On Wednesday morning, I broke the news of the school shooting in Minneapolis for PJ Media, and I covered it until around noon. After that, some of my colleagues here took over reporting new information and adding their opinions and analysis, but I'll admit that the story haunted me for the rest of the day. I couldn't look away.
The murder and maiming of innocent people, especially kids who are just eight and 10 years old, is always horrific, but this situation is much bigger. It's not just about a school shooting. It's about the decline of our culture. It's a reflection of the results of allowing far-left policies to run amok within every corner of American society.
And the murderer pretty much verified this himself.
We know now that the shooter was a 23-year-old man named Robin Westman. He claimed to be a woman. Court documents show that he was born Robert but changed his name to Robin at the age of 17 because he "identifies as a female and wants her name to reflect that identification." His driver's license also lists him as a female. If you've had the chance to watch the disturbing videos that he posted online, you know that he wrote out some sort of manifesto in a mix of Russian and English.
According to the New York Post, some of the language buried in those manuscripts suggests that Westman was kind of over the whole "trans" thing he cooked up when he was, I suppose, in high school. The manifesto included passages about how he was "tired of being trans" and how he wished he had "never brainwashed" himself. He specifically referenced his long hair, which we've now seen pictures of, and said he only keeps it "because it is pretty much my last shred of being trans. I am tired of being trans, I wish I never brainwashed myself."
Minneapolis school shooter Robin Westman confessed he was ‘tired of being trans’: ‘I wish I never brain-washed myself’ https://t.co/P74W8e0JjM pic.twitter.com/pEHbUOmRFu
— New York Post (@nypost) August 28, 2025
Other language in the manifesto read, "I can’t cut my hair now as it would be an embarrassing defeat, and it might be a concerning change of character that could get me reported. It just always gets in my way. I will probably chop it on the day of the attack," and "I regret being trans. I wish I was a girl I just know I cannot achieve that body with the technology we have today. I also can’t afford that." He also said, "I don’t want to dress girly all the time but I guess sometimes I really like it. I know I am not a woman but I definitely don’t feel like a man."
All of the transgender stuff aside, as our managing editor Chris Queen put it yesterday, this guy gave us other evidence in these videos that he "was operating from an ideological framework." From what I can tell, his views seemed very much aligned with those of today's top Democrats.
Democrats like Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.), who runs his entire state like his own personal laboratory — a Wuhan-style breeding ground for these vile far-left policies he hopes to spread throughout the nation.
And Democrats like that weaselly little mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey. I knew nothing about this guy until yesterday, but I know enough now. When your first reaction to the loss of innocent little lives is to condemn people's faith, especially when those who died were celebrating that faith, you've got to be a pretty lowdown human being. And when your second reaction is to call for support for the "trans" community rather than the community that experienced such hatred and violence, I'm not even sure you qualify for human status. Even if that's what you believe, there's a time and a place for that, and it ain't standing outside a church where the bodies of dead children lie.
If these men really cared about the "trans" community, they'd be setting up mental health services for them, not encouraging children to become them. This Westman guy is a product of that culture in Minnesota, a culture that pushed something that isn't natural on him and allowed him to slip through the cracks, ruining the lives of countless others along the way. He literally laid that out in his manifesto.
I'll leave you with a quote from a monologue from Fox News' Jesse Watters that Matt reported on last night:
I don't hate anyone who thinks they're trans. I feel sorry for them. But statistically, the trans population has been prone to violence. That's not villainizing, that's reality, and if you can't recognize reality, you're in danger. We love the American people, especially American children, and if they're troubled and believe they're somehow a girl trapped in a boy's body, we wanna get 'em help. We don't wanna give 'em hormones and operate on them. Society shouldn't be trying to produce more trans kids.
Amen to that.
The mainstream media is too busy screaming about gun control or misunderstanding what prayer means to those of faith to see the real problem here, but it's not lost on us here at PJ Media. We'll always report the truth. We'll show you where far-left ideology fails us.
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