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by DYLAN NOLAN
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Former South Carolina congressman turned Fox News host Trey Gowdy drew the ire of conservatives after blaming yesterday’s mass shooting of children attending Mass at the Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis on white males – and calling for gun control.
Typically, news personalities can be forgiven for misplacing blame in an incident like this due to the length of time required for authorities to brief the media on the identity and motivations of a mass shooter, 23 year old Robert ‘Robin’ Westman.
In this case, however, Westman made his identity and motivations immediately clear by publishing an apparent manifesto to YouTube prior to launching his attack on the church.
Westman’s indiscriminate gunfire killed two children immediately, and injured at least seventeen others.
Westman’s story unfortunately echoes that of numerous transgender mass murderers – perhaps most famously that of Audrey Hale, a transgender who went on the deadliest mass shooting in Tennessee history at Nashville’s Covenant Christian School in 2023.
While authorities attempted to bury Hale’s ‘trannifesto’ – meaning the public had to wait months to understand what went wrong and what led to Hale’s decision to end multiple innocent lives – Westman’s self-publication of his motivations allows for immediate reflection.
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Westman begins by thanking his parents for raising him to be a “good person,” with traits of “empathy, self-sacrifice and good character,” but goes on to apologize “I am sorry I didn’t turn out how you had hoped.”
Westman clearly understood the gravity of what he intended to do, apologizing to his siblings for “forever tainting the rest of your lives.”
“I have wanted this for so long,” he wrote. “I am not well. I am not right. I am a sad person, haunted by these thoughts that do not go away. I know this is wrong but I cant seem to stop myself. I am severely depressed and have been suicidal for years.”
Westman proceeded to lament “the injustices of this world,” noting he had “decided to perform my final action against this world.”
Five years before Westman’s “final action,” his mother filed to legally change Robert’s name – noting Westman “identifies as a female and wants her name to reflect that identification.”
Despite this legal and social recognition of his “gender identity,” Westman remained a tortured soul – drawing himself communicating with a beast resembling Satan who repeatedly told him to “kill himself.”
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Westman’s manifesto detailed years of fantasizing and plotting a mass shooting – an obsession which apparently dated back years (to when he was in the seventh grade).
Westman actualized his plans this month, documenting an August 20, 2025 trip to the church where school staff were conducting active shooter training.
“I bet they won’t anticipate an attack in the first week,” he noted.
On August 8, 2025, he recorded his purchase of an AR15 along with several magazines.
Within days he put his new firearm to work, turning it first on the church’s innocent congregants before ending his own life.
Westman’s journal and suicide note bear a striking resemblance to that of Audrey Hale, the aforementioned female mass shooter from Tennessee – yet in the hours after the shooting, while commentating on Fox News, Gowdy missed this clear parallel.
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RELATED | NASHVILLE TRANS SHOOTER’S MANIFESTO
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“It’s always a young white male – almost always,” Gowdy opined, asking “did anyone think this morning ‘I wonder if that was a female.'”
Fortunately for Gowdy, someone clearly had asked that – and reminded him of Hale from behind the camera.
“But other than that, it is usually young white males,” Gowdy continued.
Apparently Gowdy also missed black 26-year-old transgender Snochia Moseley – who carried out a mass shooting that left three people dead in Maryland in 2018.
At the time, The Washington Post reported Moseley “had been beset for years by mental illness as well as emotional turmoil related to her struggle with sexual identity.”
Does it sound like the common denominator here is whiteness? Or maleness?
What’s more, Gowdy took the tragedy as a time to call for gun control – opining that “we’re going to have to have a conversation of freedom versus protecting children.”
Gowdy’s takes rapidly circulated on social media, drawing criticism from thousands of users in mere minutes.
“Sickening, but that’s Gowdy,” X user @CarolinianGreen wrote. “SC has produced some of the worst politicians.”
X user @SC_RedLine replied they “hope someone asks Trey Gowdy exactly which freedom he implies should be traded to protect children.”
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Lest you think the producers at Fox News forced Gowdy to say these things, compare his assessment to that of Jesse Watters on “Jesse Watters Primetime.”
