These people are fucking evil and we should say it more
In the aftermath of the Club Q shooting, journalists should stop being afraid to say the right wing is the problem
So it’s been six days since the shooting at Club Q, a queer nightclub in Colorado Springs. Late Saturday night, a 22-year-old gunman walked into the club and began shooting, killing five and wounding many others. The gunman was stopped before he could kill anyone else, pummeled by an army veteran and stomped on by a trans woman, and taken into custody shortly after midnight Sunday—literally on Transgender Day of Remembrance.
I really wish I had some profound immediate reaction to the late Saturday night shooting to share, but it didn’t even register for me at first. Like many people, I’m pretty numb to gun violence in the United States at this point—notably, the Club Q shooting isn’t even the only mass shooting to take place in America this week.
I think I got a push notification that a shooting had taken place in Colorado from one of the 16 different news apps I have on my phone, glanced at it, and went about my day. I didn’t even realize until the next day that the shooting had happened at a gay club.
But it pretty quickly became impossible to ignore. People who know me probably know that I spend too much time on Twitter, and in the wake of the shooting, a certain side of the political aisle became shockingly bold in the sentiments they were expressing on everyone’s favorite hellsite. Maybe some of that is attributable to noted absentee father and edgelord Elon Musk purchasing it for 47 quadrillion dollars, but it was a little scary to see many conservatives skipping right over the thoughts and prayers portion of any American tragedy and going straight to something that sounded a lot like “well maybe these people had it coming.”
Libs of TikTok, the Twitter account that directs hate toward whatever trans and gay TikTok users have caught the eye of the woman behind the profile—a sad but deranged Brooklyn real estate agent named Chaya Raichik—was quick to draw attention toward an organization in Colorado that “helps young LGBTQ+ performers safely experience the art of drag on stage” just hours after the shooting. Never mind that the bodies of the five victims of the Club Q attack were likely not even cold yet, Raichik felt it necessary to point out that two Colorado state representatives “promoted and encouraged this child drag organization and performance,” since conservatives’ new thing is to claim any child exposure to any LGBTQ concepts whatsoever is abuse and “grooming.”
Failed traffic lawyer and Rudy Giuliani fart sniffer Jenna Ellis tweeted this just two days after the shooting: “The Colorado Springs PD is posting photos of the victims with their preferred pronouns as if that is what is most important to their humanity.”
Later, she became particularly weirdly obsessed with the question of whether there is “evidence these 5 were saved or living according to Christ and Truth”—which is, uh, an interesting dogwhistle in that it’s not even really a dogwhistle so much as a christofascist blowhorn.
Candace Owens, who I don’t even have a sick insult for because I don’t know what the hell her deal is, tweeted a clip from her podcast in which she blames the left for blaming the right for the shooting (I know, it was a really weird and confusing clip) and calls liberals “monsters” for supporting trans people while making a bizarre jump from acknowledging trans identities to children’s genitalia. Yes, this is what she felt it was important to talk about in the days after a deadly shooting at a queer nightclub rather than, oh I don’t know, expressing sadness and sympathy for the victims and their families.
In fairness, Raichik is an irrelevant gay-hating shitweasel and Owens hasn’t done anything more notable than speak at the White House, but Ellis had an actual place in Trump’s orbit, having worked on his legal team. And more major players even than that were quick to jump on the hate train.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson had a guest on his show Tuesday night who said shootings like the one at Club Q will likely continue until gender-affirming care for trans people ends.
“Sadly, I don’t think it’s gonna stop until we end this evil agenda,” Jaimee Michell, founder of Gays Against Groomers (yeah, I don’t even know what to say about that org name) said on the show.
And what did Carlson do? Did he push back on that at all? Did he issue any clarification after that statement that he in no way wants to promote violence on his show? No, he simply smirked (he did condemn the shooting in his broadcast Monday night, but then immediately displayed a graphic that said “stop sexualizing kids” so, uh, you do the math).
So we’ve established that people on the right—and not just fringe figures, but people who had or have real power or access to it—saw five people killed in a queer space and basically shrugged their shoulders. And yet, this very same week, we see many mainstream pundits and reporters behaving as if they have learned exactly nothing. In fact, we’re having many of the same tired conversations about objectivity in the media that we have been having for years, even long after it has become obvious that many powerful Republicans are either bloodthirsty fascists or apologists for bloodthirsty fascists.
“Circa 1950-2015 both-sidesism was a shitty heuristic, but I’ve grown less confident since then that the alternatives are better,” FiveThirtyEight editor Nate Silver tweeted on Wednesday. How that could be a conclusion one reaches in a week when Democrats condemned a mass shooting and Republicans said “hmm maybe the fags deserved it” is an object of great mystery.
