The Madison, Wisconsin School Shooter Was A Columbine Copycat: Here's What That Means

Also: why the far-right wants you to believe she was transgender

This article was written and researched by Garrison Davis and edited by Robert Evans.

Another Monday in America and another school shooting. On the morning of December 16th, a female student at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, shot and killed a teacher and fellow student and injured 6 others before killing herself. Initially police falsely reported the shooter was 17 years old, but late Monday night they correctly identified the deceased shooter as 15 year old Natalie Rupnow, who went by Samantha or Sam.

In the aftermath of this horrific event, rightwing influencers and content creators wasted no time in blaming the shooting on trans people, labeling the suspect as another in a series of alleged “transgender terrorists.” But what really happened here had nothing to do with trans people and is, sadly, ordinary for the United States.

In August of 2024, the father of the future school shooter took his daughter to a gun range to do trap shooting. Samantha wore a shirt bearing the logo of the band, KMFDM. In another photo of the shooter we can see the front of the shirt. The same design was famously worn by Columbine shooter Eric Harris, who was a fan of the band.

COLUMBINE COSPLAY

The bulk of the shooter’s online footprint suggests a general obsession with school shooters and the “TCC,” or True Crime Community, a nickname used for the de facto international Columbine fandom. This sort of content dominates her tumblr, which last posted in May of 2024. An alleged online friend of the shooter said that she “posted about school shooters all the time,” and “had school shooter leanings.”

Samanatha is hardly alone, there have been over 100 copycats inspired by the Columbine shooting since 1999.

A Twitter account believed to have belonged to the shooter posted a series of videos that teased and glorified school shootings in the days leading up to her own shooting. The account was created in December of 2024, and the profile picture featured a young man in camo pants and a tactical backpack.

This male profile picture was used as evidence by some conservative influencers that the shooter must have transitioned, though these same influencers could not agree on whether she was female-to-male or male-to-female. One user constructed an overlay trying to compare the photo of the shooter with her twitter profile picture.

The above post is, however, only proof that most of what gets passed off as “OSINT” online today is incompetent rambling and propaganda. The main issue with this diagram is that the male profile picture is actually another Columbine copycat school shooter from Russia who, similar to Samantha, was 15 years old when he carried out his shooting.

FEMCEL HITLER

Hours after the shooting, while right wing accounts were still arguing what sort of transgender the shooter had been, a neo-Nazi twitter account named Nitro claimed to be friends with the shooter on Discord and repeatedly denied accusations that the shooter was transgender, calling her a “biological woman.” An early complicating factor in establishing the motive and identity of the shooter is that her alleged twitter account posted a link to a google doc of her manifesto, but seemingly forgot to make the visibility setting public. The shooter’s alleged Discord friend, Nitro, claimed to find what he believed to be a snippet of a manifesto draft shared by the shooter in a Discord group chat. Nitro is in the UK, and so if legitimate (big if) this message would have been sent about an hour and a half before the shooting.

Hopefully to most people this should read like unintelligible gibberish, a reactionary “feminist” screed about initiating a wave of male-targeted violence to cleanse the earth, with pepperings of “moids,” “foids,” (internet incel slang for male and female, respectively) racial slurs, and something called “radfem hitler.” The incel content would, if this excerpt is legitimate, mark her out as a “femcel”, or female incel.

“Radfem Hitler”, meanwhile, is a reference to a Twitter influencer by the same name and the handle @hollowearthterf (“Terf” stands for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist”). Her content is a mix of trad-influenced rightwing feminism, advocating traditional gender roles for men and women, with anti-trans flourishes. Radfem Hitler supports a mass purge of “moids” (including trans women). She is derided by both those on the right and left, but has a small dedicated following of conservative radfem women with trad or occult interests.

Nitro claimed the shooter “was a fan of RFH (radfem hitler),” and talked about the account frequently on Discord, though Nitro previously believed her interest was merely ironic. An anonymous twitter nazi is certainly not the most reliable source. Nitro was the first person to correctly identify and post photos of the shooter, but they could be utilizing his newfound clout to troll a widely disliked twitter user. Though the fact that he’s been right about all other details inclines me to not discount his claims all together, just to hold them with a billion pounds of salt.

