In the aftermath of the horrific mass shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, in which two children were killed and 18 others wounded, the fascist right, Elon Musk and the Trump administration are seizing on the shooter’s identity to launch a pogrom-style campaign of demonization against transgender people.

The comments and proposals now being advanced by the White House and its allies in the media, including openly neo-Nazi and Christian nationalist propagandists, are the political antecedents of imprisonment, forced “deprogramming,” electroshock, and other forms of abuse historically visited on LGBTQ people.

While the fascists are fixated on the shooter’s identity, at a press conference Thursday police officials stated that the shooter “hated everyone” except other mass murderers. The latter include several neo-Nazis whose names the shooter had written on the weapons used in the killings.

Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara confirmed that among the 18 wounded in Tuesday’s attack, 15 were children between the ages of 6 and 15, with three elderly adults in their eighties also injured. While some children suffered graze wounds, several remain hospitalized in critical condition.

Chief O’Hara said the shooter was a former student at the school whose mother once worked there. The shooter, O’Hara said, “had some deranged fascination with previous mass shootings and very disturbing writings that demonstrate hatred towards many different individuals and groups of people,” and “fantasized” about previous mass killers.

As families mourned, the far-right propaganda machine directed from the billionaires in the White House and the owners of major media platforms moved into overdrive.

The owner of X and world’s richest man, Elon Musk, has led the charge. On Friday, he reposted Libs of TikTok’s smear that “the Democratic Party grooms kids into being transgender and turns them into radical LGBTQ terrorists.”

Less than a day after the shooting, in posts to his 180 million followers, Musk claimed that violent crime among trans people was “10 times higher” than the general population, a blatant lie, and demanded the FDA withdraw gender-affirming hormones.

In an interview with Brian Kilmeade, fascist propagandist for Fox News, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. backed Musk’s call to go after psychiatric and hormone medications. Kilmeade said that while there were a lot of “questions,” it was clear that the shooter was “trans” or “transitioning.”

Kilmeade then asked Kennedy if he was going to be “examining at all any of the drugs used to make that transition happening? To see if it plays a role? Because we also know there was a trans shooter in the Tennessee situation.”

Kennedy assured Kilmeade,

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.

By pointing to hormones, SSRIs, and “transition drugs,” both Kilmeade and Kennedy reinforce a fascist conspiracy linking transgender identity and mass violence. It sets the stage for regulatory crackdowns on gender-affirming care, with the NIH itself framed as investigating trans people as a public safety threat.

In a press conference Thursday, Karoline Leavitt, White House Press Secretary, called the shooter an “evil monster” and did not deny a call from fascist Daily Wire reporter Mary Olohan for the FBI to create a new category of “domestic terrorism involving trans ideology.”

The day before on her Instagram, Leavitt amplified a post from the far-right style magazine The Conservateur’s which claimed a “demonic force” is “moving when a transgender maniac sprays bullets at pews of Catholic school children. Shame on the progressive leaders and lawmakers who make this about the man in the White House, the second amendment or so-called trans bigotry.”

MAGA-propagandists, including Matt Walsh, Charlie Kirk and Jack Posobiec, have joined in the attack. On X, Walsh claimed “Trans terrorism is an epidemic.” Kirk reposted a Libs of TikTok post calling trans persons “a growing safety threat” while Posbiec shared a graphic falsely claiming a surge of “trans shooters.”

This rhetoric is specifically designed to scapegoat and equate the existence of transgender people with terrorism.

On his program following the attack, Jesse Watters of Fox News used the shooting to paint a target on all opponents of the fascistic Trump administration. Above a caption that read “there’s a pattern of trans violence” Watters mused, “and it seems like half of antifa is trans.”

The United States is home to the most billionaires and school mass shootings. The phenomena of mass school shootings in the US has exploded over the last three decades under conditions of unending war abroad, deepening inequality and the evisceration of democratic rights and what remains of the social safety.

While the ruling class and politicians ignore these factors in the rise of school shootings, the fascist attempt to pin the blame on transgender persons is transparently false.

As the Republicans drive the anti-trans crusade, the Democrats are rushing to keep pace with their fascist “colleagues.” During his 2024 campaign Trump routinely spread fascist lies about transgender people. In response to similar attacks from Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz, his opponent in the race, Democrat Colin Allred ran an ad declaring he opposed trans participation in women’s sports.

Speaking with the aforementioned fascist Charlie Kirk on his podcast earlier this year, California Governor Gavin Newsom backed Kirk’s anti-trans campaign, which is laundered under the false flag of “defending women’s sports.” Newsom, adapting to his fascist guest, said, “I am not wrestling with the fairness issue. I totally agree with you.”

The Democratic Party, which elevates issues of identity above class to obscure its own alignment with corporate and military interests, has no principled opposition to the fascist assault.

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.

The Minneapolis massacre is being transformed into an ideological battering ram for the far right. What is posed is the necessity of the independent political mobilization of the working class, uniting every section of the oppressed in a common struggle against capitalism, dictatorship, and war.