by Miranda Devine
If ever there were an example of the perils of the Democrat approach to crime and social disorder, it is Minneapolis, ground zero of the George Floyd/defund-the-police movement that roiled the country five years ago, and a “sanctuary transgender state.”
The deadly mass shooting of small children at Mass at Annunciation Catholic School Wednesday brings home the tragic cost of a disordered society, where evil rampages unchecked and those who would protect the vulnerable are handcuffed and pushed away.
It’s too early to say exactly how, or even if, the tragedy could have been prevented. Yet Minnesota Democrats already have reached for their lazy gun-control mantra, in a state that has among the strictest gun laws in the country.
Of course, they remain silent about the anti-Christian radical gender ideology that appears to have driven the latest spate of school shootings, from the murders at the Covenant School in Nashville, Tenn., in November 2023, and at the Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wis., in December 2024, to Wednesday’s rampage.
At least we now have an FBI that tells the truth about the motivating hatreds so that we can try to understand the pathology and stop its spread.
“The FBI is investigating this shooting as an act of domestic terrorism and hate crime targeting Catholics,” FBI Director Kash Patel said in a statement on X after the Annunciation murders Wednesday, adding that the killer has been identified as “Robin Westman, a male born as Robert Westman.”
Name change
Robin Westman, 23, had his mother apply to the Minnesota District Court to legally change his name from Robert in January 2020.
“Minor child identifies as a female and wants her name to reflect that identification,” says the court order “Granting Name Change of a Minor.”
There is no indication of what medications Westman was taking, but mental illness combined with hormone treatment and antidepressants are a recipe for rage. A YouTube “manifesto” speaks of depression and suicidal thoughts, as well as anti-Christian, anti-Jewish demonic ravings adorned with pride flags. He wrote “Kill Trump” along with anti-Israel racist messages and the names of other mass killers on his weapons and ammunition.
The increasingly violent rhetoric of the trans movement has been embraced by Minnesota’s politicians.
Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan wore a T-shirt emblazoned with a hunting knife and the slogan “Protect Trans Kids” during a 2023 press conference celebrating an executive order signed by Gov. Tim Walz to make Minnesota a “trans refuge state” for “gender-affirming” care, aka surgical and chemical castration of children. She’s now running for the US Senate.
Woke Walz earned the nickname “Tampon Tim” during his ill-fated VP run with Kamala Harris last year after he signed legislation requiring free menstrual products be provided in boys’ bathrooms for grades 4–12.
Just two days ago at a DNC meeting in Minneapolis, radical left Minnesota AG Keith Ellison boasted to a cheering audience: “We have sued Trump for gender-affirming care.”
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey hijacked a police press conference about the Annunciation shooting Wednesday to blast the public for what he claimed was a “whole lot of hate being directed at our trans community.”
He also sneered at anyone praying for the victims: “Don’t just say this is about thoughts and prayers right now. These kids were literally praying.”
To say these public officials have lost the plot is an understatement.
Gasoline on the fire
If Walz, Frey and Ellison are familiar names to you, it’s because they played a central role in the calamity that struck a pandemic-crazed country in the summer of 2020 — the deadly BLM-Antifa riots that raged after the death of Floyd, a black drug-affected criminal, at the hands of Minnesota police.
Instead of behaving responsibly after the tragedy, these Democrat leaders poured gasoline on the fire and seemed to revel in the mayhem. Walz delayed calling out the National Guard for at least 20 hours. His wife, Gwen, weirdly spoke of keeping “the windows open as long as I could” to smell the aroma of “burning tires . . . because I felt like that was such a touchstone of what washappening.”
Frey ordered the Third Precinct to surrender its police station to the mob as a sort of ritual sacrifice.
Ellison railroaded Derek Chauvin and three other cops for Floyd’s death and lied that President Trump supporters were to blame for the riots.
These are people who find political profit in chaos and disorder.
It is incredible that they paid no price for the death and destruction they unleashed — which continues to this day in the form of undermanned and demoralized police forces around the country.
The Minneapolis police force has been so beaten down that it now has just 350 street cops compared to 900 before Floyd, according to former Twin Cities TV news anchor Liz Collin, who was taken off air during the 2020 riots because her husband was the police union chief.
“These cops are already really stretched to the limits,” Collin told Megyn Kelly, pointing out the Annunciation school massacre was the fourth shooting incident in Minneapolis in less than 24 hours.
If Democrats wonder why their political stock is spiraling into the death zone, they need look no further than their willful failures on urban crime and border protection.
Joe Biden, who once posed as a tough-on-crime moderate, came into the White House and immediately dismantled all the Trump-era border protections, allowing millions of illegal aliens, including rapists, child molesters, murderers and assorted gangbangers to roam free along with our homegrown criminals.
He turned a blind eye to urban crime while prioritizing the fake crises of climate change and “equity.”
In place of police, now taxpayer money was being wasted on social workers and “violence interrupters.”
All less safe
The upshot is that we all became less safe, even while Dems gaslit us about the wonderful crime stats we knew they’d faked.
Instead of admitting fault and embracing commonsense policies like more cops on the beat, Democrats are siding with criminals. New York is about to sign our own death warrant if Zohran “No Misdemeanors” Mamdani gets his way and wins the mayoralty.
But Trump’s successful DC crime crackdown puts the lie to their claims that law and order is too complex to solve with policing.
He has saved the lives of at least half a dozen people in a city that sees a murder every other day.
The capital’s almost unprecedented 12-day homicide free-streak ended early Wednesday, sadly, but there is no doubt that the streets are safer, and the most affected residents are grateful.
Since most, if not all, of the lives saved are the young black men who usually fill mortuary slabs, it’s a rich irony that the loudest critics of Trump’s law-and-order push are the same Democrats who weaponized “Black Lives Matter” into an insane movement to defund the police.
In Chicago, where Trump threatens to send the National Guard next, six people were killed last weekend alone, including a 5-year-old boy.
Don’t their lives matter?
https://nypost.com/2025/08/27/opinion/dem-led-minnesota-has-been-at-the-center-of-social-disorder/
