‘Remembrance’ for a Criminal
17th February 2025
Six years ago (“The Media’s ‘Climate of Hate’ Myth,” American Spectator, Jan. 18, 2019), I examined the political forces behind allegations of an “epidemic” of violence against transgender people. The mainstream media were complicit in a propaganda campaign to convince the public that right-wing “hate” was responsible for this phenomenon. The propaganda campaign involved a running total of how many transgender people had been “murdered” during the current calender year, so that a news report about a recent death could include the fact that the victim was 14th (or 27th or whatever) such person killed in the U.S. that year.
Of course, the activists compiling those lists of transgender victims were not scrupulous about who got included in their totals — they wanted a big number to promote the EPIDEMIC OF HATE narrative, and relied upon the gullibility of journalists not to examine the details of these deaths on a case-by-case basis. Any reasonably curious person could do some basic research and realize that the “epidemic” narrative was bogus. The number of transgender victims whose deaths could be clearly attributed to “transphobia” was so close to zero as to be statistically neglible, a drop in the bucket in a nation where there are about 20,000 homicides a year. Let us stipulate that a drag queen who gets shot during an argument outside a bar at 3 a.m. may, in some vague way, be a victim of “transphobia,” but does it make sense to depict such an incident as evidence of a “Climate of Hate”? And yet this was the substance of the alleged “epidemic” of anti-transgender violence that the media kept hyping up during Donald Trump’s first term. Anyway . . .