Originally Authored at TheFederalist.com
Only five days have passed since a 17-year-old shot up his school in Perry, Iowa, killing one and injuring five. Yet anyone looking for updates about the tragedy would be hard-pressed to find it on the front pages of any corporate outlet, unusual given the media’s typical amplification of such tragedies.
The press is known for lengthy coverage glamorizing killers, inspiring copycat acts, and using shootings to push gun control. When covering tragedies that contradict leftist claims, however, Democrats and their cronies in the corrupt media quickly go radio silent.
The Perry shooting is one such case. Once the Iowa killer was identified as a teen who flirted with Democrat gender ideology, headlines and TV segments about his shooting spree slowed to a trickle. The fact that the shooter used a shotgun and small-caliber pistol instead of the ever-popular Democrat boogieman, the AR-15, also likely played a role in the story’s disappearance.
Those media that did bother to keep coverage of the issue going, like NBC, sought to shift blame from the shooter to sexual sanity advocates such as Libs of TikTok Founder Chaya Raichik. She dares to report on the growing trend of violent transgender shooters, including details linking the Iowa school shooter to gender-fluid identity politics.
“Each time there is a mass shooting where the shooter’s identity is possibly LGBT, you and other conservative influencers appear to fixate on this and suggest to your millions of followers that people with LGBT identities are prone to violence,” NBC’s LGBT issues writer Matt Lavietes wrote in a comment request Raichik posted. “What would you say to your critics who say you’re stoking fear, hatred, and potential violence against a marginalized group of people?”
It wasn’t long before Lavietes’s article, “Musk and far-right figures seize on Iowa shooter’s possible LGBTQ identity,” began making its rounds.
Democrats and the press followed a similar playbook in 2023 when a woman masquerading as a man shot and killed three children and three staff at a small Christian school in Nashville. They framed Christians as the perpetrators of the shooting rather than the victims and blamed Tennessee gun laws, gun lovers, and laws protecting children from drag shows and irreversible sexual disfigurement. Some outlets even complained that authorities “misgendered” the shooter.
When a man shot and killed five at Old National Bank in Lousiville, Kentucky in the name of furthering the left’s gun-control agenda, gun grabbers also used the shooter’s logic to fuel Democrats’ push for unconstitutional red-flag laws.
The corporate media’s double standards on shootings should not surprise Americans, 39 percent of whom say they do not trust media at all. These double standards should, however, enrage them.
For noticing patterns in violence among gender-indoctrinated kids and warning that taking away Second Amendment rights won’t solve the mental health crisis or the weakening family and community ties that exacerbate these tragedies, the media believes conservatives deserve more criticism. The press is perfectly content smearing their political enemies with the acts of those so evil they’d murder children, while refusing ever to look in the mirror.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.