“To punish the oppressors of humanity is clemency; to forgive them is cruelty.”

Yesterday, on September 10, 2025, the white supremacist nazi Charlie Kirk was shot dead at a hate rally. Sorry, Charlie! He was silenced in the midst of a racist screed about the origins of gun violence in the US — one he’s practiced before. He was merely expressing the unspoken rules of gun ownership in the United States out loud.

Kirk was asked “Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last ten years?” The nazi replied, “Too many.” The audience member responded, “In America, it’s five. Now, five is a lot, right, I’m going to give you — I’m going to give you some credit. Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last ten years?”

Kirk replied, in his last words, “Counting or not counting gang violence?”

What stirring last words! Why did he spend his final breath asking his audience whether they wanted to count “gang violence” in the list of mass shootings? Because for Charlie Kirk and the ruling class, the question of gun ownership is simple. Every person should own a gun. The unspoken corollary to that is that only property owners are people.

For Charlie Kirk, as for the many others in the ruling class, rights are for property owners. Property owners are overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly men. Kirk knew that. He didn’t want “criminals” to own guns, and wouldn’t you know it, many “crimes” are defined or criminalized by poverty. He doesn’t want trans people to own guns, only cis people. Kirk stood for the proposition that all cis white men should own a house and a gun, they should patrol the internal frontier of their country against the poor, against Black people, against trans people, and against workers.

Sorry, Charlie!

We have not one tear to shed for Mr. Kirk, his backers, his supporters, or his ruling class friends. And unlike Mr. Kirk, we don’t agree that property owners should have guns. Only the working class, the poor, the sex-oppressed, the nationally oppressed and their agents, organizations, and tribunes should be armed. Until that day comes, Mr. Kirks’ allies will continue to talk out of the side of their necks.

Since the tragic Covenant School shooting in Nashville on March 27th, the capitalist media and fascist reactionaries have begun a campaign of defamation on several trans women. Kayla Denker, a trans communist and armed community defense advocate, as well as Alana McLaughlin, a trans MMA fighter of similar political background, have been continuously slandered as terrorists, antifa thugs, extremists, and supporters of Audrey Hale, the perpetrator of the Covenant School shooting. In typical fashion, the capitalist promise of free speech and free press seems to only mean the right of the ruling class to lie with impunity while silencing and drowning out the truth. It would seem ruining the life of upstanding citizens is of no consequence to the fearmongering corporate media when profit can be made from inciting outrage!

Two particularly harmful lies have been boosted by the mainstream press. On March 5th, Ms. Denker posted a video on TikTok and Twitter posing with a rifle and a caption supporting armed self defense:

However, after the Nashville shooting, right-wing trolls sent her video viral, insinuating that it was published after the shooting and in solidarity with Audrey Hale. This blatant lie was then picked up on by the Daily Mail, who not only repeated the lie — and as of writing this article, the lie remains published — but the article as originally published called her an Antifa member and implied a connection between her and a “Trans Day of Vengeance” march — which had also been scheduled prior to the shooting. Ms. Denker has made clear she has no affiliation with any organizations and was not involved with organizing any march. In a follow-up video responding to the press coverage, she resolutely refuted any connection with or sympathy for Audrey Hale, condemning his actions. Similar coverage was made by Newsweek, though the story has since been edited to reflect proper chronology.

Even with a late (and partial) correction to the record, it’s clear that the damage of the inflammatory rhetoric and defamation has already been done, as Ms. Denker privately expressed fears that she may lose her Archeology job over the overwhelming onslaught of character assassination from the press and social media.

It seems that Ms. Denker’s fears were well founded. After two weeks of probation — enough time for the media to move on — she was indeed fired from her job as an archeologist. Where are the crusaders against cancel-culture who will defend a trans woman wrongfully terminated over pressure from social media? Where are our valiant defenders of free speech? Apparently nowhere to be found! And as if potentially ruining a woman’s career were not enough, Ms. Denker has also been the victim of an onslaught of personal hate, harassment, and even death threats. Apparently the volume of death threats reached such an unprecedented degree that the FBI contacted her to warn her about them and even encouraged her to remain armed.

Then there is the coverage of Alana McLaughlin — or rather, a right-wing sock puppet account posing as Alana:

This is not Ms. McLaughlin’s account, nor her words. Any child could easily recognize this cartoonishly villainous monologue as bait intended to incite feelings of victimhood in Christian nationalists. And yet the excellent journalists of the Daily Mail, with all the integrity of a used condom, uncritically shared the post without investigation, going so far as to label the troll as an “activist.” Such malpractice! Such apathy to truth! It’s truly unforgivable. Furthermore, as a trans woman in sports, Ms. McLaughlin is certainly no stranger to controversy; commenting on the disinformation, she simply expressed intentions to sue the Daily Mail:

