A top White House official went to war with CNN on Sunday as a network anchor used deceptive data to downplay deadly attacks against Christians by transgenders.
Sebastian Gorka, the White House senior director for Counterterrorism, appeared on “State of the Union” with guest host Brianna Keilar, as the pair discussed Wednesday’s mass-casualty shooting at the Annunciation Catholic Church and School in Minneapolis that killed two children and wounded 17 others.
The perpetrator, Robert Westman, a transgender who had changed his name to Robin Westman, killed himself at the conclusion of the horror.
Keilar asked Gorka: “When you are looking at the U.S. Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center looking 172 mass attacks in the U.S. between 2016 and 2020. 96% of the attackers were non-trans men.
“So I know you’re focusing on the shooter being trans, uh, the shooter was trans, and that is certainly of note. But are you missing the bigger picture here when you zero in on that instead of more broadly these school shooters as an epidemic and you perhaps miss through line that connects them all?”
Gorka responded: “Well, no, because your facts obfuscate two things: You are using data based on the predominant gun violence, which is gang-on-gang violence with zero ideological content.
“If you remove all of that, the gang violence on the streets of Chicago, L.A., Detroit, then you come down to a much smaller dataset. So, it’s like those who say ‘gun violence in America causes so many deaths’ and then fail to note the majority of the stats they are using refer to also suicides by gun, which, of course, is not what we are talking about here today.
“So let’s concentrate on mass shootings at schools, especially Christian or Catholic schools, then the data set is wholly different. So, don’t conflate different datasets just to make a political point.
“There was an ideological content to this attack. that’s what terrorism is. 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 was saw the fact that it was anti-Christian and targeting children! That has nothing to do with gang violence. Let’s not mix the two things up.”
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, in an attempt to “narrow it down,” told Gorka, “By CNN’s count, when you look at 32 school shootings since 2020 in which you have four or more people who have been killed … only three of 32 of those shootings were committed by transgender shooters.”
Gorka blasted back: “Forgive me if I don’t go with CNN stats. OK? CNN has proven itself to be wholly inaccurate in all kinds of things for the last 10 years, uh, perpetrators of the Russia Russia hoax and that we didn’t have an open border. So please forgive me if I don’t take your stats for granted.”
“It’s simple math,” stressed Keilar.
“No it’s not. It’s distortions,” Gorka said. “You are distorting the facts. Let me be clear. In just a couple of years, we have seen SEVEN mass shootings involving people of transgender nature or who were confused in their gender, SEVEN in just the last couple of years. That is inordinately high. … I’m gonna stick with the facts and not CNN’s pseudo-facts.”
Keilar then said: “You think transgender people are the problem here. So what specifically do you think should be done?”
“When did I say that?” Gorka replied. “You just created live, fake news. You just did it right in front of the small viewership you have.”
Regarding how such tragedies could be prevented in the future, Gorka explained: “What we should do is we should look at the early warning signals. We should be providing off ramps. We should providing mental health options for these individuals.”
“I find it hard to believe that an individual goes from getting his mother to sign a change of name certificate, age 17, and then just a handful of years later is mowing down innocent children in a church pew during a Catholic Mass, and nobody realized there was a problem. That’s what we have to address to save the next children from the next atrocity.”
WATCH: Senior WH Director for Counterterrorism Sebastian Gorka calls out the trans violence epidemic and how to combat it:
“What we should do is we should look at the early warning signals. We should be providing off ramps. We should providing mental health options for these… pic.twitter.com/4irJtjvP6X
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) August 31, 2025
“It’s not about the sexual proclivities of the individual. It’s the fact that nobody seems to notice a very disturbing pattern towards violence. You don’t end up you don’t wake up one morning saying I’m going to do a video on YouTube threatening to kill the president, targeting Jews, targeting children.”
“That doesn’t happen overnight. Somebody saw that degradation. Somebody saw those mental issues and said nothing. That’s what we have to prevent. The early warning signals must be addressed if children’s lives are to be saved.”
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‘I am not right’: Catholic school shooter identified as anti-Trump transgender