RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/08/28/the-annunciation-shooting-reveals-the-savagery-of-identity-politics/

“What is most striking is the media coverage of the horror in Minneapolis. It seems muted. There’s little focus on the killer’s anti-Semitism, where we all know that if he’d been Islamophobic it would have dominated the coverage. His trans identity is not significant, say observers who would have thought it very significant indeed if the piece of shit had been an ‘incel’. And just imagine if three acts of barbarism had been carried in recent months under the rallying cry of ‘Fuck Palestine’. The left would be in up arms. But ‘Free Palestine’? Screaming about Israel before you end the lives of pensioners or praying children? They’re silent on that. Perhaps they’re mortified. They should be.”

Maybe it’s because the school has the exact same name as the first one I attended in London – the Annunciation Catholic School – that yesterday’s massacre in Minneapolis horrified me so deeply. Our school also had a church right next door, also called the Annunciation Catholic Church, like the one in Minneapolis. And just like those kids who were so savagely attacked as they clasped their tiny hands together in prayer at 8am, we, too, would make the short journey from school to church to give praise to God for our lives, our families, our friends.

It is hard to comprehend the sheer barbarism of the mass shooting of those Annunciation kids. The suspect – Robin Westman – is said to have shot through the church’s windows. He pumped bullets into innocents in their holy sanctuary. Two children, aged eight and 10, were killed. Six others are in a critical condition. More would have perished were it not for the heroism of the teachers and older pupils. As the school principal said: ‘Adults were protecting children. Older children were protecting younger children.’ Unimaginable courage in the face of unimaginable evil.

All mass shootings chill the blood. Especially school shootings. But there is something distinctly heinous about firing into a church full of kids. For Catholics, the church is a holy haven from the trials and vagaries of life. If the Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis is anything like the Annunciation Catholic Church in London that I attended, then to those kids it will have been a place of safety, silence, wonder. That a man clad in black violated their sacred zone with blind, mad violence is unconscionable. The scars of this will last.

As with all crazed shootings, it would be folly to try to derive hard ‘lessons’ from this atrocity. Yet it would be negligent – to the victims, to America – to not ask questions. To not ponder, at least, how such a bestial act, such a vicious clawing at the fabric of civilised society, could take place in 21st-century America. To my mind, it is possible we are witnessing the hyper-violent logical endpoint to identity politics. From what we know about the suspect, it seems his savagery was in some ways the armed wing of the apocalyptic narcissism that identity politics so often engenders and unleashes.

Westman’s atrocity is being investigated as an anti-Catholic hate crime. He’s reportedly a former pupil of the Annunciation. So he will have sat in the very pews he mercilessly fired upon. But there’s more. He was ‘trans’: he changed his name from Robert to Robin and posed as a woman. He was seemingly anti-Christian. The words ‘Where is your God?’ were written on one of his guns – a vile taunt of the children he knew he was about to massacre. And he was virulently anti-Semitic, a passionate loather of Israel. Did the hate he so brutishly visited on those kids spring from his descent into the extremities of these identitarian positions?

It would be reckless to overlook that this is not the first time a trans person has carried out a mass shooting. There was also the massacre at a Christian school in Nashville in 2023, in which six were slaughtered. And the shooting at a school in Denver in 2019. And the massacre at a warehouse in Maryland in 2018. We must not ‘villainise’ the trans community in the wake of the Annunciation shooting, says Minneapolis mayor, Jacob Frey. This isn’t about villainising anyone – it’s about asking whether the self-regard and self-pity so recklessly sown by the identitarian zeitgeist might be helping to nurture catastrophic levels of anti-social animus.

Westman’s ‘manifesto’ would seem to suggest he was consumed by the vanity of the victim mindset. It included the trans Pride flag and the words ‘defend equality’. He appeared to hate Christians, presumably for their trans-scepticism. He grossly imagined himself as the ‘horrible monster standing over those powerless kids’.

We have to grapple with the possibility that a culture that forces the individual ever more inwards, inviting them to obsess over their own fantasy identities and to loathe any ‘phobe’ who refuses to genuflect at their altar of the self, is wrenching people ever further and ever more violently from society itself. Sure, most identitarians merely harbour a latent contempt for the average citizen who refuses to validate their hallucinatory self-image. But perhaps some are pushed a little further. Perhaps it was more dangerous than we thought, or certainly foolhardy, to greenlight this politics of recognition that pits the self-pitying individual against the mass of society.

