A big key factor to look at with these types of political propaganda posts made for shock value are the words at the end: “sources say.” These big, biased publications cannot even make this claim confidently, because they themselves either haven’t done the proper research to know whether or not it is based in fact, or they know it is untrue and just want to cause controversy and fuel political discourse online. The source linked to this claim from The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) literally says in its opening paragraph, discussing what Utah Governor Spencer Cox said about the bullet casings, “He gave no indication that the ammunition included any transgender references.” The only confirmed sayings inscribed on the bullet casings were supposed “furry memes” and one reading “Hey fascist, catch!” The addition of the phrase “transgender ideology” to title this story, especially on such a famous news publication, is so easily readable as a ploy to anger leftists, specifically in the sense that it suggests the shooter himself must have been “liberal.”
In actuality, what we do know about the shooter, Tyler Robinson, is that he was a young white male who was found in voter records to actually be an unaffiliated, inactive voter. (WRAL) As soon as these details were released to the public regarding the shooter, right-wing news publications popped up everywhere, trying to paint the 22-year-old shooter as someone who could seem, at face value, to be a leftist or somehow attributed to the LGBTQ+ community. This gives a sense of power to extreme conservatives—specifically those who were fond of Charlie Kirk—and gives them someone from the other side to blame. From an article detailed in the Cambridge Journal of Experimental Political Science, Adam Wolsky says, “Republicans feel warmer about their party when reading about a hypocritical versus non-hypocritical out-party transgression.” (Cambridge Core) This further explains the idea of the Republican Party taking one “bad” character that they label as part of a larger Democratic ideology to fuel their belief that the entire party, its members, and every group within them are bad or harmful to right-wing ideas.
Even though all of this information I’ve given has to do with the “transgender ideology” aspect of the claim, the idea that anti-fascism is seen as something “liberal” or negative is a huge issue on its own. It pushes the idea that those against fascism are not only liberal but aggressive and possibly dangerous enough to commit such an act, which is scary to see. Even without diving deeper into the details of this whole mess, it is decently clear from the biased rhetoric displayed in the title of The Wall Street Journal article itself that this claim is false and also purposefully infuriating.
