Propaganda 101 (Lecture 1): When a Shooting Becomes a Script
The blood wasn’t even dry before the spin started.
On Wednesday morning, August 27, 2025, at exactly 8:30 a.m. CDT, a gunman opened fire from outside the Church of the Annunciation in the Windom neighborhood of Minneapolis. The attack rained bullets through church windows during a back-to-school Mass, tragically killing two children—an 8-year-old and a 10-year-old—and injuring 18 others, including 15 children and three elderly parishioners . Within minutes, the shooter was confirmed to be Robin Westman, 23, a former student of the school, who died by suicide at the scene .
Shock and grief rippled through Minneapolis. Vigils sprang up, flags flew at half-staff, and local leaders—including the mayor and governor—urged compassion, explicitly warning against vilifying the transgender community in response .
But before facts had time to surface—from police updates to confirmed victim names—the narrative machine had already loaded its first bullet.
At 11:42 a.m. CDT, a rage-bait account posted a viral claim: the shooter was “trans and anti-Trump,” propaganda packaged so precisely it needed no confirmation. Within the hour, influencers, blogs, and Facebook groups had amplified the claim, later parroted by media outlets. Sound familiar? It’s not theory. It was happening live, and fast.
If you’ve read Propaganda 101 (Series Intro): 7 Tactics Authoritarians Don’t Want You Naming, you recognize what’s unfolding here: an emergency demonstration of the playbook in motion. The delay between truth and traction gives the lie the lead—and power.
📌 Reader’s Note
This article builds on concepts from Series Intro. You don’t have to read it to follow this case study—but if you want the full framework, go back and start there. Today, we’re in the lab: watching the machinery spin in real time.
The Misinformation Timeline
11:42 a.m. CDT — The seed.
A rage-bait account on X (“@EndWokeness”) posts a claim: “BREAKING: MN Catholic school gunman is trans… said to ‘kill Trump’ on magazine.” No police confirmation. No evidence. Just a caption and a collage.
11:50–11:58 a.m. CDT — The amplifiers.
Within minutes, a cluster of culture-war accounts (Sky, buddydawg77, Grummz) recycle the claim with screenshots and memes. None cite sources—just the original post repackaged.
12:04 p.m. CDT — The influencer handoff.
Ryan Saavedra, with a reach in the millions, pushes the “Kill Trump” magazine image. The lie scales instantly.
12:06–12:13 p.m. CDT — The swarm.
Cernovich, Ingraham, and others pile on, each bending the message slightly but holding the frame: trans shooter, anti-Trump motive.
12:12 p.m. EST — Caught in the wild.
I first spotted the narrative breaking into Facebook through a Trump-supporter comment. The jump from X to mainstream Facebook threads took less than 30 minutes. I fact-checked and immediately started pushing back, blasting receipts into comment sections before the narrative hardened.
12:45 p.m. CDT — Blog laundering.
The Right Scoop publishes the claim as an “article.” Independent Sentinel and Blazing Cat Fur echo it almost word-for-word. By the top of the hour, a tweet has morphed into “reporting.”
2:30 p.m. EST — The Fox dog whistle.
On Facebook, I caught the first Fox-branded graphic: “Shooter went by two names.” The phrasing never mentioned “trans”—but that’s the dog whistle. It delivers the insinuation to millions without saying it directly, laundering the lie from social media into corporate news.
Afternoon–Evening — The flood.
From this point forward, the narrative saturates. Screenshots of the Fox chyron, blog headlines, and influencer memes spread across Facebook, X, Instagram, and Telegram. The “trans + anti-Trump shooter” claim is repeated thousands of times.
My role in the fog.
I spent the evening actively monitoring threads across platforms through my curated feed: Facebook groups, X threads, Instagram comment chains. Every time the false frame surfaced, I countered with receipts. Some threads I was able to derail. Others drowned in volume. The point isn’t that I could stop the flood—the point is that it was a flood. The strategy was overwhelm, and overwhelm was working.
By prime-time — Full launder.
Fox anchors and other right-wing outlets present the shooter’s supposed “two names” as early fact. What began as a lie seeded by a rage account has traveled the pipeline: fringe → influencers → blogs → Facebook → Fox.
Where We Are So Far
By the end of the first day, the Minneapolis shooting had become two stories.
The real one: A 23-year-old former student opened fire outside Annunciation Catholic School, killing two children and injuring 18 others before taking their own life. A community left shattered, grieving, and demanding answers.
