It is well known that between eighty and ninety percent of the population of Canada lives within a hundred miles of the U.S. border. All their major populations centers, from Vancouver to Toronto to Montreal, lie inside that convenient band.
It is therefore rare indeed that anything from north of that region makes the news.
On February 10, however, a tragic story came down from the north. At least nine schoolchildren and adults were murdered, and at least another 27 were injured (reports of the injured are still climbing at this writing), at and near Tumbler Ridge Secondary School, some 13 hours north of Vancouver.
We will dispose with the word “alleged” in this case, since the shooter killed himself and there is no question about his identity:
This was an 18-year-old man named Jesse Strang or Jesse Van Rootselaar, raised in a normal Canadian family of hunters, who started dressing as a girl in 2023, when just 14 or 15 years old. He murdered at least two members of his own family (his mother and stepbrother), then went to the school and continued his killing spree, until finally committing suicide himself.
This mass murder is a tragedy, of course, and will be blamed, as they always are, on numerous unrelated targets. The Left will blame hunting culture, firearms, religion, culture; they will blame every aspect of the environment except the person who pulled the trigger, again and again, that awful day.
24 hours in, the Canadian press is still reporting that the murderer was a woman, even though the international press has been correctly reporting that the killer was a man in a dress (presumably on the various cocktails of drugs taken by people with such issues) since the killings occurred.
Neighbors and family members were comfortable telling the truth to reporters, even adding details about the perpetrator’s numerous past behavioral problems and encounters with law enforcement, but many reporters – in Canada at least – are afraid to report the truth.
Why?
Because there’s a protected class in journalism today.
Transgenderism – not the individual transgender person, but the group, the class – is protected in a way that blacks and whites, men and women, able and handicapped, have never been. If a story reflects badly on the concept of transgenderism, it is buried as soon as possible.
The press may be anti-gun, and anti-violence, and anti-terror. They will learn of a mass murder and give it all the coverage it deserves, at first – but only until they learn that the perpetrator was trans. Then they will start reducing the coverage.
The question for us – as consumers of the news – has to be this: There are two classes here; why do they choose to favor that one?
We can look at a mass murder in two ways: the specific case or the generality. In this specific case, there were a single perpetrator and dozens of victims. That’s one shooter and assorted innocent family members, adults and children. Viewed more generally, the one is a transgender person, and the others are the innocent victims.
Again and again, the perpetrators who commit mass shootings briefly turn out to have been transgender – usually men who identify as women, occasionally women who identify as men (though the latter is a much smaller sample size, in an already small sample). It’s not surprising; these are people suffering from a mental illness, who are usually on a host of medications, ranging from hormone treatments to pain meds to medications for the treatment of their underlying depression, and sometimes recreational drugs on top of the above. Of course they are going to have a higher risk of behavioral problems than the population at large. Such a cocktail of pharmaceuticals, that have never even been tested for dangerous interactions, have to increase the danger for that patient and for everyone with whom he interacts.
The press may think they are avoiding some form of bigotry by protecting the class of transgenders, it may even be well-intentioned, in a confused way. But it is illogical at its heart.
By choosing to favor the transgender class over the class of murder victims in such a story, they are engaging in a form of bigotry against people most likely to be victims of such shootings. It is bigotry against schoolchildren and schoolteachers, bigotry against principals and parents. One cannot favor one side of an equation in this way without simultaneously cheating the other side.
The honorable goal in such coverage – a goal shared by the press, and law enforcement, and society in general – should be to reduce the likelihood of such crimes, to protect the potential victims. We have a criminal justice system to protect future victims (and to a lesser extent, to deliver punishment to the guilty).
If we refuse to cover these stories honestly – if we refuse to provide the information necessary for society to properly assign blame – then we reduce our chances of identifying future threats. We make it more likely that such incidents will be repeated.
It has become clear in recent years that mass murderers – here in the west, at least – overwhelmingly fall into one of two groups: jihadist muslims and transgender persons. That’s not to say that every muslim or every sufferer of gender dysphoria is a homicidal maniac, just that these are the two populations with a higher concentration of these risks. This information is critical for public policy determination.
And mass murder isn’t the only place where this issue with the press has surfaced. Let’s turn to energy for a moment.
Hundreds of thousands of birds per year are killed by wind turbines in the USA. We’re talking sparrows, robins, crows, pigeons, seagulls, hawks, eagles – there are so many types of birds in the United States, and so many “wind farms,” that the fatalities are beyond count.
Since the press is generally on the side of so-called “alternative energy,” they don’t cover these reports the same way they would cover similar numbers of birds stricken by lightning strikes or avian flu. The windmills are a “protected class;” the birds aren’t.
But the birds aren’t the only victims of these turbine blades: when birds are chopped up mid-air, their body parts must fly somewhere.
With so many wind turbines built in the midst of farmland, this means rotting animal carcasses are flung onto the crops we eat. Normally, the birds of the skies clean our crops by swooping down and snatching the mice, rats and other critters roaming our farmland; now the birds themselves contribute to that detritus. This isn’t to say that dead birds are horribly contaminating all of America’s crops, but they are certainly contaminating some. It’s undeniable that shredded birds are joining the wind turbines’ other ill effects, such as spraying lubricating oil on nearby crops and rendering thousands and thousands of square feet of farmland – per turbine – unusable for agriculture.
And the same thing goes for wind turbines at sea, in offshore wind farms. Then it’s not just seagulls and eagles above the water at risk; it’s fish and other aquatic life, especially the dolphins, whales, and other marine life forced to live near the crushing underwater sound of these things, disrupting their natural sonar.
By favoring wind turbines as a protected class, they disfavor animal life, the farmers, the food industry – and most importantly, the consumers of food: you and me.
The same goes for solar panel farms. These things are installed in what would otherwise be useful farmland, but the press proudly reports how many thousands of acres of land are fitted for solar panels, whenever a new one is announced. These panels, too, cost society all that land, since the farmers cannot grow crops under them, and they kill birds and other animals through heat, through blinding light reflection, and through electrocution.
But the press favors solar panels as a protected class, above and beyond plant life, animal life, or human needs for food.
For a long time, the press was on the side of ecology; you could hardly open a national magazine or a Sunday newspaper without encountering some feature concerning our mountains of garbage, our need to recycle, our shortage of landfill space.
Such stories have all but evaporated in recent years, because solar panels and wind turbines, both of which are enormous and non-biodegradable, constitute an absolute violation of the cult of recycling and waste management. The land forever ruined by these forms of energy has no defenders in the mainstream press, because alternative energy is a protected class.
What is the solution?
For all these issues, from mass murder to landfill space to agricultural protection, society has decisions to make. We count on the press to provide us with all the data necessary to make an informed choice in these areas, but they don’t deliver on this expectation.
Here in the alternative press, you can get the whole story, but the mainstream news – the one that’s allied with the Left and bankrolled by the establishment – shows an overwhelming tendency to keep the most important elements of any story a secret, because they have their protected classes.
Wouldn’t it be nice if their protected class was the American people?
Copyright 2026 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance trainer and consultant. President of the Ethnic American Council in the 1980s and Chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party in the 1990s, his book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his first nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” are all available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon. He’s recently begun an eponymous podcast, and his business consulting / trade compliance training practice is available either in person or by webinar.
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