example is Yesli Vega, a Republican congressional candidate in Virginia who dismissed concerns about women being forced to carry pregnancies that result from rape, saying in audio recordings leaked recently that it wouldn’t surprise her if it were harder to become pregnant from rape because “it’s not something that’s happening organically” and rapists do it “quickly.”

This movement has relegated the women of this country to second-class citizenship, stripped us of autonomy over our own bodies and denied us essential health care. Now the people behind it are betting that our sense of hopelessness will paralyze us, allowing them to carry out their repressed vision of America without resistance.

But there are more of us than there are of them. That’s especially true if American men recognize that their way of life is also under attack. Men also have sex for pleasure. This is not just a women’s issue.

In the days after Roe fell, I have been wondering if the men I’ve dated are reflecting on how they too have benefited from the rights I and other American women enjoyed for the past half-century. What might their lives be like if I hadn’t had access to emergency contraception or birth control? Would they have the jobs, the marriages, the children, the freedom they do today?

They’re good men, and I’m happy for them. I’d also like to ask: Will I see you at the next protest? Join us.

Right-Wingers Blame Trans Woman For Uvalde Murders

 

Right-wingers don't want to admit that this country has too many guns and gun laws that are far too lax, so they look for other excuses. Sadly, they have now decided to blame transgendered people. It's a stupid and bigoted theory, but any conspiracy theory is better for these nuts that facing the truth.

The following is part of an op-ed at MSNBC.com by Katelyn Burns:

It didn’t take long after an 18-year-old brutally murdered 19 schoolchildren and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, before the internet misinformation machine cranked into action. Starting on 4chan, a false rumor began to spread that the school shooter was a trans woman named Sam. Right-wing troll Candace Owens continued to push the false narrative long after it had been disproved. The online chatter even grew to the point where far-right Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona claimed the shooter was trans in a since-deleted tweet.

The woman targeted by the false accusation eventually had to post a photo of herself holding a sign with the date, which was after the shooter had died by police fire during the attack, to prove she was not the shooter. Later that evening, a teenage trans girl in El Paso was accosted by a group of men who taunted her with the internet rumor, insisting the Uvalde shooter was one of her “sisters.”

This is not the first time a false narrative that a shooter was a trans woman has quickly taken hold following a mass murder. In 2015, a Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado Springs, Colorado, was shot up by a gunman who killed three people and injured nine. Not long after the shooting, the far right Gateway Pundit reported that the shooter was registered as female on his voter registration card, and an internet conspiracy theory was born. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz repeated the rumor in a statement to the press, claiming the shooter was a “transgendered leftist.”

In 2018, a cisgender woman carried out a shooting at YouTube’s headquarters in San Bruno, California, wounding three people before dying by suicide. The internet transphobia mob quickly sprang into action, falsely claiming that cis women aren’t capable of perpetrating violence on that scale and concluding that the shooter must have been trans.

They pored over hours of her videos, picking apart her Persian appearance and voice and deeming both to be inadequately feminine to belong to someone born female. This conspiracy theory gained much traction on gender-critical and far-right Twitter, reaching higher profile figures like far-right activist Laura Loomer, who then spread the false rumor to their followers. After a deep investigation that involved speaking with San Bernardino police and the coroner’s office, and obtaining the shooter’s immigration documents, I could conclude that she was not transgender at all.

And now the Uvalde school shooting can be added to a — growing, if we are to be realistic — list of gun atrocities falsely attributed to a trans person.

This keeps happening over and over again because of the larger project of monstering trans people, particularly trans women, that much of the far right and its gender-critical allies have engaged in for the past several years. . . .

The rhetoric has only increased over the past several years. In 2018, gender-critical feminist Sheila Jeffreys told a U.K. Parliament panel that trans women were “parasites.” As the outrageous claims built, some American conservative politicians decided to take action. In Texas, where this week’s shooting occurred, Gov. Gregg Abbott and his attorney general Ken Paxton have sought to essentially make it illegal to be a trans kid or teenager. They’ve deemed providing a trans minor with trans health care a form of child abuse, meaning loving parents who support their children’s well-being can have their kids taken from their homes by the state as a result.

The El Paso teen trans girl who was assaulted by a group of grown men on Tuesday tried to report the incident to her local police department, but the police refused to file an assault report. The 17-year-old tried to contact a local LGBTQ support center but was turned away because the center had stopped providing services to trans people; it became too risky after Abbott’s bill went into effect. She was eventually forced to contact an Indiana-based LGBTQ support line, which also tried to help her report the assault to the police, who again declined to take a report.

The hostile environment against trans people, so often fostered in far-right chat rooms and social media platforms, is amplified largely by right-wing and centrist media. It’s helped create fertile ground for open transphobia, where trans people are easily blamed for every societal ill, even a deadly school shooting. You don’t get to this place where trans people are consistently falsely slandered and denied legal and emotional support through civilized or informed debate. You get here by demonizing a tiny, near powerless minority.

That’s been the endgame for most of the media makers who push these ridiculous transphobic narratives. Let’s keep that in mind the next time you hear some outrageous story about something a trans person allegedly did.