by Brendan O’Neill, spiked
The massacre at Tumbler Ridge feels like the militant wing of grievance culture.
There was a double tragedy at Tumbler Ridge in British Columbia this week. The first was the shooting to death of five schoolkids and an education assistant in what ought to have been the sanctuary of their place of learning. The second is that the names and even the bloody fate of those innocents will not be long remembered. Why? Because they had the great misfortune of being murdered by a member of a celebrated minority. By an adherent to that most sainted ideology: transgenderism.
Watch this horror fade, first from the headlines, then from public consciousness. It’s happening already. No sooner was it revealed that the school shooter was a young male in the feverish grip of the trans delusion than the warning went out: watch what you say; don’t extrapolate; calm down. Jesse Van Rootselaar was 18 years old. He laboured under that lethal misapprehension that is so widespread in our toxic post-truth culture – namely that, through the magic of wishful thinking, he had become female.
On Tuesday, he carried out a truly horrible crime of misanthropy. First he killed his mother and stepbrother. Then he went to Tumbler Ridge Secondary School where he opened fire on students. Five kids were killed, aged 11 to 13. Their classroom assistant was slain too. The shooter finished his murder spree by killing himself. Tumbler Ridge, a tight-knit mining town of just 2,400 people, is shaken to its core by this massacre of innocents.