On a weekend already tense with post-election drama and political satire, the United States was rocked by a devastating mass shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis. The attack, which occurred on August 27, 2025, left two children dead and 18 others wounded, including 15 children aged 6 to 15 and three elderly adults in their eighties, according to Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara. As the community mourned, the tragedy quickly became a flashpoint for a wider political and cultural battle, with high-profile figures like Elon Musk and members of the Trump administration seizing on the shooter’s identity to launch a campaign targeting transgender people.
The shooter, a former student of the school whose mother once worked there, had a disturbing history. Police reports detailed a fascination with previous mass shootings and neo-Nazi ideology, with Chief O’Hara confirming that the shooter “hated everyone” except other mass murderers, and had written the names of several neo-Nazis on the weapons used in the attack. O’Hara further explained, “had some deranged fascination with previous mass shootings and very disturbing writings that demonstrate hatred towards many different individuals and groups of people,” adding that the shooter “fantasized” about previous mass killers. Several of the wounded children remain hospitalized in critical condition, while others suffered graze wounds.
As families struggled with grief, the national conversation was quickly hijacked by a wave of anti-transgender rhetoric from far-right media figures and politicians. According to reporting from the World Socialist Web Site, Elon Musk, owner of X (formerly Twitter) and the world’s richest man, played a leading role in this campaign. On August 29, Musk reposted a smear from Libs of TikTok claiming, “the Democratic Party grooms kids into being transgender and turns them into radical LGBTQ terrorists.” Less than a day after the shooting, Musk told his 180 million followers that violent crime among trans people was “10 times higher” than the general population—a claim that is not supported by any credible evidence. Musk went further, demanding that the FDA withdraw gender-affirming hormones.
The anti-trans campaign received official backing from within the government. In an interview with Brian Kilmeade of Fox News, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. echoed Musk’s call to investigate psychiatric and hormone medications, suggesting a link between such drugs and violence. When Kilmeade pressed Kennedy on whether the National Institutes of Health would examine drugs used in gender transition, Kennedy replied, “Yea, we are doing those kinds of studies now at [National Institute of Health]… on the potential contribution of some SSRI drugs and some of the other psychiatric drugs that might be contributing to violence. You know many of them...have black box warnings that warn of suicidal ideation and homicidal ideation. So we need, we can’t exclude those as a culprit and those are the kind of studies that we are doing.”
This rhetoric, both from Musk and Kennedy, has fueled conspiracy theories linking transgender identity to mass violence. As World Socialist Web Site notes, such claims are “specifically designed to scapegoat and equate the existence of transgender people with terrorism,” setting the stage for regulatory crackdowns on gender-affirming care. The White House, too, was drawn into the fray. On August 28, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called the shooter an “evil monster” during a press conference, and did not deny calls from reporters for the FBI to create a new category of “domestic terrorism involving trans ideology.”
The anti-trans backlash was amplified by far-right commentators. Matt Walsh, Charlie Kirk, and Jack Posobiec all used their platforms to push the narrative that transgender people pose a growing safety threat. Kirk reposted content from Libs of TikTok calling trans persons “a growing safety threat,” while Posobiec shared a graphic falsely claiming a surge of “trans shooters.” Fox News host Jesse Watters, in a segment following the attack, declared, “there’s a pattern of trans violence,” and speculated, “it seems like half of antifa is trans.”
Yet, as the World Socialist Web Site makes clear, these claims are not backed by evidence. The attempt to blame transgender people for mass shootings is “transparently false,” and serves to distract from the deeper issues underlying the epidemic of gun violence in American schools—issues like deepening inequality, the erosion of democratic rights, and the failure of the social safety net. The United States, after all, has the highest number of billionaires and school mass shootings in the world. While politicians and media figures focus on scapegoating marginalized groups, they largely ignore these root causes.
Meanwhile, the political establishment has been quick to exploit the tragedy for its own ends. During his 2024 campaign, Donald Trump frequently spread anti-transgender rhetoric, and following the Minneapolis shooting, he and his allies have continued to push these themes. In July 2025, Musk campaigned for Trump at a Pennsylvania rally, donning a black MAGA cap and offering daily $1 million giveaways to swing state voters. Trump, for his part, commented that Musk “doesn’t want to be in the cabinet” but is “dying” to be “in charge of cost-cutting.”
Even the entertainment world found itself caught in the crossfire. On the weekend of August 24-25, Dana Carvey appeared on Saturday Night Live’s post-election episode, performing an impression of Elon Musk in a “dark gothic MAGA hat.” The sketch, which poked fun at both Musk and Trump, saw Carvey’s Musk character joking, “America’s gonna be like one of my rockets that’s super cool and super fun. But there’s a slight chance it could blow up, and everybody dies.” Musk, thin-skinned as ever, took to X to complain about the impression and the show’s perceived political bias, stating, “They are so mad that @realDonaldTrump won,” and criticizing Carvey by saying, “Dana Carvey just sounds like Dana Carvey.”
While the SNL sketch was met with laughter from some quarters, the real-world consequences of the rhetoric swirling around the Minneapolis shooting are far more serious. The debate over trans rights and gun violence has become a battleground for America’s culture wars, with both Republican and Democratic leaders accused of using identity politics to obscure their own alignment with corporate and military interests. As the World Socialist Web Site editorialized, “The defense of democratic rights is a class question. It cannot be entrusted to the Democratic Party, a party that funds genocide abroad and votes with Trump to finance a government carrying out mass deportations.”
In the wake of the Minneapolis massacre, the stakes could hardly be higher. The tragedy is being transformed into an ideological weapon for the far right, while the underlying causes of gun violence remain unaddressed. As families mourn their losses and communities seek answers, the nation is left grappling with the consequences of a political and media landscape that too often trades in division, distraction, and scapegoating—rather than solutions.