Allegations the shooter was a neo-nazi radfem certainly sent RFH into a panic, who quickly deleted her account. Meanwhile, some of her online associates worked damage control, claiming to have contacted the alleged boyfriend that the shooter had been “e-dating,” with the apparent intention of disproving any ties the shooter had to the twitter radfem orbit. Through the alleged online boyfriend, the rightwing TERF ecosystem claimed to have acquired a copy of the “full manifesto.”

This purported manifesto lacks the anti-male (moid) ramblings of the Discord screenshot, but unsurprisingly shares its use of racial slurs and glorification of violence, at times evocative of Pekka Eric Auvinen’s manifesto (a Finnish school shooter from 2007 who killed eight people). Auvinen considered himself a “natural selector” who had evolved beyond the classmates he gunned down. In Samantha’s purported manifesto he is mentioned by name as a “true inspiration.”

Over the course of 8 hours a radfem Twitter account released 6 pages of what appears to be Samantha’s writing. It contains general misanthropic rambling about humanity and parents being “scum.” The writing describes a difficult family life, suicidal thoughts, and admiration for school shooters and white supremacists. Though it briefly references Terrorgram “saints,” the whole of it is much more reminiscent of old school Columbiners than the modern white nationalist terror milieu.

The alleged manifesto directly names the two Columbine shooters, and includes a paragraph on Vladislav Roslyakov, another Columbine copycat but from Crimea, who also cosplayed one of the shooters.

Though the Discord nazi and the reactionary radfems question the authenticity of the other’s alleged manifesto, what both sides of the incel war do agree on is that Samantha was not transgender. It seems these days the fastest way to get transvestigated is to do a school shooting.

TRANSVESTIGATING SCHOOL SHOOTERS

Transvestigating is the practice of trying to determine if an individual is transgender. It’s often leveled against celebrities, athletes, and politicians. But in recent years there has been a new common subject of transvestigation: mass shooters. In particular school shooters.

Myself, Robert Evans, and James Stout previously reported on this trend back in 2023, right as it grew in prominence after the Nashville Covenant School shooting, which police say was committed by a trans man. We theorized that the online right was testing out a new strategy to attack trans people by associating them with mass shootings via the use of selective bias reporting and plain disinformation. That fear has come to pass. The modicum of believability provided by the Nashville shooting (as it is the only legitimate trans related incident that meets criteria for mainstream mass shooting databases) was enough to fuel this ongoing strategy for two years. Since then, conservative influencers have attempted to link nearly every viral mass/school shooting to trans people to create a false trend.

The strategy operates as follows: during the first few chaotic hours after a shooting, a small group of rightwing content creators weaponize the lack of verified information to make posts framing an alleged shooter as being transgender. This can be done through the use of out-of-context social media posts, doctored photographs, photos of other people, or simply pictures of long/dyed hair. All they need is a collection of loose evidence to affirm on social media that a mass shooter is really transgender.

(For more context listen to this episode of It Could Happen Here I wrote covering the rise of fake “trans terrorists.”)

The goal is to get as many of their followers to see and spread this claim as fast as possible.

Even if this is widely debunked the next day, many who heard the false claim won’t be aware of the verified correction. All these anti-trans influencers need is a brief window of time to plant the idea into people’s minds, and that becomes remembered history. If this strategy is repeated every few months when there’s a new mass shooting, then it’s pretty easy to create the false perception of a growing trend. In reality trans people per capita are actually less likely to commit a shooting compared to cis people, and much more likely to be the victim of gun violence.

But yesterday, conservative and anti-trans influencers tried once again to weaponize a tragedy for their own hateful agenda.

Just minutes after police responded to the shooting, the conservative influencer Matt Wallace posted that an unknown “witness” said that the shooter “looked to be transgender.” Wallace, who has over 2.2 million followers on twitter, provided no source or citation (he has since deleted the post). Others in the online MAGA orbit parroted this language before any identifying information was released.

The rightwing content creator Ryan Matta baselessly claimed the shooter was on hormone replacement therapy, calling the shooter “another mentally unstable psychopath who was prescribed puberty blocker, & hormones.” Matta hosts a show on the rightwing youtube alternative Rumble and has over 123,000 followers on twitter. His tweet claiming the shooter was on HRT racked up 1.6 million “views” and 17k likes in just 12 hours.

Larger accounts like Chaya Raichik’s @libsoftiktok fueled undue speculation about the gender identity of the suspect, seeding confusion into the growing discourse and weaponizing a tragedy for political gain.

