Topic: Media Research Center
When the story of the massacre at a Colorado Springs gay nightclub broke, the Media Research Center was angry that right-wing anti-LGBTQ rhetoric was being blamed. But suddenly, a new narrative emerged, and the MRC quickly pounced on it, as a Nov. 22 post by Kevin Tober gleefully detailed:
Late on Tuesday night, court filings by the attorneys for the alleged shooter from the LGBTQ night club in Colorado Springs, Colorado revealed the shooter is non-binary and goes by they/them pronouns. After spending the past two days smearing conservative Christians for allegedly inspiring this apparent attack against gay people, CNN Tonight anchor Alisyn Camerota was clearly stunned as she watched her network’s narrative come crashing down.
Breaking the news to her audience, Camerota begrudgingly reported that the “attorneys for the accused shooter, Anderson Lee Aldrich, say in new court filings tonight that the suspect now identifies as non-binary.”
She went on to reveal that “In a footnote to a motion, asserting legal privileges, the public defenders say, quote, Anderson Aldrich is non-binary. They use they/them pronouns. And for the purposes of all formal filings will be addressed as Mx Aldrich. So in other words, not Mr. or Ms..”
After revealing that new revelation that completely contradicted and destroyed the narrative the leftist media has pushed for days, she turned to her panel speechless: “I don't know what to say about that. I mean that's not anything that we had heard from his background. People had been looking into his background.”
Desperately looking to her panel for a lifeline she asked “are you guys lawyers? I mean, you know, I don't know what to say about that. That's what he's now saying.”
CNN political commentator Errol Lewis still desperately clung to his now-debunked narrative and claimed “It sounds like they're trying to prepare a defense against a hate crimes charge.”
Alex Christy complained: "As its name suggests, MSNBC’s The 11th Hour airs at 11:00 Eastern, which on Tuesday was well after the bombshell report that the Colorado Springs shooter identifies as non-binary. Still, host Stephanie Ruhle wondered how to combat conservatives who are 'dehumanizing' anyone who isn’t a white heterosexual." Tober returned to rant:
On Wednesday's MSNBC Reports, host Lindsey Reiser and guest Scott Mccoy of the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center doubled down on the now-debunked leftist media narrative that conservatives wanting to protect children from drag shows and other forms of grooming are somehow responsible for the shooting that happened at the gay night club in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
Curtis Houck ranted in a Nov. 23 post:
Late Tuesday, the leftist narrative about early Sunday’s shooting at a Colorado Springs LGBTQ nightclub crumbled as the suspect’s lawyer revealed their client is nonbinary, blowing holes in the narrative that Christian conservatives and Fox News caused the attack. Of course, NBC promptly dropped any mention of the massacre on Wednesday’s Today while ABC’s Good Morning America omitted this inconvenient truth.
NBC did, however, find time for stories it deemed more important, such as a 25-second news brief on the Supreme Court clearing the way for a House committee to obtain Donald Trump’s tax returns.
Tim Graham was in full gloat mode in his Nov. 23 podcast:
The chorus of "I told you so" broke out after public defenders of the alleged mass shooter at a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colorado explained their client was "non-binary" and used "they/them" pronouns. So much for the notion that statements by Tucker Carlson and GOP politicians were somehow responsible for the violent crimes. On every leftist channel, they were blaming "a climate of rhetoric" instead of the shooter. CNN's Alison Camerota was beside herself.
Conservatives have (and should have) blamed the criminal for the violent crimes committed. As we pointed out Monday, law enforcement hadn't located a movie for these murders, but the Left pounced on "anti-LGBTQ hate" as the real killer. They didn't have an easy way out of that dark alley once the defense lawyers spoke.
Graham returned to whine in a Nov. 25 post:
The aggressive downplaying of Colorado Springs mass-shooting suspect Anderson Lee Aldrich declaring himself "non-binary" isn’t just contained to TV news. Thursday’s Washington Post managed to Post-pone that information until paragraph 31 of a story blandly headlined “Suspect is held without bond after hearing while awaiting formal charges.”
However, in addition to failing to entertain the idea that a nonbinary person can hate LGBTQ people as much as a conservative, the MRC's ideological victory lap may have been premature. More details about the alleged shooter, Anderson Aldrich, are coming to light, and NBC reports that the nonbinary claim "could be an effort to further harm the queer community" and contradicts what has been learned about Aldrich:
Online extremism experts say the suspect could be trolling — which is when someone makes an inflammatory or disingenuous remark meant to provoke — and that the discord and confusion created among the queer community and right-wing pundits could be intentional. Xavier Kraus, who said he lived next door to the suspect and the suspect’s mother from August 2021 to September 2022, said he believes the claim that Aldrich is nonbinary is “a total troll on the community, and a total troll on the system.” Aldrich, he said, never used they/them pronouns with him or mentioned being nonbinary.
Kraus said he and the suspect — public records show they lived one door away from each other in a Colorado Springs apartment complex — were close friends until a few months ago, when the two had a falling out. Aldrich made racist and homophobic statements, including saying they “hate faggots,” Kraus alleged, but Kraus said he was afraid to confront the suspect because Aldrich was “a very angry person” who owned guns.
[...]
That skepticism only grew this week after NBC News reported that the FBI is looking into two websites connected to the suspect. One of the websites, which Kraus said Aldrich created in the spring or early summer, is a forum-type “free speech” site where people have anonymously posted racist and antisemitic memes, language and videos.
[...]
A video on the site’s homepage advocates for killing civilians as a way to “cleanse” society, and it celebrates Brenton Tarrant, an Australian white supremacist who was sentenced to life in prison without parole for killing 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019. In one part of the video, there is an image of a wall that reads “Free Tarrant,” along with two other mass shooters, and “Race War.” A laughing face spins in the middle of the screen, next to the wall, and a message at the bottom reads, “We do a little trolling LOL.”
[...]
The suspect’s involvement in that side of the internet “points more toward the possibility that the suspect invoked nonbinary pronouns as a means to get one last insult in on the LGBT community,” Holt said.
There is also an offensive article about Aldrich on Encyclopedia Dramatica, an extremist, racist and homophobic version of Wikipedia that describes itself as a “troll archive.” The article has been on the site since 2015 and is laced with personal attacks against Aldrich.
Encyclopedia Dramatica praises those who kill gay and transgender people, and the site gave Aldrich a higher “score” on its mass shooter ranking because Aldrich “targeted fags.”
A moderator for the site — which has been tied to at least two terror attacks over the last five years — told NBC News that Aldrich has been a contributor since 2015.
The MRC has not only censored this news , it has continued to hype the shooter's claimed binary status. A Dec. 13 post by Brad Wilmouth referencing the massacre -- three days after the NBC article was published -- made a point of noting that "the perpetrator of the attack has claimed to be LGBTQ himself, identifying as nonbinary."
