Posted on | April 4, 2026 | No Comments
Marquell Lamar Wyatt, a/k/a, ‘Fifty Bandz’
One of the difficulties of arguing with liberals is that so many of them seem unable to grasp basic concepts like per capita and correlation. Any attempt to discuss crime and law enforcement will inevitably devolve into a shouting match because liberals are so prejudiced in favor of leniency — the “turn-’em-loose” school of social justice — that they become outraged if you call attention to the facts and logic in favor of the public safety benefits of a “lock-’em-up” approach. Having convinced themselves that criminals are actually victims of society, liberals respond to data about recidivism rates like a vampire confronted with a crucifix.
Any fact that contradicts the liberal narrative is disregarded and, after Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, the narrative was that this had unleashed a wave of violence against “transgender women of color.” As I explained in January 2019, the national media began reporting the annual number of transgender murders as political propaganda:
This is a crucial aspect of the Transgender Victimhood Narrative, i.e., the suggestion that Trump’s election signified the onset of a “climate of hate” which is to blame for violence against “transgender women of color” and other “marginalized communities” . . .
The national media eventually lost interest in that narrative, but not so the tax-exempt 501(c)3 Human Rights Campaign, which kept pretending that the “climate of hate” continued to reap its deadly toll even after Joe Biden became president. Thus the headline from February 2021:
HRC Mourns Fifty Bandz, Black
Trans Woman Killed in Louisiana
HRC is deeply saddened to learn of the death of Fifty Bandz, a 21-year-old Black transgender woman who was shot to death in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on January 28. Her death is at least the fifth violent death of a transgender person in 2021. We say “at least” because too often these deaths go unreported — or misreported. So far this year, four of the five known deaths have been Black transgender women.
Friends and advocates said Fifty Bandz’s name and released balloons to remember her life on February 1, and will also hold a memorial on Thursday evening. Many on Facebook have shared the sentiment “rest in peace,” with another saying “long live Fifty Bandz.” One friend shared, “When are we as a community going to do something?!”
According to local media reports, Fifty was killed by a man with whom she had been in a relationship for more than a year. Tragically, interpersonal violence accounts for a significant number of fatalities against transgender and gender non-conforming people. . . .
HRC recorded 44 deaths of transgender and gender non-conforming people in 2020, more than in any year since we began tracking this violence in 2013.
More than 10,000 hate crimes in the U.S. involve a firearm each year, which equates to more than 28 each day . . . According to the 2017-2019 Transgender Homicide Tracker, three-fourths of confirmed homicides against transgender people have involved a gun, and nearly eight in 10 homicides of Black trans women involve a gun. Further, advocates saw a 43% increase in the formation of anti-LGBTQ hate groups in 2019.
Did you notice the sleight-of-hand there? After admitting that this was “interpersonal violence” between the victim and “a man with whom she had been in a relationship,” they began talking about “10,000 hate crimes” and an alleged increase in “anti-LGBTQ hate groups,” as if it were relevant to this case, which it obviously isn’t.
“Fifty Bandz” was just a social-media pseudonym for Marquell Lamar Wyatt, and he was killed by Michael Brooks, who had secretly “dated” Wyatt. After Brooks was sentenced to prison, he appealed his sentence, and you can read the ruling in which the court rejected his appeal:
At trial, Leonda Guerin (“Leonda”), Wyatt’s friend, testified that Wyatt and the defendant were in a romantic relationship at the time of his death. Leonda said Wyatt openly identified as a gay man, but the defendant was closeted and did not want people to know he was gay. Leonda testified, on the day of the incident, she drove Wyatt to a house in Brookstown to deliver a phone for the defendant so he could better communicate with Wyatt. According to Leonda, the defendant, the defendant’s girlfriend, and the defendant’s brother were outside when she and Wyatt arrived. Leonda said the defendant pulled out a gun “to show off in front of his girl” and acted like he did not know Leonda when she handed him the phone. A few minutes after delivering the phone, the defendant called Leonda while she and Wyatt were driving back to Wyatt’s mother’s house. Leonda testified the defendant was upset and cursing at her, which angered Wyatt. Leonda said the defendant and Wyatt argued on the phone for a while, and then Wyatt asked Leonda to drive him back to Brookstown to pickup the phone from the defendant. When Leonda refused, Wyatt borrowed a vehicle from his mother and left. . . .
You can read the whole thing, but the point is that Brooks felt that Wyatt was trying to “out” him, got Wyatt to agree to meet up to return the phone, and then shot Wyatt 19 times, including 11 shots fired “in the immediate vicinity” of where police found Wyatt’s body, which a detective said indicated that, after Wyatt fell down from the initial shots, Brooks stood over him and kept firing until the pistol’s ammunition ran out.
So, secretly bisexual black man murders his openly gay black boyfriend (who apparently sometimes dressed in drag), and the Human Rights Campaign treats this as evidence of “anti-LGBTQ hate”?
Even more preposterously, however, would you believe HRC claims that white supremacy is to blame? Vincent Lundgren and Colin Wright looked into that, and did the arithmetic to disprove it:
For more than a decade, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) has pushed this narrative, publishing annual “Epidemic of Violence” reports documenting transgender homicide victims in the United States. Relying on the HRC’s analysis, activists, presidents, members of Congress, the American Medical Association, celebrities, journalists, and scholars have repeated the HRC’s claims so often that for many they feel like established facts.
The problem is that many of these claims just don’t add up. Transgender people are less likely to be murdered than the rest of the population, most transgender people are murdered by members of their own race, and intimate partner violence — not hate — is the leading identified motive for most such murders.
We reached this conclusion using the HRC’s own victim lists as the starting point. We independently verified every case from 2015 through 2024 (304 victims) using court records, police statements, local news reports, and other public documentation. . . .
The HRC’s own data further debunk the claim that “white supremacy” is a cause of violence against transgender-identifying Americans. Among identified suspects, black suspects account for 65.1 percent of perpetrators, while white suspects account for 18 percent. . . .
This finding is not the result of one bad year or a handful of outlier cases. And in 2020, the year the Human Rights Campaign published a statement attributing the deaths of “our Black trans siblings” to “an epidemic of violence” fueled by “systems of white supremacy,” not a single white suspect was identified in the cases we verified. . . .
To see how the mismatch between narrative and reality is manufactured, consider the deaths of “four Black transgender women” that the HRC cited in a 2021 report titled “Black LGBTQ People and Compounding Discrimination” as proof that “white supremacy” was driving an “epidemic of violence.” One case, the drive-by shooting of Tyianna Alexander, remains unsolved, with no public evidence of anti-trans bias, a hate crime, or anything tied to white supremacy.
In the other three cases, every identified suspect was a black man. Bianca Bankz was killed by a black man named Moses Allen, who shot Bankz and then killed himself. Dominique Jackson’s killing led to the arrest of a black man named Branden McLaurin; police said there was “no evidence supporting a hate-crime” in this case. Fifty Bandz was killed by boyfriend Michael Joshua Brooks, a black man, in what looks like a straightforward case of intimate partner violence. . . .
You can read the whole thing. For the sake of brevity, I omitted a lot of Lundgren and Wright’s statistical analysis here, but it’s excellent. No liberal narrative can survive arithmetic, because math is RAAAAACIST!
