Minneapolis Mayor: People Using Shooting To Vilify Trans People Have Completely Lost Touch With Common Humanity
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey told MSNBC host Jen Psaki that today’s mass shooting by a trans person should not be used to vilify the community.
PSAKI: I have been thinking about them as my own all day, as I know many people watching have been thinking about them as their own. It’s so fresh here. It’s just happened this morning. And I — there’s already been sort of some effort, which I think is so sick and disgusting, to weaponize some of the details, even if we don’t know a lot at this point in time. And, obviously, the law enforcement in your city have been keeping people abreast, including details about the individual possibly being trans, about the individual possibly having negative things to say about Trump, about some things that have been on the weapons. A lot of this is just very early reporting. What do you do as a leader of your city to prevent details from being weaponized and using this to blame something other than the guns? FREY: First off, anybody who is using this as an opportunity to villainize trans people has completely lost touch with a common humanity. Operate not off of hate for any community. Operate off of love for our kids. Kids died today. This should be about protecting our children. This should be about loving our children. And far too often, I feel like people will think of the conclusion that they want to get to, and then they will, like, reverse-manufacture the facts that they want to hear to get to that end point. We should be standing up for our Catholic community, by the way, right now, because this is a Catholic Church. We should be standing up for kids and churches and schools and all that. Let’s love each other. The antidote to hate is not more hate. The antidote to hate and cowardice, which clearly this shooter had, is not more hate. Hurt people hurt people. The antidote is love. The antidote is standing up for our neighbor no matter who they are. That’s where we need to get to right now. And so, no, this whole effort to villainize a community, this was not about a community that did this. A community didn’t do this. A person did this. And that was a horrific act. And we should all be staying that out loud. And we should all be loving each other more.
