Second chances kill innocents



Republicans might finally take me seriously after years of warning: America suffers not from mass incarceration, but from mass under-incarceration. The system needs tougher sentences, not softer ones.

The brutal murder of 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska, allegedly at the hands of career criminal Decarlos Brown Jr. on a Charlotte commuter train, didn’t reveal anything new. It shocked the nation precisely because it put on camera what has become routine in our cities since the bipartisan “criminal justice reform” wave dismantled Reagan-era tough-on-crime policies.

Legislators will have a choice when they reconvene: Pass strong reforms like these or watch more innocent people die.

For every man like Brown who slipped through the cracks, at least 10 more walk free when they should be locked up for life.

Brown had been arrested 14 times since 2007. His record included assault, felony firearms possession, robbery, and larceny. He didn’t see the inside of a prison until 2014, when an armed robbery conviction earned him a mere four years. He racked up more arrests after his release in 2020, but neither prison nor psychiatric commitment followed. The justice system looked the other way.

The result was predictable. Brown’s obvious mental instability made him even more dangerous than an ordinary criminal. Yet over the last 15 years, Republicans and Democrats alike embraced “reform” that made second chances for the violent and insane a top priority. They weakened sentencing, gutted mandatory minimums, downgraded juvenile crimes, eased up on drugs and vagrancy, and abandoned broken-windows policing. Hard-won gains against crime and homelessness evaporated.

The final insult: Brown was last released on cashless bail by North Carolina Magistrate Judge Teresa Stokes, allegedly affiliated with a pro-criminal “second chances” group. But violent offenders don’t just get second chances. They get third, fourth, and 15th chances. Most criminals never even face charges. Prosecutors downgrade cases. Convicts skate on early release. The cycle spins on.

Look at the numbers. In 2024, the FBI’s incident-based reporting system logged over 12.2 million crimes. Strip away drug and gun cases, and the picture remains grim: 2.4 million violent crimes with no arrest. Another 1.25 million serious property crimes — arson, burglary, motor vehicle theft — with no arrest. Every year, more than a million offenders escape justice. Meanwhile, the nation’s prison and jail population sits at roughly 1.9 million.

Even when police make arrests, punishment rarely follows. In 2021, only 15,604 people went to prison for robbery despite 121,000 reported incidents. Just 4,894 went away for car theft out of 550,000 cases. Even homicide convictions lag far behind — just 6,081 murderers entered prison against more than 15,000 killings.

This isn’t a statistical fluke. It’s a system that fails to punish violent crime year after year.

RELATED: Iryna Zarutska’s name should shame the woke

Screenshot/Charlotte Transit Authority

So what needs to change? Here’s a checklist every state legislature should adopt in the next session:

  1. Ban public encampments on streets, sidewalks, and public property; allow lawsuits against localities that fail to enforce.
  2. Elevate porch piracy penalties, following Florida’s lead.
  3. Impose stiff punishments for organized retail theft and flash mobs.
  4. Tighten “truth-in-sentencing” laws to ensure violent offenders serve their full terms.
  5. Pass anti-gang statutes that cross county lines, fund prosecutions, and mandate enhanced sentences for gang-related crimes.
  6. Let prosecutors, not judges, decide whether to try violent juveniles as adults.
  7. Set mandatory minimums for carjackings, especially for repeat offenders.
  8. Impose harsh sentences on felons caught with firearms, and harsher still when they use them.
  9. Require parole violators to finish their sentences.
  10. Hold repeat offenders without bond; revoke pretrial release when new crimes are committed.
  11. Fund prosecutors’ offices to clear the backlog of violent felony cases.
  12. Strengthen “three strikes” laws to eliminate loopholes.
  13. Apply the death penalty to fentanyl traffickers.
  14. Mandate quarterly public reporting of judges’ sentencing records in a searchable database.
  15. Criminalize squatting and streamline removal.

Legislators will have a choice when they reconvene: Pass strong reforms like these or watch more innocent people die.

