KARE 11 is the NBC-affiliated television station serving the Minneapolis–Saint Paul metropolitan area in Minnesota. In its reporting today on the mass shooting that occurred just hours ago at Annunciation Catholic Church and School in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where a gunman opened fire, killing two children aged 8 and 10 and injuring 17 others, including 14 children, the author, Samantha Fischer, refers to the shooter using “she/her” pronouns. This confirms what I gathered from the information I’ve been collecting on the case—that our nation has suffered yet another instance of trans violence targeting children.
“KARE 11 investigative reporter A.J. Lagoe reported the shooter was 23-year-old Robin, formerly Robert, Westman. Law enforcement sources said Westman grew up in Richfield and that her mother was an employee at Annunciation School.” (Emphasis mine. You can read the article here: “Minneapolis Catholic school shooter: What we know.”) From other sources, I have learned about court documents showing that, when Westman was 17, he and his mother, an employee of Annunciation (she retired in 2021), applied to change his birth name from Robert to Robin. That request was granted in January 2020. It appears that Westman attended Annunciation as a student for at least some time.
The shooter died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound outside the church. He—not she—legally purchased the firearms used in the attack and had no significant criminal history. It’s shocking that his mother could not have known that her son was a deeply troubled young man—and before that teenager. She knew he was trans, and a cursory look around his room should have told her that he was a profoundly disturbed individual. Investigators are examining a manifesto and online videos—items which I reviewed before they were scrubbed from the Internet—which, they say, suggest a possible motive related to anti-Catholic sentiment. The FBI is treating the incident as an act of domestic terrorism and a hate crime targeting Catholics.
I can tell readers that, based on the materials I reviewed, it’s a lot more than anti-Catholic sentiment. From Westman’s writings, the videos, and the symbology on his notebook, weapons, and around his room, the ideology that moved him is in line with the more radical expressions of progressivism—anti-Semitic (not just anti-Jewish sentiment but a shoutout to Muhammad Atta and the word Mashallah, which means “What Allah has willed” in Arabic) and anti-Christian, as well as Trump Derangement Syndrome. I noted a great deal of Cyrillic script in Westman’s notebooks and scrawled on his weapons. (There is talk on social media about the script being Russian. However, Ukrainians use the Cyrillic script for writing their language, as well. The modern Ukrainian alphabet is distinct from Russian Cyrillic in a few letters and pronunciation rules. I don’t know either language, so I can’t tell.)
On one of Westman’s notebooks is a sticker of the Pride Progress flag with an AR-15 on it. Etsy sells these at $4.50 a pop. In fact, the image I shared above is the image Etsy uses in its marketing. It could just as easily be an image from Westman’s bedroom. This sort of imagery in trans activist messaging—images of guns and knives in tandem with calls to defend and protect the ideology—is typical of the movement and its commercialization. Prominent politicians have donned this symbology. Below is an image of the Lieutenant Governor of Minnesota, Peggy Flanagan, wearing movement paraphernalia to a rally supporting radical gender ideology. Westman’s notebook also sported a sticker of a Pride unicorn.
These images might feel discordant when paired with anti-Semitic messaging, but if you’ve been paying any attention to movement politics of late, the alliance of queer activism and pro-Hamas advocacy is blatant. These politics are also anti-Christian and pathologically obsessed with Trump. The glue that holds all this together is transhumanism. Transhumanism is an anti-human moment. A significant proportion of our youth is in the grip of this species of nihilism, marked by profound self-loathing and misanthropy. They hate themselves—and from this self-hatred flows hatred for others, with children often paying the toll. Given the significant correlation between trans identification and (other) serious psychiatric disorders, such messaging is triggering to those affected by these disorders. Corporations peddling trans paraphernalia might consider that.
The elite did a good job of scrubbing the memory of the Covenant School shooting in Nashville, Tennessee, so I will inform you about that case so you can better understand the emerging pattern of terrorism in America and the ideology that grooms young people to commit these terrible acts of extreme violence. I have written about the Covenant School case before, but I will summarize it here for convenience.
The Nashville shooting occurred in March 2023. The perpetrator was 28-year-old Audrey Elizabeth Hale, a transgender female (i.e., a woman with delusional beliefs about her gender) who had previously attended the school. Hale entered the school armed with two rifles and a handgun, fatally shooting three 9-year-old children and three adults before being killed by police officers. Like Westman, Hale had meticulously planned the attack for months. The media, to the extent that they covered the story, described the motive as a desire for notoriety, with Hale expressing intentions to inspire future attacks and leave behind a legacy. Unlike the Weston case, the investigation concluded that the attack was not religiously motivated. The public was told that Hale’s writings, found in sixteen notebooks, contained incoherent and violent content. However, with leaks here and there, the notebooks have, for the most part, been kept from the public. (See Audrey Hale’s Manifesto: Blueprint for the Total Destruction of What?)
We will learn more about Westman in the future. The authorities will have a much more difficult time memory-holing this massacre than they did with the Hale case, thanks to the quick work of observers in preserving images and videos. But what is clear enough at this point is that the path that took Westman to this moment is the same path Audrey Hale walked. It’s not an untrodden path; other trans identifying youth have walked the path with murderous consequences (see From Delusion to Illusion: Transitioning Disordered Personalities into Valid Identities). Crucially, those who walk the path did not prepare it. Others did. Nor will the path be abandoned if those who made it continue paving it with their hatred and lies.
There will be a call for gun control (the calls have already begun). But guns don’t shoot themselves. People shoot guns. And the motive in these types of massacres—as in acts of Islamic terrorism— is prepared by ideology. The terrorist embodies the ideology in reality. If the world desires less terrorism, then its residents need to condemn the ideology that drives it, not wear T-shirts that normalize it.
One last observation before I hit “Publish.” Upon learning that Robin is a “woman,” what will progressives say after having spent so much time today on social media spinning the shooting as yet another instantiation of “white male pathology”? It’s a pathology, to be sure, but not in the sense they wish it were.
freedom and reason 