Last month in Minneapolis, Robin Westman, a 23-year-old man who had identified as a transgender woman, drove to the Annunciation Catholic Church with a rifle, a shotgun, and a pistol. He fired more than 100 rounds through the windows during the back-to-school Mass, leaving two children dead and nearly 20 people injured.
The media wasted little time muddying the waters. The New York Times proclaimed that “we may never know” Westman’s true motivation and dutifully identified him as a woman with “she” and “her” pronouns. At a press conference held the day after the attack, Joe Thompson, the acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Minnesota, curiously began his remarks by pointing out that Westman had expressed hatred toward other groups besides Catholics.
Reporting in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune on the shooting seemed more concerned about a potential backlash against the transgender community than the fact that Catholics had been gunned down in their place of worship.
We have spoken with parishioners at Annunciation who are shocked by the media’s attempt to downplay the shooter’s anti-Catholic sentiments and the role of transgender ideology in the shooting. The anti-Catholic nature of the massacre should be obvious. Westman deliberately targeted Catholic children and, prior to the massacre, had drawn an upside down cross on his weaponry and pinned a photo of Christ on a paper target hanging on the wall of his room.
We have discovered new evidence that, in what may have been his final act before turning the gun on himself, Westman shot three rounds into a statue of the Holy Family outside the church. The photographs we have obtained reveal that the statute, showing Saint Joseph and the Virgin Mary, each holding the hand of the Christ child, now has three bullet holes in it: two near the Virgin Mary’s heart, one in Saint Joseph’s staff.
According to our sources, given the statue’s location on church grounds, it is likely the rounds were intentionally fired. When contacted, the Minneapolis Police Department declined comment on the bullet holes in the statue of the Holy Family, saying its investigation remains ongoing. But a police spokesman confirmed that no responding officers fired their weapons that day, which means that the rounds almost certainly came from Westman’s gun.
Parishioners also told us that they have long felt hostility from left-wing and transgender activists due to the Catholic Church’s teachings on abortion and sexuality. Prior to the shooting, two neighbors ostentatiously hung transgender flags in the area around the church, one pinned up in the window of a nearby house and another flying in the front yard of a house across the street. Five days after the massacre, when hundreds of people gathered for a vigil, yet another trans flag was seen waving in the air. Some parishioners interpreted this as yet another provocation, especially given the shooter’s inclusion of a trans flag in his manifesto.
Westman’s own writings suggest that transgender ideology played some part in motivating the violence. In his manifesto, Westman wrote that he was “tired of being trans” and that he wished he had never been brainwashed by the movement. He wrote that he regretted ever “experimenting” with “gender.”
The attack at Annunciation Catholic Church was far from the first mass shooting perpetrated by an individual ensnared in transgender ideology. In 2018, Snochia Moseley, who identified as a transgender man, killed three people and wounded two others at a Rite Aid distribution center in Maryland. In 2019, two students, one of whom identified as a transgender man, opened fire at their Denver high school, killing one classmate and injuring eight others. In 2022, Anderson Lee Aldrich, who identifies as nonbinary, murdered five people at a gay bar in Colorado. In 2023, Audrey Hale, who identified as a transgender man, shot up a school in Tennessee, killing six people, including three children.
It may be impossible to prevent all similar tragedies, but it is certain that, if we are to make any progress, we must begin by being honest. Transgender ideology has motivated violence. Religious people are a target. We must pray for all those who are vulnerable to violence, and pray, as well, for those caught in the nihilism of an ideological movement that promises the impossible and, when that fails, recommends death.
As the brave parishioners at Annunciation Catholic have demonstrated, we must continue to live, to work, to educate our children — and to pray, as Catholics do, that St. Michael the Archangel “be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the Devil.”
Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of America’s Cultural Revolution. Ryan Thorpe is an investigative reporter at the Manhattan Institute.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
