National Public Radio on Friday tried hard to pretend there were no anti-Trump, anti-Christian, or anti-Semitic motives to be found in the August 27 murder of two children at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis by a male shooter who identified as “transgender.” The online headline to the radio report underlined the falsehood: “‘There is no message’: The search for ideological motives in the Minneapolis shooting.”
Enter NPR’s “domestic extremism correspondent’ (but only for “right-wing” extremism), Odette Yousef.
Although the transgender shooter’s weapon collection was covered with specific, hateful slogans (“Kill Donald Trump,” “Burn Israel,” “6 million wasn’t enough,” “Where is your God now?”), and a notebook owned by the shooter contained a drawing laying out the location of the pews inside the church, NPR implausibly suggested there was no motive to be found, certainly not a left-wing anti-church one.
(The headline quote “There is no message” doesn’t appear in the transcript itself, but in a longer, related text report from Yousef. It comes from a slogan on one of the weapons — the only slogan NPR found important.)
Host Ailsa Chang opened the denial session:
AILSA CHANG, HOST: Today, FBI Director Kash Patel posted on X that yesterday’s mass shooting at a Minneapolis church was, quote, “an act of domestic terrorism motivated by a hate-filled ideology.” Extremism analysts have been looking through extensive materials that the shooter is presumed to have shared on a YouTube account, and some of these experts say the videos do not paint a picture of any motive. NPR domestic extremism correspondent Odette Yousef joins us now….I just want to start with what specifically FBI Director Patel cites as evidence that this attack was ideologically driven. He claims that – let’s see – the shooter made, quote, “anti-Catholic, antireligious references,” also expressed animus towards Jewish people and Israel and that the shooter called for violence against President Trump. Now, how does all of that line up with what you and analysts have found?
YOUSEF: So I need to preface this with some caveats. First of all, the FBI has access to far more information than I or any extremism researchers can access….that said, the picture that’s emerging for researchers that I’ve spoken with is quite different from what the FBI is saying. The FBI is highlighting what it is calling anti-Catholic messages as well as anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian messages. The materials I’ve seen include, for example, a picture of Jesus crucified that is mounted onto a shooting target. So perhaps anti-Christian but not specifically anti-Catholic. And more notably, you know, there is a stew of hatreds here. You know, there is antisemitism in there. There’s also anti-Muslim references. But the bigger point is that to focus on any single one would be to cherry-pick. You know, instead, the overwhelming picture here is of somebody who was obsessed with mass shooters and a specific aesthetic of mass shooters but not an ideology. The goal was the violence itself and to achieve notoriety through it.
Chang raised a conservative point only for Yousef to dismiss it:
I also want to mention that there’s been a lot of discussion among some conservatives and the media about how the shooter’s gender identity may be relevant here. What do the researchers that you’re talking to – what are they saying about that?
Yousef came close to blaming society’s treatment of transgenders for the shooter’s vile act:
…the numbers simply don’t bear out the idea that trans people are disproportionately responsible for mass shootings in the U.S. But the trans community in the U.S. is vulnerable, and that could potentially make them susceptible to online radicalization in ways others may not be.
What made this segment galling: Yousef had never had a problem finding right-wing extremism and radicalization everywhere, unearthing “anti-Semitic blood libel” in the populist countrified song “Rich Men North of Richmond” and anti-black racism in protecting Jewish students from anti-Semitic attacks on campus. But present her with a strongly left-wing coded killer who attacked a church and shot children, and suddenly motives get vague and impossible to pin down. Pathetic.