Social media outrage won’t fix this crisis. Neither will empty calls for “accountability.” As Iryna’s grieving family warned, “This could have been anyone riding the light rail that night.”

That’s the truth — and unless lawmakers act, it will be the truth again tomorrow.

If mental health experts can’t identify murderers, what’s the backup plan?



A profound mental health crisis lies at the heart of violence in America. Decarlos Brown Jr., the suspect in the brutal stabbing death of the Ukrainian woman Iryna Zarutska in Charlotte, North Carolina, was in a mental hospital earlier this year and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. But doctors wouldn’t have released him if they had viewed him as a danger to himself or others.

Similarly, the killers at Minneapolis’ Annunciation Catholic School and Nashville’s Covenant School both struggled with mental illness. Nearly all mass shooters also battled suicidal thoughts.

Our mental health system cannot serve as the last line of defense — too many mistakes slip through.

“We will never arrest our way out of issues such as homelessness and mental health,” Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles warned after the stabbing death. “Mental health disease is just that — a disease. It needs to be treated with the same compassion.” After the Minneapolis attack, House Speaker Mike Johnson underscored the issue: “The problem is the human heart. It’s mental health. There are things that we can do.”

Yet despite the fact that more than half of mass public shooters over the past 25 years were already under the care of mental health professionals, not a single one was identified as a danger to themselves or others. An entire body of academic research now explores why mental health experts so often fail to predict these attacks.

What’s the plan?

When professionals cannot identify threats before atrocities are committed, society must ask: What is the backup plan?

The Minneapolis school murderer admitted: “I am severely depressed and have been suicidal for years.” After the Nashville school shooting, police concluded the killer was “highly depressed and highly suicidal throughout her life.” Yet even with regular psychiatric care, experts found no signs of homicidal or suicidal intent.

The 2022 Buffalo supermarket killer showed the same pattern. In June 2021, when asked about his future plans, he answered that he wanted to attend summer school, murder people there, and then commit suicide. Alarmed, his teacher sent him for evaluation by two mental health professionals. He told them it was a joke, and they let him go.

Later he admitted: “I got out of it because I stuck with the story that I was getting out of class, and I just stupidly wrote that down. It was not a joke; I wrote that down because that’s what I was planning to do.”

Many well-known mass killers saw psychiatrists before their attacks. U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who murdered 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009, was himself an Army psychiatrist. Elliot Rodger, the UC Santa Barbara "incel" shooter, had received years of high-level counseling, but like the Buffalo killer, Rodger simply knew not to reveal his true intentions. The Army psychiatrist who last saw Ivan Lopez (the second Fort Hood shooter) concluded there was no “sign of likely violence, either to himself or to others.”

Aurora movie theater shooter James Holmes’ psychiatrist did warn University of Colorado officials about Holmes’ violent fantasies shortly before his attack, but even she dismissed the threat as insufficient for custody. And both a court-appointed psychologist and a hospital psychiatrist found Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho posed no danger to himself or others.

Psychiatrists have every incentive to get these diagnoses right. Beyond professional pride and the desire to help, they face legal obligations to report threats. Families of victims have even sued psychiatrists for failing to recommend confinement. Despite this, psychiatrists consistently underestimate the danger.

The problem runs deep enough to generate a whole academic literature. Some experts suggest psychiatrists try to prove their fearlessness or become desensitized to risk. Additional training in unusual cases may help, but predicting such rare outcomes will always remain extremely difficult.

Hindsight makes the warning signs look obvious. Before the attack, even to experts, they rarely do. And while addressing mental illness, we should not stigmatize it. Mentally ill people are far more likely to become victims of violence than perpetrators. Only a tiny fraction ever commit murder.

Take schizophrenia: More than 3.5 million Americans live with the disorder, yet only one schizophrenic has committed a mass attack since 2019. That makes the odds of such a crime less than 1 in 3.5 million — extremely rare.

Victims left defenseless

No one wants dangerous individuals to access weapons. Are we going to disarm all mentally ill people, even though they themselves are at increased risk of violent crime? One woman we know saw her husband murdered in front of her by her stalker. She was very depressed but feared that in seeking mental help she would be denied the right to own a gun (which she needed to protect herself).