This is not simply the honest failure of the journalism industry, nor even simply the opportunism of individual actors in the market. Ms Denker and McLaughlin are simply casualties amid a coordinated push to target the rights of all trans people, who are being held collectively responsible for the actions of Mr. Hale. Take, for example, Benny Johnson, production chief at Turning Point USA, who tweeted to an audience of over a million people that: “One thing is VERY clear: the modern trans movement is radicalizing activists into terrorists.” Former president Donald Trump, as well as representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, both publicly speculated about the role of hormones in Mr. Hale’s actions, despite no evidence that he was even on hormone replacement therapy — let alone in lieu of any evidence that masculinizing HRT causes violent aggression in trans men. Donald Trump Jr. similarly expressed that “there’s a clear epidemic of trans/non-binary mass shooters.” Ben Shapiro, infamous fascist pundit and media personality, went so far as to advocate banning trans people from owning firearms. These sentiments are a clear pattern of escalating fascist rhetoric from the far-right demagogues in media and politics.

As the American Empire loses its grasp on its position in the current imperialist order, as conditions within the empire continue to deteriorate and destabilize, it is increasingly imperative for fascists to manufacture a scapegoat responsible for all the woes of society — lest people develop class consciousness and turn against the capitalist system. Between the necessity to create such a bogeyman, and between the financial imperatives of profit-driven and advertisement funded “news” networks to prioritize clicks and views beyond all else, this hate mongering is the inevitable result. Capitalism, decaying empires, they breed hate and fear to sow division among the ranks of the working class, to prevent unity and solidarity, to prevent revolution. Only once political and economic power has been seized and nationalized by the working class can this crisis of disinformation be resolved! Only then can fascism be vanquished for good! Only then can transmisogyny be destroyed!

As for Ms. Denker, like all the other casualties of the capitalist press, she is now left to fend for herself. Please consider contributing to her gofundme campaign to cover legal and survival funds.

Information obtained from social media indicates that the 28-year-old shooter, who was at first identified by police as a woman, may in fact have been a transgender man.

We do not know the perpetrator’s motive. Police stated that the killer was suffering from, and receiving treatment from a doctor for, an “emotional disorder” related to the loss of a friend. His parents stated that they did not believe their son owned any weapons, and that he shouldn’t have been allowed to, due to his psychological condition. We also know that the killer formerly attended the Covenant School. The victims appear to have been shot at random.

Despite the uncertainties surrounding the Covenant School shooter’s motive and the little we know about his psychological profile, the latest concerted anti-trans narrative, already spinning through this country’s corporate media and its halls of power, goes that transgender people are, by virtue of being trans, by virtue of existing, mentally ill and prone to violence, and must be deprived of the right to own and bear arms, intensively policed, driven underground, and institutionalized.

To no one’s surprise — other than the beady-eyed, sieg-heiling drones who make a habit of watching Fox News and other fascist media — the facts don’t line up with the latest anti-trans scapegoating. A database compiled by the Violence Project shows that an overwhelming 97.7% of all known mass shooters have been cisgender men; all of the remaining 2.3%, with one exception — the latest mass shooting at the Covenant School — have been cisgender women. That means that the Covenant School mass shooting is likely the first in history committed by a transgender person of either gender.

This week’s tragedy-exploitation and scapegoating is only the latest push in a years-long campaign that has been ruthlessly waged by the right-wing of U.S. fascism to eliminate the civil rights of transgender people.

Only through a century and more of persistent struggle, and only thanks to immeasurable personal sacrifices borne by our communities and our activists, have LGBT people in this country gained even a modicum of social acceptance, safety, civil rights, and equality before the law.

But particularly in the last few years, with the ascendance of a new breed of rabid Trumpites, an increasingly fascistic Republican Party is going on the offensive in the Federal and state governments against LGBT, and especially transgender, rights. This offensive includes legislation to deprive transgender children of healthcare, to ban drag shows and crossdressing, and to redefine gender along incoherently “biological” lines. According to a mapping project created by the American Civil Liberties Union, 435 anti-LGBT bills have been introduced in state legislatures across the country in 2023, already breaking the previous record of 315 set in 2022. The vast majority of these bills have been and will continue to be defeated in their state legislatures, but that will not deter the Republican Party’s anti-LGBT crusade; the small minority that have passed severely curtail the rights of LGBT people, and the fascists will take every last inch of ground they can.

The GOP’s anti-LGBT crusade also coincides with its offensive against reproductive rights — bans on abortion, contraception, and other reproductive healthcare. These assaults have been enabled by the right-fascist Supreme Court’s decision in the 2022 case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned the federal right to an abortion, ruled “constitutionally” protected by the Court in its decision in the 1973 Roe v. Wade case.

The State of Tennessee, where the Covenant School mass shooting took place, has itself been swept up in this anti-LGBT crusade.

