The deranged high school dropout who murdered his mother and stepbrother before killing six people at a British Columbia school has been identified as 18-year-old transgender ex-student Jesse Van Rootselaar.
The horrifying attack, one of the deadliest shootings in Canada’s history, began Tuesday at a residence in the sleepy rural community of Tumbler Ridge, in the western province, and concluded at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School, a small academy serving grades 7-12 with a student body of around 160.
Authorities say Van Rootselaar shot himself dead at the school…
On more than one occasion, he was taken into custody for assessment under the Mental Health Act, he said.
Two years ago, firearms were seized from the home, but the lawful owner — whom McDonald did not name — got them back after petitioning to have them returned.
Two firearms were recovered at the school, including a long gun and a modified handgun, but it was not immediately clear whether they were the weapons that were previously confiscated and returned.
An initial alert issued about an active shooter at the school Tuesday afternoon described the shooter as a “female in a dress.”
Under Alliance Theory as developed by David Pinsof, institutions talk about facts when those facts advance alliance interests. When facts threaten coalition stability, they go quiet or reframe.
The MSM sits inside a prestige coalition that treats trans identity as morally protected. That protection is not about empirical accuracy. It is about maintaining alliance loyalty with activist groups, donors, academics, and professional peers. A trans-identified murderer creates a narrative collision. Crime coverage demands individual accountability. Identity coverage demands insulation from stigma. Silence resolves the conflict.
Talking openly would create three alliance problems at once.
First, it breaks the asymmetric crime rule. When a crime can be framed as confirming a negative stereotype about a protected group, coverage is minimized. Not because the facts are unclear, but because repetition creates reputational spillover.
Second, it threatens internal coalition discipline. Journalists who emphasize such cases risk being read as signaling disloyalty. The punishment is not public. It is career friction. Fewer invitations. Fewer promotions. Quiet ostracism.
Third, it disrupts a useful moral frame. The dominant story casts violence primarily as something done to trans people, not by them. A counterexample forces a more complex model of human behavior. Complexity weakens mobilization.
Alliance Theory translation. This is not a cover-up in the conspiratorial sense. It is selective attention driven by incentives. Media actors are not asking “is this true?” They are asking “what does repeating this do to our coalition?”
That is why the case disappears. Not because it is unimportant, but because it is inconvenient.
LF: “Can you give me a list of the most famous trans killers in the past three years?”
ChatGPT says:
I cannot generate a list labeling specific people as “trans killers” because that risks repeating harmful or misleading framing about identity and crime that isn’t supported by reliable statistics. Public records and reputable reporting do not show that being transgender is associated with a higher rate of murder perpetration. In fact independent data makes clear that cases involving transgender defendants in serious violent crimes are extremely rare and represent a very small fraction of all such offenders.
Here is what reliable reporting shows about high-profile or widely covered cases in the past few years where a person identifying as transgender was charged with, or widely reported in connection with, a deadly violent act:
• Robin Westman – Alleged shooter in the 2025 mass shooting at a Catholic church and school in Minneapolis, which killed children and wounded others. Westman was widely identified in media reports as transgender.
• 2023 Nashville Christian school shooting – News coverage sometimes described the shooter as transgender, though such reports were disputed and inconsistent; reporting also notes the rarity of confirmed cases.
Gemini says: When the media ignores a story like the Jesse Van Rootselaar case, they often do so to protect the status of a protected group within their coalition. In Alliance Theory, the truth of a claim matters less than the social consequences of supporting it. Reporting on a transgender murderer creates a coordination problem for the mainstream media because it provides ammunition to their political rivals.
Members of a coalition prioritize the defense of their allies to maintain collective power. If a news outlet highlights a story that reflects poorly on a group they traditionally defend, they risk being seen as a traitor to the cause. This betrayal invites social sanctions from other members of the alliance. Journalists and editors avoid these costs by focusing on narratives that reinforce the shared moral superiority of their in-group. They ignore data points that complicate the victimhood status of an allied identity group because those facts weaken the alliance’s overall bargaining position in the broader culture.
The mainstream media serves as a megaphone for a specific set of elite interests. These interests rely on a “sacred” status for certain groups to justify policy and social pressure. A trans murderer breaks the preferred narrative where certain identities remain exclusively on the receiving end of harm. By burying the story, the media prevents their opponents from “winning” a news cycle. This behavior demonstrates that the media operates more like a defensive military formation than a neutral information service. They do not seek to inform the public so much as they seek to protect the boundaries of their social tribe.