Another factor that makes these attacks difficult to stop is that they are planned long in advance, with six months being about the shortest. The Sandy Hook massacre was planned for over two and a half years, allowing the perpetrator plenty of time to obtain weapons.

RELATED: If ‘words are violence,’ why won’t the left own theirs?

Photo by wildpixel via Getty Images

These killers, like the recent attacker in Minneapolis, often state outright in their manifestos and diaries that they target “gun-free zones.” They may be crazy, but they aren’t stupid. They expect to die, but they want attention when they do. They know that the higher the body count, the more media coverage they’ll receive. That’s why they choose places where no one can fight back.

Weapons bans won’t work

The attack in Charlotte happened in a gun-free zone. The woman had no chance to defend herself when the attacker struck from behind, and no one on the train intervened. Bystanders may have hesitated out of fear — after all, the killer was a large man armed with a knife, even though knives are also banned on public transportation. Someone with a firearm possibly could have stopped the assault, just as a Marine veteran in July did in a Michigan Walmart, where at gunpoint he forced a knife-wielding attacker to drop his weapon. Others who tried to stop the attacker without a gun were stabbed.

Our mental health system cannot serve as the last line of defense — too many mistakes slip through. If mental health professionals can’t reliably stop these attackers before they strike, we must ask: What’s the backup plan? Leaving targets unprotected isn’t the best option.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.

Could passengers have SAVED Iryna Zarutska?



Surveillance footage of the murder of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska in Charlotte, NC, reveals that the other passengers on the train didn’t help her until some time had passed — and Blaze media co-founder Glenn Beck doesn’t believe it’s his place to judge.

“I’m torn about how I feel about the people on the train because my first instinct is, they did nothing. They did nothing,” Glenn says.

“What would I have done? What would I want my wife to do in that situation?” Glenn asks.

However, after Glenn and BlazeTV host Stu Burguiere imagine their wives in the same situation, they realize it’s not their place to judge.


“It’s tough to put yourself in that situation. It’s very easy to watch a video on the internet and talk about your heroism. Like, everybody can do that very easily on Twitter,” Stu says.

“When you’re in a vehicle that doesn’t have an exit with a guy who just murdered someone in front of you, has dripping blood off of a knife that’s standing 10 feet away from you, 15 feet away from you, there is probably a different standard there that we should all kind of consider,” he continues.

“When I’m thinking of my wife, my advice to my wife would not be to jump into the middle of that situation at all costs,” Stu says.

While Glenn agrees, he does hope he himself would have taken action.

“I would hope that I would have gotten up and at least tried to help her, you know, help her up off the floor, at least be there with her as she’s seeing her life, you know, spill out in under a minute,” Glenn says.

“And that’s the other thing we have to keep in mind. This all happened so rapidly,” he adds. “A minute will seem like a very long period of time in that situation, but it’s a very short period of time in real life.”

Iryna Zarutska’s name should shame the woke



The brutal murder of Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte train shocked the city and the nation. Yet, the reaction from Mayor Vi Lyles revealed something deeper — and more troubling — about the worldview now shaping our institutions.

Instead of calling it what it was — a violent crime committed by “a mentally deranged lunatic” and “well-known career criminal,” as President Trump described the suspect — Lyles chose to label it a “tragic event.” The tragedy, she suggested, was not the victim’s death so much as society’s failure to provide resources for the killer.

We cannot blame 'the system.' We cannot blame God. Facing consequences for our actions is not oppression — it is humanizing.

That rhetorical move matters. It echoes the same radical philosophy that has taken over higher education and increasingly influences our politics. In this worldview, criminals are not moral agents. They are victims of circumstance.

The death of free will

As a humanities professor, I have heard this refrain for decades. Subjects meant to explore the human condition and the pursuit of wisdom have been hijacked by an ideology that insists “marginalized” individuals cannot be held responsible for their actions.

