Sometimes it’s a pity more people don’t watch CNN, because every once in a while, they’d get a lesson on how pitiful the network really is.
One of those moments came on Sunday’s “State of the Union,” when Sebastian Gorka, a conservative commentator and a top aide in President Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security, took on CNN’s Brianna Keilar in a tussle over the involvement of so-called transgenders in mass shootings.
It didn’t go well for Keilar at all.
The discussion was sparked, of course, by Wednesday’s murders at a Roman Catholic school and church in Minneapolis by a clearly deranged 23-year-old man who’d been “identifying” as a woman since his teens.
Check it out here. It was a beatdown, pure and simple:
Everybody stop what you’re doing and watch this.
A CNN host tried to downplay the surge in Christian attacks and pushed false data on transgender shootings, but Sebastian Gorka called her out and shut her down.
“Forgive me if I don’t go with CNN stats. Okay?”
An absolute… pic.twitter.com/PHiRqGSxWk
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) August 31, 2025
Keilar cited statistics she said showed “96 percent” of mass attacks in the United States involved “non-trans men.”
That number might sound impressive to the uninformed, but Gorka’s response proved he is anything but. And he was also clearly prepared for the question, or something like it.
Do you know anyone who gets their information from CNN?
The numbers Keilar cited, he said, covered mass attacks overall, which overwhelmingly involve gang-related or criminal violence.
Wednesday’s attack, like the 2023 mass killing at Covenant Christian School in Nashville, Tennessee, was not a matter of gang-on-gang violence or drug deals that turned violent.
Both killers — Audrey Hale in Nashville and Robin, “nee Robert”, Westman in Minneapolis — made clear in writings that have been made public that there was very personal hatred involved.
And that hatred was undeniably connected to an ideology that condones a mental illness so deep that it convinces individuals they are in the wrong body.
“There was an ideological content to this attack. That’s what terrorism is,” Gorka said, as CNN’s transcript recorded.
“It’s not because somebody didn’t get the drug deal they wanted. It is an ideological message, whether it was anti-Israel, as in this case, whether it targeted President Trump in its rhetoric, as we saw on one of the magazines written by the perpetrator on that YouTube video, or whether we saw the fact that it was anti-Christian and targeting children.”
At a later point, he was even more direct.
“Let me be clear. In just a couple of years, we have seen seven mass shootings involving people of transgender nature or who are confused in their gender, seven in just the last couple of years,” Gorka said.
“That’s inordinately high.”
Keiler launched a counterattack, disputing whether it was seven or five “transgenders” involved in Gorka’s list, but even she probably had to know she sounded like she was splitting hairs. The real fact that matters is that, when the facts don’t fit the leftist narrative when it comes to acts of mass murder, leftists lie.
Progressives prefer their killers to be white and male and boiling with Trumpian rage. When they turn out to be anything but — as in the Nashville and Minneapolis cases, among others — leftist apologists like Keilar and her network throw up a host of seemingly related data points that only obfuscate the issue.
The fact that Keiler started out with data from 2016 to 2020, the years of the first Trump administration, is likely a sign she knew how weak the argument was.
But Gorka, the Trump administration’s senior director for counterterrorism, cut right through that.
And he had plenty of support on social media.
Well done. Well said. It’s past time to push back on the mainstream media.
— LisaontheWrite (@LisaontheWrite) September 1, 2025
Why does CNN always do things like this to promote agendas?????
— Otbills (@DeraOt_) August 31, 2025
Accuracy. CNN hosts may start backing off the “I’m going to talk over you” routine, as they wonder how to save their diminishing audience for what looks like an inevitable exodus.
— Evan Goodrow (@evangoodrow) August 31, 2025
What’s interesting is that it’s a good bet that virtually all of the commenters about Gorka taking on Keilar — probably all of those commenters, actually — saw the clip only on social media, as opposed to viewing it live.
The number of Americans who watch CNN is minimal compared to those who watch other cable news networks. The dominant Fox News had almost five times as many viewers as CNN in the second quarter of 2025, according to the advertising industry publication AdWeek.
And the number of CNN viewers in the second quarter was lower than it was in the first, according to Adweek, so it doesn’t look like things are improving.
That’s about what CNN deserves after destroying its own credibility with year upon year of deranged Trump bashing, but it still is a pity sometimes.
Watching Gorka school Keilar with cold, hard facts would have been a pleasant Sunday morning surprise for any conservatives watching. And maybe liberals would have learned something.
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