A small group of conservative influencers has so successfully created an alternate reality in which nearly every new mass shooter is transgender that they don't even have to outright say it anymore. Accounts like Libs of TikTok and Malaysian blogger Ian Miles Cheong can merely gesture to this reality tunnel they've intentionally created, and now thousands of people will affirm this fake reality as the obvious truth, backed up by historical precedent of fabricated memory.

Conspiracy theories spread that the police were intentionally withholding information about the shooter’s gender identity in service of some hidden “agenda.”

SAMANTHA HYDE

As early as 1:01pm EST the neo-nazi twitter user Nitro correctly identified the shooter as his online friend Sam/Samantha. As this name spread online the multi gendered nature of the name added to speculation that the shooter was trans.

Scarlett Johnson, an activist with the ultra conservative “parents rights” group Moms For Liberty, shared self admitted unconfirmed reports that the shooter was a “transgender teen” who went by “Samantha or Sam.”

As alleged pictures of the shooter started to spread online, courtesy of Nitro, the transvestigation of the shooter only intensified. An unfortunate coincidence is that the shooter’s given name matched the ancient Sam Hyde meme, in which extremely online people try to trick journalists into believing the culprit of a new mass shooting was American comedian Sam Hyde.

In recent years the meme has been used to falsely label mass shooters as trans women. One Hyde post from an unassuming boomer named Ed Massey racked up over 600k views, 4.5k likes, and 1.5k retweets. Massey posted “When you put disturbed children on hormone blockers and sexually mutilate them, you're not curing them, you're creating potential school shooters.” It should go without saying, but the use of puberty suppressing medication has no link to increased violence.

DOUBLE FLIPPER

The “we can always tell” crowd ended up transvestigating both directions, seemingly unsure of what assigned gender at birth the shooter must have had. Some believed the shooter was transfem, while others concluded they were transmasc.

A now deleted post from a TERF account attempted to pass off the shooter as a trans girl-

“Trans identified male” is usually a transphobic dogwhistle to refer to a trans woman, as in a male who identifies as a trans[woman]. but sometimes transphobes get confused by words and use the phrase to refer to trans people who “identify” as men.

One of the most widespread posts claiming the shooter was a trans guy came from an antisemitic doctor in Denmark with 1.4 million followers. She falsely claimed, with no evidence, that the shooter was taking testosterone.

As of Tuesday morning this post has 3 million views, 22k likes, and 8.3k retweets. In a following post she blamed “the jews” for inventing transgenderism. [Note: extremism researchers have argued that transphobia is structurally similar to antisemitism.]

A common piece of anti-trans memetic propaganda deployed in the wake of mass shootings is the “trans shooter collage.” This format spread after the Nashville school shooting in 2023, and this week Matt Wallace provided us with a brand new version.

Out of all those pictures only one person in this collage is actually reported to be transgender, the Nashville shooter in the upper left. The rest of the people pictured are not trans and have never claimed to be. The person with long hair in the lower half of the image is Colt Grey, who was falsely labeled as trans by far right influencers like End Wokeness and Mike Cernovitch. Grey’s Discord posts revealed he held transphobic beliefs.

A more classic version of the “trans shooter collage” format is pictured below, courtesy of Libs of TikTok admin Chaya Raichik.

But just as before, the majority of subjects in the meme aren’t actually trans. The Colorado Springs shooter who targeted a queer club is not really nonbinary, and simply tried to weaponize a false identity to get out of hate crime charges. The person labeled as the “Denver shooter” is not trans, has never claimed to be trans, he just has died hair. This individual did plan the shooting with a transgender male who is not pictured. Lastly, though the person pictured as the “Uvalde shooter” is trans, that is not the actual Uvalde shooter. It’s a random trans girl, who was one of two trans women whose photos were used to falsely label the shooter as transgender.

So after all that transvestigating what do we have? Just another columbiner with neo-nazi ties. The right has gotten so good at deploying the “trans shooter” as a smoke bomb. It obscures the reality of the over-availability of firearms, the dynamics of online radicalization and the social issues that fuel alienation and anger in youth. Instead of focusing on all that, on the victims of this epidemic of white supremacist violence, we instead have to spend a whole day debating the late shooter’s pronouns.

And that’s the point, that’s what they want us talking about. Those who delete their “trans terrorist” posts after being conclusively proven wrong will try the exact same schtick in a few months, after the next mass shooting goes viral. Others won’t even care that much; they’ll just leave up their post, secure in the stability of the reality tunnel they helped to create.

“Never believe that [fascists] are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words.”