The day before that—and right in the middle of all the toxic discourse from conservatives over the Club Q shooting, mind you—Washington Post national political correspondent Ashley Parker tweeted “I spent four years covering the Trump (White House) and two years covering the Biden (White House). What’s fascinating is that they both lie, albeit in v different ways. Trump team was shameless, whereas Biden team is too cute by half.”
Parker was referring to a scuffle the Biden administration got into with the White House press corps over a photo shoot Vogue did before his granddaughter’s wedding, a wedding that the press corps was apparently peeved they were not invited to. It’s anyone’s guess as to why this was equated with a president who literally tried to overturn an election and especially why it was being discussed literally in the middle of an eruption of shameless sociopathic hate for queer people from the right wing.
Which brings me to my point: what the fuck are we even doing?
If we want to talk about objectivity, let’s talk about how it is objectively true that it is suddenly much scarier to be gay or any of the other letters on the LGBTQ alphabet than it used to be (which some of my family may still not know about me I guess. Yeah. Hi. I guess that’s the reason I never brought any girls home).
Because here’s the thing: it’s not like this shooting at Club Q is an isolated incident. Rather, it’s the latest escalation in an accelerating wave of hatred toward queer people, which we’ve seen manifest itself in christofascist terrorists showing up at pride events and drag queen story hours, in conservative show hosts feeling comfortable calling queer people “groomers,” and now in a 22-year-old murdering five people in a gay club. It’s pretty clear where the shooter got the ideas from, by the way, since his dad told CBS8 in my sort-of hometown of San Diego that he was relieved after the shooting to find out that his kid was just at a gay club to murder gays, not because he is gay.
Just a few years ago, we were getting legalized gay marriage and Disney was making cute movies about coming out. To be sure, it’s not like I ever felt comfortable holding hands with a guy while walking around the Temecula mall, but it seemed like things were at least trending in the right direction. And now it feels like the 1980s all over again, with prominent conservatives feeling perfectly comfortable to wonder aloud whether the queers go to heaven less than a week after five of them were shot to death.
And if it’s hard to be gay, it’s also pretty annoyingly difficult to be a gay journalist. Because you’d think we would have gotten over all that bothsides bullshit during the Trump years, but apparently not. So here we are, with many of my colleagues still pretending people who want to kill me have Some Very Important Perspectives To Share™️. “Democrat John Doe thinks gay people deserve rights, but on the other hand Republican Jim Boe thinks gay people should be strung up by their nosehairs and set on fire. These are both perfectly valid opinions that should be framed in the exact same way.”
These conversations aren’t just happening on Twitter between bigshot reporters at news organizations I will never be successful enough to work at. I once had an editor tell me that I had a “conflict of interest” and shouldn’t write stories about LGBTQ issues because my mom is trans. I hadn’t even told him about me being gay and I sure as hell didn’t after that. (This editor was a straight white man, obviously. If wonder, in an alternate universe where I was born heterosexual to two heterosexual parents, if he would have told me it was a conflict of interest for me to cover stories about straight people).
Another time, I had a boss frequently wonder aloud why liberals couldn’t see that people who want me dead are clearly the best suited to run the country. She later edited an AP wire story that we used on Jan. 6 to include unconfirmed claims (really, lies) that Antifa had in fact stormed the Capitol and not supporters of then-President Trump, which she only changed back when I repeatedly pleaded with her.
And so this has actually been my dilemma for the past few months since I got laid off in May. I love being a journalist. If you asked me “what are you?” and gave me three seconds to respond, I would probably say “a reporter” before anything else. But fuck is it hard trying to strike a balance between the obvious reality that there are some pretty horrifically evil things going on in the Republican Party—evil things that are often directed specifically at people like me—and the old-school views from the fucking 1990s about what objectivity means from the people who make hiring decisions in newsrooms.
I really, truly, don’t know why we as journalists spend so much goddamn time dancing around this issue and trying to pretend every political story has two sides. Especially when you consider that most of the “other side” we are trying to reach are never going to read or watch us anyway and many of them actively hate our guts!
Because here’s the thing—they don’t just want to kill the gays. They want to kill all the journalists, too. Remember that viral picture from 2016 of a man wearing a shirt that said “Rope. Tree. Journalist. Some Assembly Required”? Remember the years of being called “the enemy of the people”? These are the same people who wanted to kill their lord and savior’s own vice president for not doing a coup to keep his boss in power. The truth should be plain as day by now. These are just bad people.
It really is just pathetic at this point. It’s like if you kept going back to your ex who always cheats on you. Actually, it’s worse—it’s more like going back to your ex who keeps putting rat poison in your breakfast cereal. Maybe we should stop being a bunch of fucking simps and realize Republicans in midwestern diners are just never going to be as into us as we apparently are into them.
Officeholders in the United States swear an oath to protect and defend the constitution from “enemies foreign and domestic.” Well, these are the enemies domestic. I think it’s the job of the fourth estate to point that out.