Tucker Carlson held up the mass shooting in Tennessee to spread vile and dangerous anti-transgender hate on Tuesday, joining the chorus of other prominent right-wingers.
Addressing the issue of gun control, the Fox News host sought to cast Monday’s violence as evidence of a war between Christians and transgender people. The 28-year-old gunman, who authorities identified as trans, killed six people at the private Christian school he worked at before the attacker was shot dead by police.
“Why are some trans people so angry, and why do they seem so angry, specifically, at traditional Christians? We can’t help but think of trans people who have been killed by pastors,” Carlson said.
Pushing his trademark “us against them” rhetoric, Carlson went on to suggest that trans people and Christians are irreconcilable “natural enemies.”
“The trans movement is a mirror image of Christianity and therefore its natural enemy,” he said. “In Christianity, the price of admission is admitting that you are not God. Christians openly admit that they have no real power over anything, that’s why.”
“The trans movement takes the opposite view. Trans ideologies claim to dominate nature itself,” he said. “‘We can change the identity we were born with.'”
“They will not be able to reconcile. They will certainly collide with each other. One side will probably take blood before the other side,” he said. “Yesterday morning, tragically, our fears were confirmed.”
Nashville police reported that Hale was assigned female at birth but has been using male pronouns on social media platforms. The shooter’s gender identity, though, remains unclear.
Transgender people are more than four times more likely than cisgender people to be victims of violent crime, according to a 2021 study by the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.
Carlson has been a leading voice in the right-wing hate campaign against transgender people and drag queens in recent years, coinciding with increased discrimination and violence against the LGBTQ community and the passage of several anti-LBGTQ laws in Republican-controlled legislatures across the country.
The number of murders of transgender people nearly doubled from 2017 to 2021, largely due to gun violence, a report by the nonprofit group Everytown for Gun Safety found.