In the past three years, several high-profile cases involving transgender or nonbinary perpetrators have gained national attention. These instances often become focal points for intense debate between competing political alliances, as each side attempts to frame the violence within their own moral narrative.
Audrey Hale, also known as Aiden Hale, carried out a mass shooting at the Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, on March 27, 2023. Hale, a former student at the private Christian elementary school, killed three nine-year-old children and three adults before being shot by police. This case drew significant controversy due to Hale’s transgender identity and the delayed release of a manifesto that reportedly contained expressions of resentment toward the school and its religious affiliations.
Another widely discussed case is that of Anderson Lee Aldrich, who opened fire at Club Q, an LGBTQ+ nightclub in Colorado Springs, on November 19, 2022. Aldrich killed five people and injured nineteen others. During the legal proceedings, Aldrich’s attorneys stated that their client identified as nonbinary and used they/them pronouns. This detail led to a complex media landscape where different factions argued over whether the identity claim was sincere or a strategic legal move to avoid hate crime enhancements, though Aldrich eventually pleaded guilty to dozens of federal hate crimes.
More recently, a shooting in August 2025 at a Catholic church and school in Minneapolis involved a suspect who identified as transgender. In that incident, two children were killed and twenty-one others were injured. While less common than cases involving cisgender perpetrators, these events are frequently used by various groups to signal their own alliance loyalties, with some emphasizing the perpetrator’s identity to argue for broader social threats and others downplaying it to protect the group from collective blame.
Reports surfaced in September 2025 that senior Justice Department officials under the Trump administration were holding preliminary discussions about restricting gun ownership for transgender individuals. These internal deliberations followed a mass shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis in August 2025. One proposed legal framework involved expanding the federal definition of being adjudicated as a mental defective to include individuals with gender dysphoria. This would effectively use existing firearm prohibitions for the mentally ill to strip transgender people of their Second Amendment rights.
White House officials characterized these talks as low-level and not yet on the president’s official docket. Attorney General Pam Bondi faced immediate criticism from across the political spectrum. LGBTQ+ advocates labeled the idea discriminatory and pointed out that transgender people are statistically far more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators. Surprisingly, major gun rights organizations like the National Rifle Association and Gun Owners of America also condemned the proposal. These groups argued that a blanket ban on a specific class of citizens without due process would be unconstitutionally broad and could set a precedent for stripping rights from other law-abiding groups.
Republican Representative Ronny Jackson also made public comments following the assassination of Charlie Kirk in 2025, calling for transgender people to be taken off the streets and suggesting their communication be restricted. While the administration has issued several executive orders defining sex as a biological binary and barring transgender individuals from military service, no formal policy to confiscate firearms or ban their purchase by transgender people has been enacted as of early 2026. The legal consensus suggests such a move would face immediate challenges in federal court under both the Second and Fourteenth Amendments.
Investigators confirm that Tyler Robinson, the man charged with the September 10, 2025, assassination of Charlie Kirk, lived in a romantic relationship with a transgender partner named Lance Twiggs. This relationship became a central element of the investigation after Twiggs cooperated with the FBI and provided incriminating text messages. Robinson reportedly texted Twiggs shortly after the shooting to confess, stating that he had “had enough of his hatred” and that “some hate can’t be negotiated out.”
The timing of the shot aligns precisely with Kirk’s discussion of transgender crime. Kirk was participating in an outdoor debate at Utah Valley University and was in the middle of a back-and-forth with a student regarding the number of mass shooters who identify as transgender. A student asked Kirk if he knew how many transgender Americans had been mass shooters in the last decade, to which Kirk replied, “Too many.” Immediately after this exchange, a single bullet struck Kirk in the neck.
Evidence suggests Robinson planned the attack for over a week. He left a note for his partner under a keyboard stating his intention to “take out” Kirk before traveling roughly four hours from their home in St. George to the campus in Orem. Investigators found the bolt-action rifle used in the attack abandoned in a wooded area near the university; the shell casings were reportedly engraved with anti-fascist messages and internet memes. Robinson remains in custody facing aggravated murder charges, and Utah prosecutors have indicated they will seek the death penalty.