“The media is bad at pattern recognition,” Watters noted. “Just two years ago another trans 20-something walked into a Christian school in Nashville with a rifle and shot 3 kids and 3 adults. They buried the manifesto and locked down the case.”
Watters added “we’ve seen trans shootings in Colorado and in Maryland.”
“Statistically, the trans population has been prone to violence,” he said. “That’s not villainizing, that’s reality.”
Watters correctly laid the blame at the feet of ideologues and politicians who manipulate the mentally ill.
“The left is weaponizing trans kids and turning them into culture warriors,” he said. “And they’ve been turned loose against the church, schools, and Trump. The trans clan has a militant wing, and it’s out for blood. They’re taking lives, defiling churches, and freaking everybody out.”
While that last paragraph might sound absurd to those unfamiliar with the militant radicals who govern Minnesota, look no farther than the state’s lieutenant governor Peggy Flanagan proudly rocking her “protect trans kids” shirt, which prominently features a bowie knife.
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The pairing of seemingly innocuous rhetoric with violent imagery is a staple of militant left wing extremists, and mirrors the “defend equality” sticker seen on the shooter’s notebook, which depicted an AK-47 on top of an LGBTQIA+ pride flag.
While one would expect this from the kind of lost soul who would go on to commit a heinous mass shooting, it’s patently insane for elected officials to be openly supporting their party’s most deranged militant fringe.
And lest you think Flanagan’s shirt was an accidental faux pas, recall that the state’s governor Tim Walz penned an executive order declaring the state a “trans refuge” prior to joining Kamala Harris‘ ill-fated 2024 presidential bid.
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Throwback: Tim Walz signed a bill to make Minnesota a "trans refuge state.”
— Graham Allen (@GrahamAllen_1) August 28, 2025
This isn’t normal. This is MENTAL DISEASE…
pic.twitter.com/bMDJHR7H3A
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The unfortunate reality that the delusional Democrats and Fox News‘ B-team need to get through their heads is that the mental illness that is pervasive in America’s youth is the underlying problem.
The nihilism and mental instability that led Eric Harris and Dylan Klebond to begin the trend of school shootings in Columbine, Colorado in 1999 has only grown more prevalent in the quarter of a century since their crime.
Like the aforementioned trans killers, Harris and Klebond were social outcasts who kept journals detailing their descent into psychopathic cynicism.
But unlike 1999, when pathological individuals were encouraged to seek help, school employees and medical professionals are now instructed to “affirm” the delusions of individuals who desperately need to be tethered to reality rather than being pushed farther away from it.
Westman’s journals are eerily similar to Audrey Hales’, which are eerily similar to Eric Harris’. While it’s easy to point the finger at transgenderism as the root of the recent uptick in trans mass shooting insanity, its far more accurate to see transgenderism as the logical progression of our youth’s increasingly disordered and violent thinking.
While Westman was transgender, even he saw through the charade – noting he was “tired of being trans,” and wished he was “never brain-washed,” in his manifesto.
“I regret being trans… I wish I was a girl I just know I cannot achieve that body with the technology we have today,” he wrote. “I also can’t afford that.”
America, and her youth in particular, have a lot of soul searching to do if we are to reverse our gradual decline into dysfunction. While it’s easy for talking heads like Gowdy to blame the perennial boogeyman, or should I say boogey-white man, it doesn’t get us any closer to the root issue – in fact, it gets us farther from it.
As Americans, and particularly as conservatives, we must have the courage to look the truth in the eye, and to condemn those who don’t.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR …
(Via: Travis Bell)
Dylan Nolan is the director of special projects at FITSNews. He graduated from the Darla Moore school of business in 2021 with an accounting degree. Got a tip or story idea for Dylan? Email him here. You can also engage him socially @DNolan2000.
