During an interview aired on Thursday’s broadcast of NewsNation’s “Elizabeth Vargas Reports,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey (D) responded to questions on if the Minneapolis shooter’s gender dysphoria could have played a role in their mental issues and the shooting by saying, “I can’t speak to what is in a different individual’s brain or mind. Obviously, we love our trans community. They’re suffering. We love our Catholic community. They’re suffering.” And “We’ve got to stop making this about groups of people every single time one of these things goes down.”
Host Elizabeth Vargas asked, “As you know, there has been a lot of focus on the fact that the shooter was born a boy, but identified recently as a girl. He changed his name several years ago from Robert to Robin. You have said it’s not important to villainize the trans community, but couldn’t it also be true that his or her gender dysphoria may have played a role here?”
Frey responded, “Look, villainize the person that committed this horrific act. It was cowardice. It was evil. There should be no dispute there. But anybody that is using this as an opportunity to villainize our trans community has lost sight with a sense of common humanity. Operate not out of hate for any community out there, any community, operate out of love for our children. And when we love our children, we make the necessary change so that something like this doesn’t happen again and it’s not just lip service.”
Vargas then asked, “[The shooter], according to reports emerging today in The New York Post, reportedly wrote in one of his journals, ‘I am tired of being trans, I wish I [had] never brain-washed myself.’ ‘I can’t cut my hair now as it would be an embarrassing defeat,’ Could this have been contributing to his depression, to his suicidal ideation, even, perhaps?”
Frey answered, “I can’t speak to what is in a different individual’s brain or mind. Obviously, we love our trans community. They’re suffering. We love our Catholic community. They’re suffering. There was just [fire opened] on a church and we need to be doing everything possible to [be] supporting them. We’ve got to stop making this about groups of people every single time one of these things goes down. We’ve got to stop having the conclusion that we each want to arrive at and then reverse-engineering the facts to meet the conclusion that we’ve already determined. This is not about what team you’re on. It should be team kids. It should be team children. We should be on team love. And the antidote to all this hate that we’re seeing nationwide is not more hate, it’s not villainization of a whole group. Villainize the act.”
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