Fundamentally Transforming the Murder of Innocents
On Wednesday morning, Aug. 27, in Minneapolis, Robin Westman—born Robert Westman but who “identified” as a woman—opened fire on worshippers at the Annunciation Catholic Church and School. Westman killed eight-year-old Fletcher Merkel, 10-year-old Harper Moyski, and wounded 17 others, 14 of them children, before killing himself. That afternoon in a press conference, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey failed to name or condemn Westman or speculate on the shooter’s motive.
“I have heard about a whole lot of hate that’s being directed at our trans community,” Frey told reporters. “Anybody who is using this as an opportunity to villainize our trans community, or any other community out there, has lost their sense of common humanity. We should not be operating out of a place of hate for anyone.” The mayor instead focused on firearms, contending, “Don’t let anybody tell you that it’s not about guns, because it is. We’ve got more guns in this country than we have people . . . Why have we not taken the necessary action to stop our children from dying?”
In social media posts, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz said, “I’m praying for our kids and teachers whose first week of school was marred by this horrific act of violence” and “Minnesota is heartbroken. From the officers responding, to the clergy and teachers providing comfort, to the hospital staff saving lives, we will get through this together. Hug your kids close.”
The governor, Kamala Harris’s running mate in 2024, did not name or condemn Westman or speculate about his motive, the key question in any murder case. By contrast, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Minnesota Democrat, called Westman a “madman” and referred to the shooter as “he.” That drew a correction from National Public Radio’s Ailsa Chang, who said that the shooter’s gender was “unclear.” FBI director Kash Patel didn’t think so.
“As we continue to investigate yesterday’s barbaric attack from Robert Westman, the male subject,” Patel told reporters on Thursday, “our teams have gathered information and evidence demonstrating this was an act of domestic terrorism motivated by a hate-filled ideology.”
Westman left “multiple anti-Catholic, anti-religious references both in his manifesto and written on his firearms” and “expressed hatred and violence toward Jewish people, writing ‘Israel must fall,’ ‘Free Palestine,’ and using explicit language related to the Holocaust.”
Westman also wrote an explicit call for violence against President Trump on a firearm magazine and wrote “Where is your God?” on one of the magazines displayed in the video. Minnesota Bishop Robert Barron weighed in on the motive.
“If someone attacked a synagogue while congregants were praying, would anyone doubt that it was an anti-Semitic act?” Barron told reporters. “If someone shot up a mosque while the devout were praying, would anyone doubt that it was an anti-Islamic attack? So, why would we even hesitate to say that a maniac shooting into a Catholic Church while children are at prayer was committing an anti-Catholic act.” For a similar act, dial it back to March 27, 2023 in Nashville, Tennessee.
In the run-up to the April 1 “Trans Day of Vengeance,” Audrey Hale, a woman who thought she was a man, shot her way into the Covenant School. There Hale murdered Evelyn Dieckhaus, 9, Mike Hill, 61, William Kinney, 9, Katherine Koonce, 60, Cynthia Peak, 61, and Hallie Scruggs, nine years old and the daughter of Covenant Presbyterian pastor Chad Scruggs. Like Westman, Hale deployed multiple firearms and would have killed many more children if Nashville police had not shot her dead. The victims all died of multiple gunshot wounds and as the autopsies reveal, Hale also applied blunt force trauma to William Kinney and Katherine Koonce.
The Trans Resistance Network proclaimed that Audrey Hale “had no other effective way to be seen than to lash out by taking the life of others.” Over at the White House, Joe Biden failed to identify or condemn the shooter, failed to name a single murder victim, and did not attend any of the funerals. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said “our hearts go out to the trans community as they are under attack right now.”
A former student at the school, Hale carefully planned the attack for months. Police and the FBI blocked release of her “manifesto” and trans activists were adamant that the material not be released.” In May 2025, more than two years after the mass murder, the FBI released more than 100 pages from the manifesto. A new FBI director made all the difference in releasing information from the Minnesota case, but the background dynamics are the same.
As the gay-rights writer Bruce Bawer has pointed out, adding the transgender “T” to the LGB calling card was an innovation and the queer “Q” can mean anything. The LGBTQ+ formulation is every bit a construct as Lawyer Gynecologist, Baker, Trucker, Quaker, plus bullfighter, hairdresser or whatever, and in both cases there is no LGBTQ “community.” The construct is just another way for the left to divide people into oppressor and victim classes.