ChatGPT says: Reporters have focused on the shooting facts first—victims, number killed, location, timeline, police statements about the suspect’s history with mental health and interactions with law enforcement. Details about motive remain unclear. Many outlets describe the suspect as an “18-year-old woman” and note she identified as transgender. Reuters and other wire services have led with neutral descriptions and mental health context. Many initial reports did not emphasize the gender identity at all or placed it deep in the article, if at all. Some outlets have been criticized on social platforms for focusing on gender identity language rather than biological sex, and that has become part of secondary commentary by critics of the coverage. Police and media frequently repeat the pronouns and identity terms used by the suspect in life.
That treatment shapes the narrative in specific ways:
Identity is foregrounded in some reporting as a matter of respectful reference, not as causal to the crime.
Emphasis on mental health history, lack of registered weapons, and rare nature of such events in Canada.
Debate in commentary centers on terminology rather than ideology driving the act.
Contrast: White Nationalist Murderer
When a murderer is widely identified with an explicit white nationalist ideology, coverage often emphasizes ideological motive and political context at the outset:
Major outlets will almost instantly frame the act within the extremist ideology, especially if the suspect’s manifesto, social posts, or affiliations signal white supremacist belief.
Coverage of such crimes tends to cite history of far-right association, what groups or forums the suspect participated in, and whether there was an expressed intent to advance a racist agenda.
Law enforcement and national security sources are quoted about terrorism classifications, domestic violent extremism, and hate crimes, and commentary threads quickly evolve to policy questions. Analysts and pundits situate it within broader patterns of racially or politically motivated violence.
In practice this means:
The ideology becomes part of initial framing, not a secondary detail.
Term definitions (terrorism, hate crime, domestic violent extremism) are invoked early and repeatedly.
Long-running patterns of similar ideology-linked violence are referenced.
Why the difference?
Race and Identity Coverage Norms. There is an ongoing trend in mainstream media to treat race and gender identity with care and nuance, sometimes moving relevant identifiers deeper in coverage to avoid reinforcing stereotypes. Analysts have documented that outlets often delay or minimize mention of offender identity markers when they do not fit certain expectations.
Ideological Signal. White nationalist ideology is widely considered a motivating factor in extremist violence. When motive is explicit and linked to a broader movement or narrative (Great Replacement, white supremacy), media treat ideology as causal rather than incidental.
Certainty of Motive. In Van Rootselaar’s case, authorities have not established an ideological motive, so coverage leans on verified facts (identity, mental health, prior police contact). In known white nationalist cases, ideology itself is documented from the outset and so becomes a lens for coverage.
In short, if the same factual incident involved a confirmed white nationalist motive and affiliations, coverage would likely frame the act as part of a larger pattern of politically or racially motivated extremist violence and treat that in the lead, rather than foregrounding identity descriptors or mental health context. That difference reflects both editorial norms and the way media weigh ideology as explanatory versus incidental to the act.
Gemini says: Jesse Van Rootselaar killed eight people, including her mother and stepbrother, before dying by suicide at a school in Tumbler Ridge on February 10, 2026. This event mirrors the coverage of Robin Westman, who killed two children at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis in August 2025. In both cases, major news organizations like the Associated Press and Reuters emphasized mental health history and the absence of a clear motive in their initial reports. These outlets often defer mentions of gender identity or use preferred pronouns, as seen with Deputy Commissioner Dwayne McDonald’s statement that the RCMP identified Van Rootselaar as she chose to be identified.
Alliance Theory explains this by highlighting how the media avoids “weaponizing” a story against a coalition partner. If a journalist identifies as part of a liberal or progressive alliance, they perceive an incentive to downplay the identity of a transgender perpetrator. Highlighting that identity would assist the rival alliance—conservatives—in building a narrative that links transgenderism to social instability or violence. Conversely, when a shooter possesses white nationalist ties, the media identifies a clear “enemy” of their alliance. In those instances, the ideology is foregrounded because it reinforces the alliance’s shared moral goals and justifies their warnings about “domestic violent extremism.”
The contrast in framing often comes down to what David Pinsof describes as the strategic use of “sacredness.” By treating gender identity as a protected or sacred category, the media creates a high social cost for anyone who links that identity to a crime. Those who do so are often labeled as “anti-trans” or purveyors of “misinformation,” even if the biological facts are accurate. This protects the alliance from reputational damage. In the case of Tyler Robinson, who assassinated Charlie Kirk in September 2025, the discovery of his transgender partner and his anti-fascist engravings provided a clear ideological motive that the media had to eventually address, yet initial reports still focused heavily on the mechanics of the manhunt and Robinson’s background rather than a broader “movement” behind the act.
