The Courage to Count
Noah Rothman wants to talk about the courage to marginalize trans people.
Noah Rothman ends his latest piece in National Review with it — the courage to connect dots, to say what others are too frightened to say, to confront an uncomfortable truth that the "activist class" is desperately trying to suppress. It's a flattering frame. It positions Rothman as the brave truth-teller and everyone who disagrees with him as either a coward or a propagandist.
Here's a more uncomfortable truth: it takes no courage at all to point at a marginalized group and call them dangerous. That has been, in fact, one of the most reliably rewarded moves in the history of American political commentary. What takes courage — what Rothman conspicuously declines to do — is follow the evidence wherever it actually leads, including when it leads somewhere inconvenient.
So let's follow it.
Rothman has assembled a list of mass shooters who had some connection to transgender identity. It's a real list. The shooters he names are real people who committed real atrocities. He isn't making them up. But a list is not an argument, and the thing Rothman never does — the thing the entire piece depends on him never doing — is asking the obvious next question: a connection to trans identity compared to what?
Mass shootings in the United States are not rare events. They are, to our collective shame, a regular feature of American life. And the overwhelming majority of their perpetrators are cisgender men. Not adjacent to cisgender men. Not identifying as cisgender men while struggling with their identity. Cisgender men. That is not a talking point — it is the most robust and replicated finding in the entire literature on mass violence. Young cisgender male identity is, statistically speaking, the single strongest demographic predictor of this particular form of murder.
Rothman does not mention this. The absence is not accidental. The moment you name the base rate, his entire analytical framework collapses, because you can suddenly see what he's actually done: he has curated a list, not analyzed a trend. He has looked at a universe of violence, found the cases that fit his thesis, and presented them as though the cases that don't fit simply don't exist.
This is not connecting dots. This is choosing which dots to draw.
The piece has another tell, and it's a damning one.
Rothman, to his credit, does identify real common factors across the shooters he discusses. An obsession with graphic violence — gore websites, death videos, communities built around the consumption of real-world atrocity. Documented, severe mental illness. Social isolation. Expressions of anguish that preceded violence by months or years. These are not incidental details. They are, in fact, consistent with what violence researchers have actually identified as meaningful warning signs. Rothman names them. He acknowledges they're there.
And then he pivots away from them to talk about transgender identity.
That pivot is the whole game. He finds the real throughlines, dismisses them as insufficient, and lands on the one that generates the most political heat. Not because the evidence points there. Because the politics do.
The people who will be harassed, threatened, and killed in the climate that pieces like this help create are not abstractions. Trans people in this country are already living with dramatically elevated rates of violence against them. They are already the targets of a coordinated legislative campaign designed to make their existence more precarious. Rothman's contribution to that environment is a 1,200-word argument, dressed in the language of careful analysis, that their identity is "an unmistakable warning sign."
You don't have to hate someone to harm them. You just have to be willing to use them.
There is something almost poignant in the piece's closing gambit. Rothman worries that if polite society refuses to have this conversation openly, it will "move underground, where the elite arbiters of the national dialogue will have no influence over its trajectory."
He's warning us about radicalization.
In a piece designed to accelerate it.
The conversation he wants to "confront" openly is the one that ends with trans people being identified, in a major American political magazine, as a category of person prone to murder. He is not pulling that conversation back from the underground. He is providing it with a letterhead.
Rothman ends with courage. Let's end there too.
The courage this moment actually requires is not the courage to point at trans people and call them dangerous. Plenty of people are doing that, loudly, with institutional backing and political reward. The courage this moment requires is the willingness to say that we have a violence problem in this country that has identifiable causes — a culture that fetishizes mass murder, a gun policy regime designed by the people it profits, a mental health infrastructure that we systematically underfund and then blame when it fails — and that scapegoating a marginalized group is not a solution to any of them.
It is, however, excellent for clicks.
The dots Rothman declines to connect are the ones that actually matter. He looked at the evidence, saw where it pointed, and pointed somewhere else. That's not courage. That's a choice. And choices have consequences for real people living real lives in a country that is already doing its level best to make those lives harder.
Count all the dots, Noah. Or don't claim you're counting.
Dark Before Dawn is a free political newsletter about how government actually works — and why it so often fails in predictable ways.
New here? Start with What Dark Before Dawn Is For.
Everything here is free. Paid subscriptions and the occasional tip jar are optional ways to support the work — never for access.
— Liberal Cynic