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13 comments
We learned from conservatives that there are only two sexes, male and female, determined at birth and immutable thereafter. Like race. The Minneapolis shooter was born white and male. So why are conservatives trying to pin the violence on a third sex after telling us there is no such thing, not even a way to transition from one sex to the other? Call him what you will and make up some pseudo “identity”, to let white guys off the hook, but the Minneapolis killer was born and remained a white male. Like the vast majority of mass murderers. Suffering their same white-guy masculine delusions that killing people would make them powerful and famous. And he used easily available guns — another conservative dogma — to kill children. It’s straight forward thinking by Gowdy to eliminate guns because we can’t eliminate white males, the other part of the equation.
“Does it sound like the common denominator here is whiteness? Or maleness?”
When 98% of the perpetrators are white males the answer is ‘yes’. Ferchissakes, get your head out of your ass, Opie.
Of course, Fizznews tends to ignore mass shootings when the shooter is a white male. Big Balls gets roughed up by a teen girl and Trump mobilizes the military on the National Mall. Children get killed and nothing gets done about it for fear of angering limp dick 2A fanatics.
Trans had nothing to do with this shooting. This shooter was obsessed with others that came before, as will others still to come. It’s a self perpetuating cycle that will only get worse.
What a completely garbage article. There is no mass epidemic of “trans shootings”. Trey Gowdy’s comment was absolutely correct. The vast, vast majority of mass shootings like this are committed by young, white males. The proof is in the stats, which of course Dylan doesn’t bring up but instead chooses to cite a few select instances, and then bizarrely tries to stretch gender affirming care to apply to shooters who weren’t transgender.
“The pairing of seemingly innocuous rhetoric with violent imagery is a staple of militant left wing extremists”
Remind me Dylan, which is the side that constantly use messages like “come and take it”, put decals of assault rifles on their car windows, and takes Christmas photos of their whole family holding long guns? Would these be examples of “pairing seemingly innocuous rhetoric with violent imagery”?
Judging by Dylan’s picture, I think he may have some own gender issues of his own he’s been unable to work through.
So the term “mass shooter” has slightly different technical definitions among those groups that track gun violence. Some keep it very simple: an event where four or more people (not including the shooter) who are killed, while some others include persons seriously injured in the victim count. But then there are other groups (and I think FBI is one of them but I may be wrong) who then parcel out events that would otherwise be defined mass shootings, but involved gangs, or occurred in a domestic context (like dad kills whole family, then himself). If you include gang related shooting events in the mass shooter definition, white males are not the main perpetrators – its blacks and latinos. But if you pare that out and focus on the headline-grabbing events of someone just walking in and shooting up a school or generally public place for no apparent reason other than being pure evil, it’s white males (without regard to their sexual orientation) that make up the majority in most given years. There are a couple of very glaring exceptions- like the Virginia Tech shooter and the Pulse nightclub shooting in Florida, but otherwise that’s the trend.
Well done Dylan! It’s a very well written article.
I agree. Well done.
He was a transgender freak who’s mother, “where is she?”, turned a blind eye to this mentally ill and dangerous person. How’d that turnout mom? Now your little boy will be remembered as the monster you created, a monster who put a bullet into his head. Transgenders need to be locked up, Alligator Alcatraz has open beds.
Good ole Trey Gowdy. Ince the great white hope of conservatism from SC. How the mighty have fallen…
He had everyone fooled that he was a conservative.
He was a white male. And a Nazi.
Sounds like a Steve Miller to me.
Why you say that? I loved his album, “Book of Dreams”.
Sounds like the author is deflecting and ill informed. Check your stats and stop stoking hatred. It’s propaganda like this that made me cancel my subscription to fitsnews. This is just pathetic. Do better.
• Misinformation often circulates claiming that “many” mass shooters are transgender, but this is not supported by data.
• According to GVA, only one of 50 mass school shootings since 2012 involved a transgender suspect (that’s about 2%).
• Multiple fact-checks have debunked broad generalizations or exaggerated claims about transgender perpetrators of mass shootings.
• Transgender individuals are statistically far more likely to be victims of violence, facing a significantly higher risk compared to their cisgender counterparts.
Trey Gowdy is a homosexual. Who is an embarrassment to South Carolina. Also
Another Aipac recipient. A little darling on fox news. Which is also owned by israel rupert mur doc scumbag jew out of australia