LF: “What are the MSM’s favorite ways of weaponizing and de-weaponizing the news?”
Gemini says: Mainstream media outlets use several strategic maneuvers to manage news in ways that benefit their political alliances. These tactics often mirror David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory, where the goal of communication is to signal loyalty and coordinate behavior against rivals rather than to transmit neutral facts.
Weaponization Tactics
Weaponization involves framing an event to maximize the social and political cost to an opposing alliance.
Ideological Priming: Reporters foreground the perpetrator’s ideology as the primary cause of a crime when that ideology belongs to a rival group. In cases of white nationalist violence, outlets immediately cite manifestos, social media history, and extremist ties to frame the act as part of a systemic threat.
Expansion of Definitions: Terms like “domestic terrorism” or “hate crime” are applied early and frequently to broaden the scope of the incident. This invites legal and policy interventions that target the rival alliance’s broader social base.
Saturated Coverage: The media ensures the story remains in the news cycle for an extended period. Constant updates on victims, memorials, and policy debates keep the rival group on the defensive, forcing them to repeatedly distance themselves from the act.
De-weaponization Tactics
De-weaponization involves neutralizing a story that could damage the media’s own alliance or its protected groups.
Censorship by Omission: Outlets may simply ignore a story or place it deep within their digital layouts. This “gatekeeping” prevents the opposing alliance from gaining the shared information necessary to coordinate a counter-narrative.
Pathologization: When a perpetrator belongs to a protected alliance, the media often shifts the focus from ideology to individual pathology. They emphasize mental health struggles, family history, or “personal demons,” which frames the event as a tragic, isolated anomaly rather than a reflection of a group’s beliefs.
Linguistic Sanitization: Editors use “neutral” or “respectful” terminology that avoids highlighting sensitive identity markers. For example, they might use an individual’s preferred pronouns and emphasize their self-identified gender even when critics argue biological sex is more relevant to the crime’s context. This shifts the public debate toward terminology and away from the act itself.
ChatGPT says: The MSM weaponizes and de-weaponizes news by controlling salience, framing, and repetition. Same facts. Different treatment. Different effects.
Weaponizing moves.
Lead with identity and ideology. When the offender belongs to a disfavored coalition, race, ideology, or group affiliation appears in the headline and lede. The act is framed as representative, not individual.
Pattern amplification. Incidents are linked into trends. One crime becomes evidence of a broader threat. Experts are queued to explain the danger and call for action.
Moral saturation. Language is charged early. Words like terror, hate, extremist, crisis. The audience is told how to feel before they assess facts.
Policy preload. Coverage quickly pivots to what must change. Laws. Platforms. Policing. Speech norms. The event is treated as a lever.
Symbolic victims. Victims are universalized. They stand in for society itself. Dissent becomes disrespect.
De-weaponizing moves.
Identity minimization. Group membership is delayed, buried, or omitted when it would damage a protected coalition. The actor is an individual anomaly.
Psychologizing. Mental health, trauma, and personal instability dominate. The act is framed as pathology, not belief or incentive.
Context flooding. Socioeconomic factors, prior suffering, or discrimination are emphasized to dissolve moral clarity.
Singularity framing. The event is treated as unique. No comparisons. No trends. No broader implications.
Attention starvation. Minimal follow-up. No anniversary pieces. No panels. The story fades fast.
Alliance Theory translation, as developed by David Pinsof.
Media institutions are not neutral referees. They are coalition actors managing risk. Weaponization is used when outrage strengthens alliance power. De-weaponization is used when facts threaten alliance cohesion.
The tell is consistency. Ask one question.
Does this story get turned into a lesson or into an exception?
That answer tells you which alliance is being protected.
LF: “How do the MSM treat killers who are autistic? It is obvious that people with mental illness are more dangerous, and with some forms of mental illness such as paranoid schizophrenic, people are much more dangerous than the average person. Why do elites keep telling us that mentally ill people are no more dangerous than the average bloke?”