Then there was Westman’s anti-Semitism. It was by all accounts deep and grotesque. ‘Israel must fall’ was written on one of his guns. ‘Free Palestine’, he said. He wrote about murdering ‘filthy Zionist Jews’. ‘Six million wasn’t enough’, he said. By my calculation this is the third act of lethal violence carried out in the US at least partly under the auspices of ‘anti-Zionism’. First there was the slaughter of two Israeli Embassy workers outside a Jewish museum in Washington, DC. Then the scalding of elderly Jews with a flammable liquid in Colorado. And now the slaying of Catholic kids by a devoted Israel-hater. In all three cases, the killer either wrote or said: ‘Free Palestine.’

We need to talk about this. It speaks, surely, to the anti-civilisational bent to ‘anti-Zionism’. That innocents can be slaughtered under the banner of hating Israel, whether it’s an 82-year-old Jew burnt to death in Colorado or two Catholic kids shot to death in Minneapolis, suggests there is a deep anti-human rot to this supposedly political position.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/transgender-church-shooter-hated-trump-christians-and-jews/

What were the motives of Robert ‘Robin’ Westman who opened fire on a Catholic church killing 2 children and wounding 17 others? The authorities claim that they’re still looking for the motive of the transgender mass murder, but like most psychos, he was happy to scrawl it all over social media.

Beyond the completely psychotic rants, Westman made it clear that he hated Trump, Jews and Christians. He also hated Indians. The one religion he seemed to like was Islam and he scribbled “Mashallah”, an Islamic term, on his gun along with love notes like “Six million was not enough”, “Israel must fall” and “Kill Trump”.

The media and local authorities won’t talk about any of it.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/an-anti-israeli-activist-posing-as-a-nun/

A few years ago a learned Russian Orthodox priest-acquaintance of mine told me what he thought of a certain nun who was making waves in Europe with her radical political views.

The nun in question was located in Vienna, and her name was Sister Vassa, a Russian Orthodox sister educated at Fordham University, a Jesuit school noted for its progressive theological views.

“You must be careful with nuns,” the priest said, ponderously. “Many of them drift into areas that are far away from anything having to do with their original religious vocation.”

It wasn’t long before Sister Vassa’s role as political activist eclipsed her vocation as a nun; as a result, she was defrocked by the Russian Orthodox Church.

Recently, another attention-seeking Orthodox nun kicked her religious vocation to the curb to become an anti-Israel political activist.

She is a little nun with a mustache, Mother Agapia Stephanopoulus, who has lived in the Holy Land since 1996 and who created a firestorm of sorts as a result of her recent interview with Tucker Carlson on what life is like for Christians in the Holy Land.

Mother Agapia’s message: life is horrible for Christians in the Holy Land, and it’s all Israel’s fault.

Watching the show, my first thought was: who is this vintage troll doll dressed as a nun who makes controversial statements and lies with such a wide smile?

Words poured out of her effortlessly, yet Tucker did not challenge or contradict her in any way. He barely asked her anything about her background, such as why she left the United States in the mid-nineties under suspicious circumstances.

No questions about how, in 2000, when she was Sister Stephanopoulos, she barricaded herself inside a Russian Orthodox property in Jericho until she had to be forcibly removed.

Writer Daniel Mael recapped that incident for The Geopolitical Maelstrom:

“U.S. diplomats were forced to intervene after she allegedly leveraged her brother George’s White House connections. A local real-estate fight became an international incident. The method was clear even then: insert yourself into conflict, cloak it in religious language, and trust that drama and family connections would amplify the cause.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/08/27/sneakflation-media-is-now-making-up-words-to-attack-trump/

In July, inflation came in lower than expected, which “defied fears of further price increases as a result of President Donald Trump’s tariffs.” That’s been happening a lot lately.

So, what’s a Trump–hating news media to do? Admit their fear-mongering was wrong? Or, invent a new term to make even good news sound ominous?

Over the weekend, CNN Business ran a story headlined: “‘Sneakflation’: How Trump’s tariffs are gradually raising costs for American consumers.”

The article admits that “inflation has remained relatively tame” this year. “To this point, consumers have been mostly shielded from starkly higher prices.”