Activists of what I call the “construct corps”—those Dave Chappelle calls the “alphabet people”—fail to understand that if someone fails to affirm their fakery, or dares to make a joke about it, they are not oppressed. They aren’t oppressed, any more than are asylum inmates who believe they are Elvis, Napoleon, or Mae West. The construct corps are “victims” only of reality dysphoria, but they demand that all people acknowledge their victimhood status. In effect, the construct corps functions as a totalitarian system, getting people to say two plus two equals five, in the style of O’Brien in George Orwell’s 1984.
According to the construct corps, the belief in biological reality—that there are only males and females—is taken as an effort to “erase” people like Robert Westman and Audrey Hale. This reality fills them with rage, so in the spirit of “trans vengeance,” they set out to erase the children of the believers in biological reality.
The construct that fuels this hatred has colonized key regions of the federal government. Joe Biden’s pick for a “Special Assistant” at the National Nuclear Security Administration was Sneha Nair, who is co-author of “Queering nuclear weapons: How LGBTQ+ inclusion strengthens security and reshapes disarmament,” published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
“Equity and inclusion for queer people is not just a box-ticking exercise in ethics and social justice,” Nair contends. “Studies in psychology and behavioral science show that diverse teams examine assumptions and evidence more carefully, make fewer errors, discuss issues more constructively, and better exchange new ideas and knowledge.” Governments “cannot afford to lose out on the human capital and innovation potential of queer people. Informed by their life experiences, queer people have specific skills to offer that are valuable in a policy and diplomacy context.” So the members of the construct corps, we are supposed to believe, are a kind of woke ubermenschen.
People might recall Sam Brinton, the Department of Energy’s Deputy Assistant Secretary of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition, and his “specific skill,” which was luggage theft. Recall the special skills of Admiral “Rachel” Levine, Biden’s Assistant Secretary for Health, born Richard Levine in 1957. According to the construct corps, someone who denies basic human biology can become a government health official.
For “trans and non-binary youth,” the Admiral recommended “medically necessary, safe and effective” sex-change procedures that turn out to be irreversible—in a word, mutilations. Those procedures are doubtless lucrative for those physicians willing to do harm.
While the ubermenschen rake in the cash, construct corps people such as Robert Westman and Audrey Hale act as a kind of einsatzgruppen, erasing the young ones who remind them of biological reality and maintain allegiance to Christianity—Catholicism, in particular, in Westman’s case. Oddly enough, this evil was foreshadowed in popular culture.
In Silence of the Lambs, the serial killer Buffalo Bill took the transition path but instead of hormone treatments he carved up females for their skin. As Bill did with his captive, the construct corps people demand that everybody put the lotion in their basket. In similar style, the 1980 film Dressed to Kill came billed as a slasher flick but proves perceptive on the trans movement. Dr. Robert Elliot (Michael Caine) dresses up as a woman, “Bobby,” and thus attired bears strong resemblance to Admiral Levine. The seductive Kate Miller (Angie Dickinson) reminds Bobby, in a tangible way, that he is still indeed a man. This fills Bobby with rage, so he slashes Kate to death with a razor.
Robert Westman and Audrey Hale preferred to gun down the kids in their classrooms and while they were at prayer. Construct corps kids are being groomed in government schools all over the country, particularly in California. Last year, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 1955, the Support Academic Futures and Educators for Today’s Youth, or SAFETY Act, which prohibits districts from notifying parents about any gender identity issues their children might encounter.
After Audrey Hale’s mass murder in Nashville, Gov. Newsom slammed Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn for voting against gun-control laws but failed to condemn Audrey Hale or name any of her victims. After Robert Westman shot dead Fletcher Merkel and Harper Moyski and wounded 18 others, Newsom’s response was, “We cannot even make it through the first week of school without mass shootings. And the @GOP will do absolutely nothing while our kids are being gunned down. This is sick.” No condemnation of the shooter and no names of those whose young lives he erased.
Gavin Newsom is all about replicating California’s woke one-party state nationwide. As Trump likes to say, we’ll have to see what happens.
https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/fundamentally-transforming-the-murder-of-innocents