Eyes too tired to read? Listen instead.
The media’s institutional machine runs on a predictable, well-oiled play, and watching the establishment press scramble to cover the Twin Falls shooting is like watching an amateur theater troupe repeat the same tired script. The moment an attacker drops into the national consciousness, the editorial rooms don't pause to gather primary court filings, verified ballistics, or official digital forensics. They instantly run a political triage. If a perpetrator leaves behind a signed, right-leaning manifesto, the story gets wall-to-wall 24/7 panel coverage for a month, complete with dramatic graphics and grave lectures about rhetoric. But the second a suspect turns out to be an academic studying law or criminology, those same newsrooms panic, ditch the investigative rigor, and fall back on subtle framing tricks, soft-focus human-interest profiles, and outrageous guilt-by-association tactics.
Look no further than how the legacy press handled the fallout surrounding Chad Williams. Lacking a concrete conservative paper trail from the 24-year-old shooter himself, the establishment media executed a classic maneuver. The news desks immediately scraped his mother’s personal Facebook feed, found posts praising Marco Rubio and ripping Joe Biden, and instantly projected those views directly onto her adult son. Outlets like the New York Post couldn't resist running the explicitly loaded line: And I quote— "The gunman’s mother apparently shares her late son’s conservative politics, according to her Facebook page – which features videos praising US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and ripping former president Joe Biden."
Seriously, I can absolutely see CNN writing that, but the NY Post? But as the saying goes, if it bleeds it leads!
Hiding behind that cowardly word "apparently" like a bulletproof vest is an utterly damning, transparent double standard. Journalistic hedge words like "apparently" or "allegedly" serve as legal armor for editorial rooms, allowing them to plant an explicit political narrative in the minds of millions of casual scrollers while preserving total legal deniability when the primary evidence inevitably proves them dead wrong.
The editorial room’s eager leap to weaponize a mother’s Facebook feed completely ignores the reality of modern political drift and radicalization. It is entirely plausible that growing up in a conservative household, a young man initially absorbed or shared the traditional political beliefs of his parents during his youth. But young men do not remain static clones of their childhood homes, and the legacy media actively refuses to examine what happens when an individual leaves that foundation behind. In an era dominated by relentless online outrage cycles, institutional anti-Western rhetoric, and aggressive left-wing propaganda, young, impressionable minds are routinely targeted, enticed, and pulled away from their family roots. The violent, dehumanizing rhetoric flowing from radical left-wing corners of the internet has a proven track record of radicalizing alienated youth, severing them from their upbringing, and driving them toward antisocial hostility. We may not have the suspect’s full, unvarnished paper trail in our hands yet, but one thing is unmistakably clear: these shooters are not conservative MAGA patriots acting on right-wing principles. By immediately pinning the mother's politics onto her adult son, the establishment press intentionally covers up the toxic digital and cultural pipeline that systematically targets young men and turns them against the very values they were raised on.
If an adult suspect happens to have a parent who posted videos supporting right-leaning candidates or served in law enforcement, the press immediately declares the household culture as the toxic soil that produced the killer. Yet when a perpetrator’s parents are active in left-wing activism, progressive unions, or tenure-track faculty rooms, those exact same news desks suddenly discover unprecedented journalistic restraint, insisting with solemn faces that a parent’s political feed has absolutely zero bearing on an adult son's independent actions. We saw this exact same game played out with Phoenix Ikner in Florida, where the press hyper-focused on his stepmother’s career as a school resource deputy to frame the event around law-and-order culture. We saw it again in Utah with Tyler Robinson, where national outlets splashed his father’s MAGA beliefs across headlines for days, completely glossing over the primary court documents and text messages revealing that Robinson himself had broken sharply from his family, lived with a transgender partner, and explicitly stated he acted out of hatred for conservative ideology.
The media’s attempt to brand an obsession with anti-crime, law, or institutional systems as an inherently conservative trait is pure manipulation. Studying criminology or law does not make someone a right-wing activist, and it certainly does not make them MAGA. In reality, deeply antisocial, disturbed personalities are routinely fascinated by the mechanics of control, state power, and crime. Look at Bryan Kohberger sitting in classroom seats at Washington State University pursuing a Ph.D. in criminology, fixated on forensic systems and offender psychology. Look at Wess Roley in Coeur d'Alene, who wanted to be a wildland firefighter, was turned away by the department, and then set the brush fire on Canfield Mountain to ambush the very institution that rejected him. Academia, university criminal justice departments, and student governments skew overwhelmingly to the left, yet the moment a suspect emerges from those institutions, legacy desks rebrand an antisocial fixation on criminology or emergency systems as a right-wing attribute, dropping a politically convenient blanket over the perpetrator to protect the establishment narrative.
Shame on these newsrooms for passing off secondhand Facebook scrapes as investigative journalism while hiding behind weak hedges that no casual reader pays attention to. The entire pipeline relies on the public being too distracted to notice the pattern. They drop a vague breadcrumb to let the audience infer whatever political profile fits the current media narrative, and the moment official records, ballistics, or digital forensics disprove their hasty caricature, they quietly kill the story, go radio silent, and move on to the next cycle without ever issuing a real correction.