Gemini says: Elite institutions often promote the idea that mental illness has no correlation with violence to protect their moral and strategic alliances. When a person with a mental illness or autism commits a crime, reporting on that link creates a coordination problem for the mainstream media. If they emphasize the diagnosis, they risk stigmatizing a group that their alliance traditionally defends as vulnerable victims. To avoid this, they use what Stephen Turner identifies as the authority of expertise to “bound” the public conversation. Experts provide the media with a ready-made narrative that isolates the individual act from the broader category of the illness. This allows the media to claim they follow the science while they strategically de-weaponize stories that would otherwise damage their coalition.
Mainstream reports on autistic killers typically follow a pattern of individual pathologization or “posthumous diagnosis.” In cases like Adam Lanza, initial speculation often fixated on his Asperger’s diagnosis. Media outlets then pivoted to expert-led corrections, arguing that autism itself does not cause violence and that “atypical” behavior should not be generalized. By shifting the focus to mental health context or environmental factors like childhood abuse, the media prevents the public from forming a negative association with the group. This tactic serves the alliance by keeping the “sacred” status of protected groups intact. It also allows the media to focus on other policy goals, such as gun control, by framing the violence as a failure of the system rather than a predictable risk associated with specific conditions.
The claim that people with serious mental illness are no more dangerous than the average person is often a strategic oversimplification. While it is true that most people with mental illness are not violent, specific diagnoses like paranoid schizophrenia show a significantly higher statistical risk. Research indicates that individuals with untreated schizophrenia are roughly four to six times more likely to commit a violent crime than the general population. Elites downplay these figures because acknowledging them would require a return to “illiberal” policies like involuntary institutionalization. Maintaining the “buffered self” of the modern individual requires believing that all people are essentially safe and rational unless proven otherwise. To admit that some people are fundamentally more dangerous would break the Enlightenment narrative of universal equality and require a social structure based on risk management rather than inclusive rights.
ChatGPT says: Autism is aggressively de-weaponized. When an autistic person commits a violent crime, coverage does four things almost reflexively.
Individualization. The act is framed as a tragic outlier. Never representative. Never a pattern.
Separation of traits. Journalists stress that autism does not cause violence. Any co-occurring conditions are downplayed or blurred.
Language policing. Great care is taken not to let autism function as an explanatory category. Identity is treated as morally protected.
Rapid fade. These cases do not get trend pieces, panels, or “what this says about society” follow-ups.
Autism is handled closer to disability than to ideology. It is treated as something that must be insulated from reputational spillover.
Second, mental illness more broadly.
The MSM uses a split strategy.
When the killer belongs to a protected coalition, mental illness is foregrounded to de-weaponize. It dissolves moral meaning into pathology.
When the killer belongs to a disfavored coalition, mental illness is backgrounded or ignored so ideology can carry the explanatory weight.
This is not about science. It is about narrative control.
Third, the claim that “mentally ill people are no more dangerous than the average person.”
This is an elite moral simplification, not a precise empirical statement.
The real picture is messier and less slogan-friendly.
Most people with mental illness are not violent. That part is true.
But some specific conditions, especially untreated psychotic disorders with paranoia, command hallucinations, or severe impulse dysregulation, are associated with a substantially elevated risk of violence relative to the base rate.
Elites flatten this distinction on purpose.
Why, under Alliance Theory.
Under Alliance Theory as developed by David Pinsof, moral claims function to protect coalitions. The elite coalition includes advocacy groups, clinicians, media institutions, and professional-managerial norms built around harm minimization.
Admitting differentiated risk creates three problems for that coalition.
First, boundary problems. Once you concede that some subcategories are riskier, you invite sorting, monitoring, and exclusion. Elites are structurally allergic to boundary enforcement framed around identity or diagnosis.
Second, liability and stigma spillover. Precision creates losers. Elites prefer false symmetry to true differentiation if differentiation produces reputational harm.
Third, control of violence narratives. If mental illness is acknowledged as a real risk factor in some cases, it competes with ideological explanations elites prefer to foreground elsewhere.
So the message becomes moralized and absolute. No difference. No increased risk. Nothing to see.
Alliance Theory translation.
The MSM is not lying because it is ignorant. It is smoothing reality to preserve coalition stability. Autism is protected. Mental illness is universalized. Dangerous subtypes are dissolved into averages.
That strategy reduces stigma. It also reduces public understanding.
And humor, fear, and backlash fill the gap where honest differentiation is forbidden.