That’s one way to put it.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/within-our-lifetime-columbia-palestinian-protest

On August 15, members of Within Our Lifetime (WOL) marched some 70 blocks across New York City, starting at the United Nations and ending in Morningside Park. Along the way, they boarded the subway en masse and resurfaced near Columbia University to join student protesters and implicitly call for the conquest of Israel. One demonstrator waved a Hezbollah flag; others vandalized a memorial near the mayor’s mansion.

The march showcased some of the pro-Palestinian movement’s most radical elements and highlighted the threat they pose to public order. As the vandalism demonstrates, WOL and its associates have a long history of lawlessness, including property destruction and building occupation. As a new school year dawns and activists push for another round of campus protests, city and university leaders must remain vigilant.

On August 15, members of Within Our Lifetime (WOL) marched some 70 blocks across New York City, starting at the United Nations and ending in Morningside Park. Along the way, they boarded the subway en masse and resurfaced near Columbia University to join student protesters and implicitly call for the conquest of Israel. One demonstrator waved a Hezbollah flag; others vandalized a memorial near the mayor’s mansion.

The march showcased some of the pro-Palestinian movement’s most radical elements and highlighted the threat they pose to public order. As the vandalism demonstrates, WOL and its associates have a long history of lawlessness, including property destruction and building occupation. As a new school year dawns and activists push for another round of campus protests, city and university leaders must remain vigilant.

Within Our Lifetime is a pro-Palestinian organization founded by Nerdeen Kiswani, a CUNY graduate with a long history in the city’s activist scene. Kiswani co-founded the New York City chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine in 2015, which rebranded as WOL in 2018. Kiswani remains the group’s chairwoman despite multiple arrests.

The recent WOL march began as a protest at the United Nations, which has been a major target of pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Activists in recent weeks have locked embassy gates and surrounded the entrances of diplomatic missions. Kiswani also confronted acting U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Dorothy Shea while she was dining at a restaurant.

https://spectator.org/newsom-slams-redistricting-as-threat-to-democracy-vows-to-redistrict-california/

On Monday, California Governor Gavin Newsom announced plans to fight fire with fire, directing his outrage at Texas’s redistricting efforts. While gerrymandering has been a fairly bipartisan practice for decades, Newsom declared on X that it risks “the destabilization of our democracy,” and that he will do the exact same thing in response.

He stated that if President Trump does not call on Texas Governor Greg Abbott to cease redistricting plans, “I will be forced to lead an effort to redraw the maps in California to offset the rigging of maps in red states.”

Replies to Newsom’s X post quickly garnered criticism, as one user stated, “California has 52 Congressional seats and the GOP has 9 of them. That’s 17 [percent] for a state that votes nearly 40 [percent] Republican.” 

Although Newsom ironically attacks redistricting as a threat to the country before vowing to engage in it, California does maintain the constitutional right to redraw its districts. Doing so could prove challenging, however, as several blue states have already been gerrymandered to a substantial level. 

In late July, the New York Times noted this fact, stating, “States where Democrats would have complete control over any redistricting, such as Illinois and Maryland, are already gerrymandered heavily in their favor. Squeezing more Democratic seats out of those states would be a challenge.”

While the irony is stark, Newsom’s outrage over supposed election interference falls flat, as Texas and California have both had four standard decadal redistricting cycles since 1990. Even with rarer mid-decade redistricting taken into account, Texas has only gerrymandered on four additional occasions since 1990. Such actions are allowed as long as no racial discrimination or equal protection violations occur, meaning that timing itself is not prohibited by the Constitution.

Although Texas courts can legally order redrawing of congressional maps apart from the mandated cycle, the state’s only major, non-cyclical gerrymandering since 1990 occurred in 2003.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-re-emergence-of-american-culture/

What must Thomas Cole have seen when, in 1825, he first gazed upon the Hudson River Valley for the first time, and later as he ventured into the Adirondacks? The natural beauty is stunning, just begging to be put on canvas. Or Albert Bierstadt, upon leaving his native northern Germany and crossing the American continent, to gaze upon the Rockies and all the way to the great Sierras of California? Or Walt Whitman, who in traveling across this great land, found his heart bursting with the beauty of America and so brilliantly put it to verse?

To the first explorers, settlers, farmers, artists who arrived from Europe, America was a blank canvas begging to be put to story and verse, to be painted and built upon a style that was uniquely American. And that they did.