On Friday, March 31, a Trump-appointed federal judge ordered a two-week delay on the implementation of a new Tennessee law, passed by a Republican-supermajority state legislature, aimed at banning drag shows across the state, citing its possible infringement upon First Amendment rights to freedom of speech. The judge’s order followed a legal challenge by a Memphis venue that often hosts drag shows.

Tennessee is also one of 11 states that have recently passed laws banning gender-affirming healthcare to transgender youth (with some laws restricting healthcare up to ages 21 and 26) and criminalizing medical doctors who provide transgender healthcare services. The legislatures of around 20 other states are considering similar bans. This is despite the wide consensus among experts and advocates that access of transgender youth to gender-affirming healthcare presents no danger, drastically improves quality of life, and lowers risk of suicide — a critical factor, given the extremely high rates of depression and suicidality among transgender youth.

Unfortunately, scientific consensus and advocacy alone won’t make a dent in the current anti-LGBT crusade. Fascists are not concerned with science or ethics. Fascism, by its very nature, embraces irrationality, pseudoscience, and cruelty. The objective harms wreaked upon vulnerable LGBT youth by anti-LGBT legislation is precisely its purpose. It is a policy of elimination.

In Nebraska, State Senator Machaela Cavanaugh began a filibuster in February in an attempt to block a bill barring minors from receiving gender-affirming healthcare. “If you want to inflict pain on our children, I am going to inflict pain upon this body,” she said. On March 16 of this year, Kentucky Republicans passed a similar ban in the face of mass public opposition, including those in the gallery of the Kentucky senate who screamed at the body. State Senator Berg, who lost her transgender son Henry to suicide this year, said “This is absolutely willful hate for a small group of people that are the weakest and most vulnerable.” As the bill passed despite her valiant efforts to block it, she openly wept.

The point of this fascist anti-LGBT crusade is simple: The Republicans are exploiting anti-LGBT and other reactionary beliefs and moods among large sectors of the public in order to regain their lost popularity. In order to recoup the GOP’s 2020 general elections losses (largely owing to mass discontent and disgust with the fascist Donald Trump administration), and their party’s lackluster performance in the 2022 midterms (which, in spite of the actively decaying Joe Biden’s souring public image and unpopularity, did not deliver a GOP “clean sweep” of both houses of Congress), the extreme-right Republicans are presenting themselves as the party of conservative Christian morality and regression in an era marked by expanding civil liberties.

There is also a struggle raging within the GOP: the “moderate” right-wing old guard, who have controlled the party since the 1980s, and the extreme-right Trumpites, who want to consolidate their growing influence in the Republican voter base, supplant the old “moderate” tendency, and establish themselves as the party’s dominant wing.

While the anti-LGBT crusade advances through the Federal and state governments and the U.S. court system, civilian-fascist militias are assembling in the streets, threatening to massacre transgender and gender-nonconforming people at bars, nightclubs, and other public venues. Only a few months ago, in November 2022, a fascist terrorist, motivated by anti-trans hatred and provoked by anti-trans news media sensationalism, stormed the LGBT-friendly Club Q nightclub in Colorado Springs, murdering five people before he was tackled to the ground by patrons and staff, disarmed, and beaten into incapacitation.

On the other “side” of U.S. politics, the Covenant School shooting has reignited calls by some sections of the Democratic Party, led by President Biden himself, for stricter “gun control” legislation, including a ban on military-grade rifles. Some well-meaning LGBT liberals believe that this liberal approach is the “answer” to the U.S. Empire’s “gun violence” epidemic. But the truth of the matter is that this horrific epidemic cannot be treated, let alone cured, with any amount of liberal reforms, for mass violence is, in the final analysis, nothing but the expression of ascending fascism, and fascism is built into the U.S. Empire’s very foundations: Fascism is the logical conclusion to centuries of the most barbaric regime of settler-colonialism, white supremacy, slavery, and world imperialism in history. The only “cure” is the utter abolition of the illegitimate U.S. Empire; only by overthrowing our capitalist rulers, dismantling their empire, and decolonizing this continent can U.S. fascism, and its attendant mass violence, be eliminated once and for all.

We know well that transgender people are far more likely to be the victims of violent crimes, including mass shootings, than the perpetrators. We must anticipate that violence against our friends, loved ones, and communities will only intensify and accelerate in lockstep with political and legal efforts to eliminate our civil rights and drive us back underground. We must prepare ourselves and our communities accordingly. Our oppressors will not voluntarily relinquish their arms; we must not relinquish ours. Our oppressors will not conscientiously emancipate us — they have no conscience. We must emancipate ourselves.

As we wrote last year, in the aftermath of the Colorado Springs massacre, LGBT people must defend ourselves. We must safeguard our own communities by arming and organizing ourselves for community self-defense — against civilian-fascist terrorists, against police brutality, and against an increasingly fascistic government, captured by political forces that openly declare their plans to exterminate us.