Right-Wing Media Is Using Two Shootings to Build a Case Against Trans People. One Shooter Was a Neo-Nazi.

On Monday afternoon, a 56-year-old walked into a Rhode Island ice rink during a high school hockey game on senior night and opened fire on their own family. Two people are dead—the shooter’s ex-wife and a daughter. Three more, including two of the shooter’s children, are in critical condition. The shooter died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Pawtucket Police Chief Tina Goncalves called it a “targeted event” stemming from a “family dispute.” The Rhode Island Coalition Against Domestic Violence called it what it was: domestic violence.

The shooter, identified by police as Robert Dorgan, also went by Roberta Esposito. Within hours, Matt Walsh posted. Benny Johnson posted. Collin Rugg posted. The same accounts that activated after Tumbler Ridge activated again, six days later. The frame was the same: another trans shooter.

An X account widely linked to Dorgan under the name Roberta Dorgano followed and engaged with Republican Representative Thomas Massie, former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, and far-right podcaster Nick Fuentes. Multiple outlets reported that Dorgan praised Adolf Hitler repeatedly, supported the Groyper movement, admired neo-Nazi author William Pierce—whose writings helped inspire the Oklahoma City bombing—and used “WP,” a common shorthand for “white power,” in response to videos of people performing Nazi salutes. Dorgan was an apparent Trump supporter. Those details make this crime all too typical in America in 2026.

Six days earlier, on February 10, an 18-year-old in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia—a remote community of 2,400 in the Peace River region—killed their mother and 11-year-old half-brother at the family home, drove two kilometers to Tumbler Ridge Secondary School, and opened fire, killing a 39-year-old education assistant in a stairwell and five more people in the library: three girls aged 12, two boys aged 12 and 13.

One 12-year-old girl, Maya Gebala, tried to lock the library door. The lock was broken. She was shot three times—head, neck, and cheek—and airlifted to BC Children’s Hospital. By Thursday she had moved her left hand and leg for the first time since surgery. A second survivor, 19-year-old Paige Hoekstra, is out of surgery. Twenty-five others were treated for injuries. It is Canada’s worst school shooting since the 1989 École Polytechnique massacre.

Within hours—before the RCMP confirmed the shooter’s name—Libs of TikTok, End Wokeness, and the Daily Caller were leading with the shooter’s gender identity. Elon Musk shared posts to his 234 million followers falsely claiming trans people are the most likely demographic to commit mass shootings. Users circulated photos of trans people who had nothing to do with the shooting—including an Ontario resident named Zylee whom RCMP had to publicly exonerate.

An X account loaded with white supremacist and neo-Nazi posts was attributed to the shooter by the Anti-Defamation League. CBC later confirmed it was a hoax—someone impersonating the shooter to inject a false ideological motive. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which studies extremism and terrorism, analyzed the shooter’s verified accounts. Senior researcher Steven Rai said there was no political orientation and no indication the shooter subscribed to any extremist ideology. The only political content he identified was a sustained opposition to gun control.

What the verified accounts did show: years of posts about severe mental illness—depression, OCD, autism, psychosis after taking psilocybin mushrooms. An account on WatchPeopleDie, a gore site frequented by multiple previous school shooters, where she described violent content as “addictive.” A mass shooting simulator on Roblox. TikTok featuring reposted videos of the Nashville Covenant School shooter. Cody Zoschak, also of ISD, told CBS News: “The worst influence you could have was the worst kid in your school. Now, the worst influence you can have is the worst person on the internet.”

RCMP confirmed that Van Rootselaar had been apprehended multiple times under British Columbia’s Mental Health Act and hospitalized. Police had seized firearms from the family home under the Criminal Code. A lawful owner petitioned for their return. The guns were given back. On Friday, McDonald revealed that the main firearm used at the school—the one that “caused the most significant damage”—had never been seized by RCMP. Its origin is unknown.

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Two shootings in one week. A teenager in crisis, known to police for years, immersed in online gore communities, with access to firearms, killed eight people at a school. A middle-aged parent with a documented history of domestic conflict, deep in the far-right internet—Nick Fuentes, Hitler, white power—killed their ex-wife and shot their children at a hockey game. Both shooters identified as trans. One was the textbook pathway to a school shooter. The other was domestic violence. The American right-wing media response to both was identical: trans people are dangerous.

I know what comes next because I’ve watched it before. Here is how the “trans shooter” narrative was built, case by case.

Uvalde, May 2022. 19 children and two teachers killed at Robb Elementary. 4chan circulated photographs of an innocent trans woman and identified her as the shooter. Congressman Paul Gosar called the shooter a “transsexual leftist illegal alien.” The actual shooter was a cisgender 18-year-old male.

