Update: The Grotesque Politicization of the Colorado Springs Gay Bar Shooting

Shocker.

People visit a makeshift memorial for the Club Q mass shooting victims near the nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on Tuesday. | (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

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Just a brief update: Attorneys for Anderson Lee Aldrich, the individual charged with 5 counts of murder and 5 hate crimes in the recent Colorado shooting at a gay nightclub, have said that Aldrich is “non-binary” and uses “they/them” in pronouns. Below is from the court filing:

As noted in my earlier post, the Left and their media vassals have spent the past few days claiming this was an anti-gay hate crime and that rhetoric from the Right was responsible. There has been ‘round-the-clock coverage trumpeting this assertion.

Bernie Sanders @SenSanders

Let’s be clear. The terrible shooting in Colorado Springs this weekend is a direct result of the hateful and violent rhetoric that has been allowed to grow in this country. We must stand united with the LGBTQ+ community and speak out against bigotry everywhere we find it.

Tom Elliott @tomselliott

Colo. state rep ⁦@BriannaForCO⁩: “We saw the Pulse Nightclub shooting, & … an uptick in the number of bills that are anti-LGBT & especially anti-trans … And this has been fueled by a lot of people being emboldened by our former president.”

Tom Elliott @tomselliott

@oneunderscore__ Collins: "Before Nazi Germany, there was, in fact, gay people, people who played with gender conformity, & they say they are contributing to the downfall of society ... We have been through this in the past. It’s very dark."

Yet, there was zero evidence in the public domain that could possibly substantiate these claims, which were made by an endless parade of politicians, pundits, and activists, and it shows a complete disregard for evidentiary standards. The refusal to wait until basic facts are known in tragedies like this — because people are eager to exploit the dead for political reasons — is both ghoulish and reckless.

This latest info about the shooter’s identity and pronouns isn’t dispositive of anything, but it disproves the knee-jerk political assumptions about this being linked to the Right. It’s clear that calling the shooting a hate crime incited by Tucker Carlson or Libs of TikTok or Matt Walsh or what have you is completely false.

Moreover, this entire episode could be a case study in how the most egregious purveyors of misinformation aren’t random, conspiratorial dudes lurking in the bowels of Twitter as the mainstream media claims, but the mainstream media itself.