The manufactured one: A lie seeded on X at 11:42 a.m., amplified by influencers, laundered through blogs, whispered by Fox graphics, and echoed in Facebook comment sections until “trans + anti-Trump shooter” became the headline in half the country’s feeds.
This isn’t just noise. It’s the propaganda pipeline in action—fringe claim to mainstream narrative in under 12 hours. And once you watch the machine move this quickly, you start to see how deliberate it is.
The point of this case study isn’t only to fact-check yesterday’s lies. It’s to show how multiple propaganda tactics can stack on top of each other in a single day, creating a fog so thick that truth struggles to break through.
Which Propaganda Tactics Were Deployed?
This shooting wasn’t just tragedy — it was a live demonstration of multiple propaganda tactics happening at once. Let’s map them directly to the 7 you learned in the Series Intro:
1. Preemptive Disarmament
Definition: Attack credibility or seed a false frame before facts exist, so truth looks like cover-up later.
📌 Case Evidence: At 11:42 a.m. CDT, @EndWokeness posts that the shooter was “trans” and carried a “Kill Trump” magazine — before police named the suspect. Hours later, when police stated there was no anti-Trump motive, the right dismissed it as “protecting the woke agenda.”
2. Inflammatory Contradictions
Definition: Push contradictory frames at the same time — “weak” and “dangerous,” “confused” and “strategic.” The contradiction destabilizes truth. If someone points it out, the rebuttal itself fuels more debate and keeps the lie alive.
📌 Case Evidence: Early posts (like ChrisBristow70) hammered “mentally unstable, diseased,” framing trans identity as weakness. Hours later, Revolver News and The Hill headlines leaned into the “Kill Trump” inscription and political motive—casting the same person as an intentional, ideological assassin.
Exhibit A: ChrisBristow70 — “He is mentally UNSTABLE… a Democratic mind virus & illness” → the incompetent/weak frame.
Exhibit B: Revolver News / The Hill headline about the “Kill Trump” inscription → the dangerous/ideological frame.
3. Accusation Inversion (Projection)
Definition: Accuse your opponents of the crime you’re guilty of, so when evidence surfaces, it looks like “both sides.”
📌 Case Evidence: Within hours, the lie was set: ‘trans shooter = woke violence.’ Meanwhile, the actual manifesto praised MAGA ideology almost word-for-word. Instead of owning that radicalization, the right projected its own violence onto the LGBTQ community.
Exhibit A: Viral posts claiming the shooter proved “woke violence” — framing trans identity as the threat. Even as this narrative spread, observers like Seth Abramson flagged the lie: ‘NONE of this had to do with him being trans and major media KNOWS it.’
Exhibit B: The shooter’s own notebooks and marked weapons confirmed it — MAGA slogans, troll memes, and Christian iconography weaponized into violence. These receipts echo far-right grievance culture, not “woke ideology.”
The shooter’s notebooks and weapons echoed MAGA slogans and far-right meme culture, exposing the projection at the heart of the “woke violence” lie.
4. Firehose of Falsehoods
Definition: Don’t just lie — flood. Volume creates the impression of truth.
📌 Case Evidence: Dozens of posts in the first 90 minutes: @EndWokeness → Saavedra → Cernovich → multiple rage accounts → three blogs. By the time debunks appeared, thousands had already shared the false frame.
Exhibit A: EndWokeness original + multiple X reposts within minutes (buddy77, Grummz, Sky).
Exhibit B: Blog laundering screenshots (Right Scoop, Blazing Cat Fur, Independent Sentinel).
5. Emotional Decoys
Definition: Manufacture culture war outrages to keep people distracted from systemic questions.
📌 Case Evidence: The narrative focused almost exclusively on gender identity. Not the guns. Not the manifesto. Not the failure of security. By dinnertime, the shooting wasn’t about dead children, it was about “trans panic.”
Exhibit A: Fox chyron / Facebook post: “Shooter went by two names” → coded dog whistle implying deception.
Exhibit B: Viral list graphic claiming multiple past shooters were “trans” → a manufactured pattern used to redirect blame onto an entire community.
6. Strategic Humor & Mockery
Definition: Weaponize “jokes” and memes to dehumanize, deflect, or disguise hate speech as comedy. Humor makes propaganda easier to share and harder to challenge — if you push back, they accuse you of being humorless.