Club Q, Colorado Springs, November 2022. Five killed at an LGBTQ nightclub. Aldrich’s defense attorneys claimed nonbinary identity. Police found rainbow-colored shooting targets. Aldrich was convicted of hate crimes against LGBTQ people. Still on every “trans shooter” list.

Nashville, March 2023. Six killed at the Covenant School. The 48-page final report concluded the shooting was motivated by a desire for notoriety, not gender identity. The shooter had been planning mass shootings since 2017 and chose the school because it was a soft target.

Lakewood Church, Houston, February 2024. Fox News reported the shooter was a trans woman. Houston Police confirmed: a cisgender woman who had used male aliases in a prior forgery case. Fox quietly edited its article without retraction.

Apalachee High School, Georgia, September 2024. Claimed trans. The shooter’s own Discord posts included anti-trans language and threats of an “LGBTQ massacre.”

Abundant Life Christian School, Madison, December 2024. Claimed trans. Debunked.

Minneapolis, August 2025. Robin Westman killed two children at Annunciation Catholic School. Westman’s own diary expressed disillusionment with being trans. No evidence of gender-affirming care. The Trump DOJ floated banning all trans Americans from owning firearms. The NRA, Gun Owners of America, and Second Amendment Foundation killed the proposal. The infrastructure stayed.

Charlie Kirk assassination, September 2025. The Wall Street Journal reported “transgender and antifascist ideology” on the shooter’s ammunition. Utah’s governor read the actual engravings at a press conference: a Helldivers 2 cheat code, the lyrics to “Bella ciao,” and “If you read this, you are gay. LMAO.” The Journal appended two editor’s notes.

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The Gun Violence Archive has logged approximately 5,748 mass shootings in the U.S. since 2013. Including Tumbler Ridge and Pawtucket: eight shooters confirmed trans or nonbinary across roughly six thousand mass shootings. 0.1 percent. The Violence Project puts the figure for high-fatality public mass shootings at 0.5 percent—less than trans people’s share of the general population. James Densley, the Violence Project’s co-founder, told CTV News: “When a shooter is transgender, that becomes the headline and that becomes the story.”

The U.S. Secret Service’s 2023 report found 96 percent of mass public attackers were cisgender men. The Violence Project puts that figure at 97.5 percent. The Williams Institute at UCLA found trans people are four times more likely to be victims of violent crime than to commit it. Nobody has proposed banning cisgender men from owning firearms.

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After Nashville, threats against trans people spiked. After Minneapolis, the DOJ floated stripping gun rights from every trans American. Anti-LGBTQ hate crimes rose nearly 9 percent in 2024, with more than half targeting trans and gender-nonconforming people. GLAAD documented over a thousand anti-LGBTQ incidents in 2025—an average of 2.5 per day. Every time a mass shooting gets welded to the word “transgender,” it gets harder for trans people to rent an apartment, keep a job, walk into a doctor’s office.

And there is the other cost, the one nobody on the right wants to discuss: every piece of research available shows that widely publicizing the motives and personal details of mass shooting perpetrators is associated with a higher risk of copycat attacks. The right-wing tabloid media in this country is unaccountable and out of control. They are not reporting on these shootings. They are amplifying them—strip-mining the dead for content, blasting the shooter’s name and face and social media across millions of feeds, and then pivoting to the next one when the details stop cooperating.

On Friday night in Tumbler Ridge, Prime Minister Mark Carney stood beside Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, the NDP, the Greens, the Bloc, and the Governor General. They named eight dead: Kylie Smith, 12. Zoey Benoit, 12. Ticaria Lampert, 12. Abel Mwansa Jr., 12. Ezekiel Schofield, 13. Shannda Aviugana-Durand, 39. Jennifer Strang, 39. Emmett Jacobs, 11. An Indigenous elder sang a prayer.

In Pawtucket on Monday, players in hockey gear dove behind the boards while parents ran for the exits. Twelve shots on a livestream. A daughter told reporters outside the police station: “He was very sick.”

The Pawtucket shooter praised Hitler, followed Nick Fuentes, and spent the day before the shooting warning about going “BERSERK.” The Tumbler Ridge shooter’s alleged far-right X account was a hoax. The verified digital trail showed a mentally ill teenager addicted to gore content with access to firearms that should not have been in the home. One was a domestic murder-suicide. The other was a school shooting. The right-wing media response to both was the same word.

A 12-year-old tried to lock a library door with a broken lock. Three children in Rhode Island are fighting for their lives. The policy questions that might prevent the next one—seized guns returned to a home in crisis, a primary weapon whose origin nobody can explain, domestic violence screening for firearms access—are not the ones being asked.