The Heritage Foundation should be investigated.

By inflating numbers and narrowing definitions, Heritage promotes a false link between transgender identity and violence in its push for the FBI to create a new terrorism category. In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing, the Republican policy apparatus went immediately to work. The Heritage Foundation, which published Project 2025, and its spinoff, the Oversight Project, issued a call for the Federal Bureau of Investigation to designate “Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism,” or “TIVE,” as a domestic terrorism threat category. The push comes as President Donald Trump just signed an executive order that seeks to mobilize federal law enforcement against vaguely defined domestic terror networks. The Heritage Foundation and Oversight Project document, which defines “transgender ideology” as “a belief that wholly or partially rejects fundamental science about human sex being biologically determined before birth, binary, and immutable," grounds its policy recommendations in a startling claim: "Experts estimate that 50% of all major (non-gang related) school shootings since 2015 have involved or likely involved transgender ideology." Heritage’s 50% claim is not just unsupported, it appears misleading by design, arbitrary in scope, and unscientific at its core. Heritage reaches its 50 percent figure by shrinking the universe of school shootings to a hand-picked few. Severino first rules out incidents rooted in crime, personal disputes, or workplace grievances. He then defines “major” school shootings as those he says are intended to “send a public message.” Applying those filters, Heritage crops down decades’ worth of incidents into fewer than 10 cases—a sample small enough that even a few shooters with one or two shared traits can be made to look like half. Broader databases, which count school shootings by more consistent criteria, show dozens of incidents each year and make clear that Heritage’s figures rest on a frame built to exaggerate, not measure; to reflect a narrative, not reality. Experts say Heritage's push not only distorts the data but also diverts attention from the extremist movements actually driving violence: nihilistic violent extremist networks, accelerationist neo-fascist movements, and lone actors motivated by any number of far right culture war grievances.