📌 Case Evidence: After the Minnesota shooting, far-right users flooded feeds with “jokes” that blurred lines between humor and hate — mocking trans identity while tying it to violence. These weren’t neutral quips; they were strategic cues designed to normalize cruelty and desensitize audiences.
Exhibit A: jaysonmaga651 sarcastic post — “So… trans women are women until they shoot up a school and then they’re angry white men that are Nazis… got it.”
Exhibit B: Truth Social meme — “Your child isn’t trans — you’re just a shitty parent.”
7. Normalization Through Repetition
Definition: Repeat a claim so often it becomes “common sense,” even if it’s false. The power lies in saturation: flood timelines with the same talking point until it feels familiar, then accepted.
📌 Case Evidence: Within hours of the Minnesota shooting, anti-trans talking points resurfaced that had been recycled for years — from Paul McHugh’s debunked “mental illness” quote to Chloe Cole’s media tour. By circulating the same scripts on loop, the right manufactures the illusion of consensus.
Exhibit A: Viral McHugh quote meme — “Transgenderism is the only mental illness…” repeated endlessly across posts and forums. (Paul McHugh is a discredited Johns Hopkins psychiatrist repeatedly cited by the right)
Exhibit B: CBN News platforming Chloe Cole — the same story amplified again as proof that ‘transition regret’ defines the entire trans experience.
Why It Matters
These tactics aren’t abstract theory — they’re the gears of a machine designed to control what people believe. In this case, they took a tragedy where two children were killed and reframed it as a culture-war spectacle. The propaganda didn’t just distort the story, it rewrote who the public was told to blame.
Once you understand the tactics, you see the bigger picture: propaganda isn’t about truth. It’s about power — and about keeping you locked in a narrative where questioning feels impossible.
What to Watch Out For
Next time a crisis breaks, watch for these red flags:
The first story you see. If it spreads before facts exist, assume it’s seeded.
Sudden contradictions. When someone is painted as both “weak” and “dangerous,” that’s narrative whiplash.
Projection. If an accusation sounds suspiciously like the accuser’s own behavior, that’s inversion at work.
Volume over substance. Dozens of posts in minutes isn’t organic — it’s the firehose.
Identity distractions. If the conversation shifts from dead children to “culture war,” it’s a decoy.
Cruelty as comedy. When memes make you laugh at violence, that’s normalization.
Echoes that won’t stop. If a claim shows up everywhere, it’s not because it’s true — it’s because it’s repeated.
Closing Remarks
Seven tactics. One event.
This shooting wasn’t just tragedy — it was a live-fire demonstration of how propaganda operates in 2025. Every move you just saw — the preemptive framing, the contradictions, the projection, the firehose, the decoys, the mockery, the repetition — unfolded not over months or years, but within a single day.
By the time the facts had a chance to breathe, the lie had already calcified. For millions of people, “trans shooter = woke violence” is now the story, no matter how many receipts prove otherwise.
That’s why this matters. Because propaganda doesn’t need to win the truth — it only needs to win the timeline. And unless we learn to spot these tactics in real time, the next tragedy will be hijacked the same way.
And I’ll be blunt: I fought like hell in those first hours. My fact-check thread pulled nearly 50,000 views in under 18 hours, as I worked across platforms to shut down misinformation and leave receipts wherever the lie appeared. Some threads I derailed, others drowned in the flood — but the point is clear: the fight for truth happens in real time, and it’s a fight we can’t afford to sit out.
Footage Archive (Viewer Discretion Advised)
The following clip was posted by the shooter on YouTube the morning of the attack. It was quickly removed, but not before others archived the footage. I recorded this for one reason only: evidence. I’m sharing only to document, not to circulate.
This isn’t glorification. It’s documentation — proof of what was actually said and shown before propagandists rewrote the story. Sharing this allows us to track the narrative as it really unfolded, not as it was spun.
Class Dismissed
This was supposed to be theory — an intro course in spotting propaganda. Instead, reality handed us a live case study where all seven tactics collided in less than a day. That wasn’t the syllabus I planned, but maybe it’s the lesson we needed first.
There will be more lectures. Some will pull from history, others will track new crises as they unfold. Each one will sharpen the same skill: learning to see the playbook in motion before it locks the narrative.
For now, you’ve watched it happen in real time. And that’s the point — once you know the moves, you can’t unsee them — which means you can’t be played the same way again.
No altar here. Sit with it.
—M
The next lecture will come when it’s demanded — whether by history, the next crisis, or a single tactic worth unpacking. Which will be soon I’m sure…