“I am sick of my hair, I want to chop it off. I only keep it because it is pretty much my last charade of being trans. I am tired of being trans, I wish I never brain-washed myself. I can’t cut my hair off 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.”
Robert ‘Robin’ Westman manifesto
The Annuciation Church shooter had an ex-girlfriend named Abi. He hated his job at a dispensary. “I am already dead. A still breathing corpse. I wish I hadn’t been born. I am a mistake, a curse on the world. A mar on history. Shoot me dead, you motherfuckers. I want my damn AR. I live in pain, give me the kiss of death. Help!”
Consumed with self-pity, Westman targeted those who could not fight back. “I want to avoid any parents, no pre or post-school pickup/dropoff. I think parents are super likely to have a gun or attack me with scary ferocity,” he wrote. “I want to kill kids! For fun!” Westman idolized mass shooters, critiqued their killings, yearned to go out in a blaze of glory. Shooting children was his fetish.
“My problems are my own, but I will still unleash my anger on the world,” Westman wrote in Cyrillic letters and English phonetics. “I want to shoot a lot of kids. I am sad I won’t ever know the high score I will get, but I hope my numbers will inspire those like me to train and beat my score! Good luck! Tragedy, suffering, pain, and despair. Feel my heart.”
Mary Grace Westman, the shooter’s mother, signed the paperwork for Robert’s social transition when he was 17, legally changing his name to Robin. By 2020, his manifesto says, he was already obsessively ideating on mass killers. “My childhood dreams are coming true!” he wrote in his notebooks. The pain of wanting to kill children was too much to bear, what a pity. “I am so happy my target is now a school. I don’t care too much about high scores, I want to commit the worst of the worst! I am so happy I get to kill little kids.” Poor baby.
“Westman seems to have been driven by an all-consuming, destructive force, a nihilism — the conviction that life is meaningless; that words like truth, justice and God are empty slogans; that everything must be razed,” Peter Savodnik writes at Free Press.
Westman expressed an “amorphous” nihilism “detached from any clearly defined agenda or principle.” Rather than blame guns, or video games, or misinformation, or social media, or ‘hate’, or right wing thoughts, we should be angry that “our elites have failed,” Savodnik argues.
They failed with their handling of Covid. They failed over and over to mitigate the most destabilizing aspects of globalization. And they failed, above all, to protect our institutions—standing by as our universities turned into activist farms, and then as those activists took control of our legacy-media behemoths, philanthropies, and HR departments. They had transformed the culture.
I would counter Savodnik and say that they did not succeed, but they did it in an effort to transform the culture, and in so doing, to transform the world, emphasis trans. Save the trans kids, save the world. ‘Save the dolls’. Saviorism is intrinsic to the political project of enshrining ‘gender identity’ in law, policy, and society.
Ostensibly, feminizing boys is supposed to make them into women, therefore weaker, which is supposed to make their presence in female sports fair and their presence in women’s prisons ethical. This will make the world more peaceful, goes the thinking, since women commit fewer violent crimes.
But the magic did not work on Robert. As Robin, he was still eager to kill kids. His Russian-lettered notebooks were a conscious effort to escape detection as he meditated, ruminated, planned, plotted. Transition did not make him stop being a boy who liked girls, or a young man with violent fantasies. It did not cure his dysphoria or prevent his suicide.
“I don’t do this to make a point, I do it because I am a pussy bitch who can’t deal with my own problems, so I am selfishly forcing my plan onto the world,” Westman wrote. In passages like this one, he is as critical of himself as any other person or group he professes to hate. “I am not a hero, I am an embarrassment to all who knew me. I am sorry to my family, whose lives I will ruin. Life goes on, though. They will recover. Those kids won’t!”
According to the New York Post, which was able to view a Facebook post and a blog post from the church website before they were deleted, Mary Grace Westman retired from the Annunciation Church and Catholic School in 2021. Mary Grace is not cooperating with investigators. “She is completely distraught about the situation and has no culpability but is seeking an attorney to deal with calls like this,” defense attorney Ryan Garry told Fox News.
Westman wrote that he had “brainwashed” himself into being transgender. Now “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.” Realism had arrived at 23, six years too late. Although the motto ‘death before detransition’ does not appear in Westman’s notebooks, it might as well be there.
Realization did not lead to introspection. Instead, the death of the dream inspired even more intense daydreams of death than before.
We are not supposed to make a connection between Westman’s gender transition and the horror he unleashed, but we naturally do, for it is obvious that the genderwoo magic did not work on him. It made him worse, and worse yet, obscured his real problems from scrutiny.
For those of us familiar with the trenches of this culture war, it is not surprising that Robert Westman got tired of the exhausting charade of being Robin. We are also not shocked to learn that his homicidal-suicidal ideation went unaddressed while his supposed gender identity received generous attention from parents, teachers, counselors, and the community. This is normal with genderwoo. Comorbid conditions are always overshadowed by the diagnosis.
News commentators have struggled with pronouns and wrestled with the dissonance. As a culture war raged over the value of prayer during a tragedy, pitting Democrats against Christians at the worst possible moment, Reddit threads glorified the killer. Meanwhile, there were efforts to disown Westman. Brianna Wu has even attempted to cast him as a detransitioner, which is risible.
Still, it all comes across as a desperate struggle to come to terms with the reality that Robert Westman had finally recognized, namely that Robin does not exist. ‘She’ was always a figment of his imagination, one that the people around him shared, and demanded others share, because they thought it was the right thing to do.
They were wrong. It is hard for them to admit they were wrong, that he was always Robert, all along, that no child is ‘born in the wrong body’ at all.
The Gender Jonestown Is Here
Robin Westman, a 23 year-old transgender-identified man, fired on Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, Minnesota this morning with a rifle, a shotgun, and a pistol, killing two children and wounding 17 others before taking his own life.