America was all ambition, the promised land; it was the Garden of Eden remade, the City on a Hill, biblical — almost literally — or seen that way by the early arrivals and into the 19th Century. America was truly formed in the 1800’s, from birth to tumult and war, to the Golden Age of American growth and destiny. America became itself as the 19th Century closed. All the promise, the dreams, the unrealized potential, the stunning growth of our great country is an astonishing story unlike that of any other nation or people in world history.

How this was portrayed, written, painted, designed and put to verse and song is an untold story that begs to be told. And given the attacks that American culture faces today, it desperately needs to be told.

America excelled in the areas of art, architecture, literature and poetry in a way that is at least the equal of the Europe that we came from. Just to cover one of these areas — art — gives us a glimpse of this incredible beauty that is vital to our history and of the American story.

Thomas Cole and Albert Bierstadt are just two of the world-renowned artists that painted America in the 19th Century. They, along with Frederic Edwin Church, Asher Brown Durand, and so many others majestically put to canvas the beauty of the American landscape and at their very best are at least the rival of the great English landscape artists John Constable and J.M.W. Turner. But how many of today’s students even know these names?

Cole, one of the founders of what became known as the Hudson River School movement, saw as his mission to create an “American” landscape vision and literary voice that was based on the exploration of nature – the natural world defined as a resource for spiritual renewal and as an expression of cultural and national identity.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/08/25/what-made-the-democratic-party-go-crazy/

The answer was not Trump alone.

Indeed, irony abounds when Democrats resonate with the claims of the vestigial Never Trumpers that the MAGA movement “hijacked” the Republican Party.

In characteristic projectionist fashion, the left is simply falsely attributing to their opposition the very hijacking that hit the Democratic Party.

The Republicans are still the party of conservatism and traditionalism. But in the last decade, it adopted an expansionary middle-class agenda that has led to record party registration, its first popular presidential vote victory since 2004, and control of all three branches of government.

The MAGA emphases also have accomplished what prior “moderate” Republican presidents and presidential candidates had sought but largely failed to achieve: making inroads with minorities and youth and substituting class commonalities for racial chauvinism.

Thus, in 2024, 55 percent of Hispanic men and somewhere around 25 percent of black males voted for Trump—along with a +2 advantage for Trump among young men in general (18-29).

In contrast, Joe Biden left office with below 40 percent popularity in many polls. His replacement, 2024 Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, despite a substantial advantage in funding and overwhelmingly biased, favorable media coverage, lost both the popular and Electoral College vote.

Since the election, a variety of data points show a steady erosion in Democrat Party favorability (24 percent positive polling) and voter registration (for the first time in memory, Republicans are out-registering hemorrhaging Democrats in new voter affiliations).

They are also on the losing end of a 40/60 split among voters on most issues—especially the border, energy, crime, transgenderism, and foreign policy—a truth that even the legacy media cannot disguise.

The Democratic implosion does not necessarily mean they will not win back the House in the next election. Historically, it is difficult for even an unpopular out-party not to pick up lots of House and Senate seats in an administration’s first midterm. But if Democrats capture at least the House, the vote will not be for their party’s policies or politicians as much as a reflection of their ginned-up opposition to Trump, the messenger of a radical and controversial counterrevolutionary message.

The Democratic project is bleeding out because it either does not address what the middle class is worried about, or it offers no solution to popular anger—namely over inflation, the out-of-control DEI commissariat, illegal immigration, crime, high energy prices and tyrannical Green New Deal policies, steep interest rates, unaffordable housing costs, and anemic foreign policies.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/california-colorado-washington-oregon-decline

Not long ago, Colorado, Washington, and Oregon were widely hailed as states with bright futures. For decades, they attracted scores of out-of-state migrants, turning Denver, Seattle, and Portland into celebrated urban hubs.

But that changed as these states began adopting the very policies—above all on energy, housing, and regulation—that many newcomers had fled from in California. Once politically purple, Colorado, Washington, and Oregon have turned solid blue, embracing the same agenda that even the New York Times concedes has turned “the California dream” into “a mirage.”

True, Colorado, Washington, and Oregon have yet to reach California’s levels of dysfunction. Yet each shows signs suggestive of the Golden State’s experience, including lower job growth, sluggish housing-construction rates, a deteriorating business climate, and surging domestic out-migration.

The shift in migration patterns may be the clearest sign of the three states’ Californication. Like California, these states long attracted newcomers with their remarkable natural beauty. People only began leaving California—still arguably the most beautiful state in the continental U.S., with some of the most pleasant weather on earth—when its political, economic, and cultural climate became unbearable, especially for young families.