A horrific mass shooting took place in Apalachee High School in Georgia, which led to the murders of two faculty and two students. The individuals in question are Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, and the educators were Richard Aspinwall, and Cristina Irimie. The shooter, Colt Gray, was allegedly aided by his father, Colin Gray. Both are currently awaiting trial.

However, members of the far-right are trying to exploit this tragedy by falsely claiming that Colt Gray was transgender and a Kamala Harris supporter, despite a complete lack of evidence.

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Alejandra Caraballo pointed out on X that people are spreading a fake, since-deleted X account of the shooter allegedly in a Kamala Harris campaign hat, wearing a weird trans pride shirt, having pronouns in the bio, and calling for an end to “all MAGAts” with a gun emoji.

This account, however, does not appear to be real and is in fact a troll account someone made, most likely by using the AI image generator Grok.

Some of the many telltale signs of fakery include the fact that the hat matches no known Kamala Harris campaign hat, and that the trans pride flag on the shirt does not match any real pride flags associated with people being trans.

Additionally, a separate screenshot of the account shows it as belonging to someone completely different. PolitiFact shows an archive of the account as backing Donald Trump in one instance. They find that it formerly said “to any lawyers, journos, cops & the CIA: this content is all fake and made up” in a post, and that its name used to be “S. Poster.” (Get it?)

There are other trans claims about the shooter circulating around, but as PolitiFact also pointed out, there is no evidence as no official source has stated the shooter as being transgender.

Additionally, CNN revealed that in a Discord account, the shooter modeled himself after other, previous shooters and had, “expressed frustration with the acceptance of transgender people,” which Daily Dot interprets as him being anti-trans along with recognizing the lack of actual evidence.

The only thing we can do is wait for more developments on this story, and avoid any social media accounts baselessly speculating.

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