The logical problem should be obvious. If the “oppressed” are not responsible for their actions, then they lack free will. That is a dehumanizing philosophy. It strips away moral agency and reduces people to products of “the system.”

Yet, radical professors advance this philosophy because it props up political causes that would collapse under scrutiny. Their favorite tool is the fallacy of appealing to pity: “Don’t hold me accountable, I had a hard life.” But if failure is always the system’s fault, then so is success. The DEI professor will tell you that bad outcomes come from oppression — and good outcomes come from privilege. Individual responsibility vanishes.

Crime 'happens' to the criminal

In this view, crime happens to the criminal. The system, not the sinner, makes the choice. The remedy? Education and therapy. Punishment for evil is rejected outright.

Take two examples.

First, Chicago’s Mayor Brandon Johnson (D). Listen to him describe gun violence and you’d think guns sprout legs and walk into the city from other states. Who are the human beings pulling the triggers? That question is avoided, because the system supposedly forced them into crime.

Second, watch the recent Jubilee video featuring Patrick Bet-David. Anti-capitalist students invoked the plight of the single mother. To hear them tell it, single motherhood simply “happens.” No choices, no responsibility. Just victims of capitalism who have no choice but to work four jobs. The notion that having unprotected sex outside marriage is a choice is brushed aside.

This isn’t compassion, let alone justice. It’s a simple refusal to acknowledge reality.

Complaints against God

Charlotte’s racial equity policies rest on this same rejection of free will. And beneath that rejection lies something even deeper: complaints against God Himself.

Christianity teaches that God created men and women with real differences and that He governs the circumstances into which we are born. Radical critics call this unfair. Why can’t Bet-David be a single mother? Why should people be born rich or poor? Why does God still hold us accountable?

RELATED: Trump DOJ takes action against violent thug accused of savagely murdering Ukrainian refugee

Maxiphoto via iStock/Getty Images

The apostle Paul anticipated this very objection in Romans 9:19: “Then why does God still find fault? For who resists His will?” The ultimate complaint is against divine providence.

But denying free will is absurd. Many born into hard circumstances have learned to be wise and seek God. Many born into privilege have chosen evil. Our choices define us.

The humanizing truth

We cannot blame “the system.” We cannot blame God. Facing consequences for our actions is not oppression — it is humanizing. It reminds us that we have the dignity of free will and the responsibility to choose between good and evil.

And here is the one solution the radical professor will never offer: There is forgiveness for our sin, freely given in Christ. That is the antidote to a culture that excuses evil and denies accountability.

DOJ weighs firearm ban for transgenders after Minneapolis shooting



In the aftermath of the tragic Minneapolis shooting — where two young lives were lost to a violent gunman — Trump’s Department of Justice is considering taking action to stop guns from getting in the hands of transgenders.

The move is being celebrated by conservatives, as the shooter, Robin Westman, was a 23-year-old man who identified as a woman.

One potential avenue could see Trump formally declare that those who identify as transgender are mentally ill and no longer legally allowed to possess firearms.

“Under Attorney General Bondi’s leadership, this Department of Justice is actively considering a range of options to prevent mentally unstable individuals from committing acts of violence, especially at schools,” a spokesman for the DOJ said.


However, while many conservatives believe that transgenderism is a mental illness — they’re not sure that broadly banning guns for any group of people is the right move.

“I read that headline and my knee-jerk reaction is like, good, they shouldn’t have guns. And then I’m like, ah, I don’t know how you do that with the Second Amendment,” BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales says on “Sara Gonzales Unfiltered.”

“I think everyone would agree you don’t want violent, mentally ill people to have firearms,” BlazeTV contributor Grant Stinchfield chimes in. “So we can all agree on that. The problem becomes ‘Who is the decider?’”

“So who decides who’s violently and mentally ill? Because I promise you, Nancy Pelosi is going to say, ‘Well, Stinchfield’s mentally ill because he loves freedom and God and all those things.’ So it’s all in the decider,” he continues.

“Now, transgender certainly ... it’s a violent, violent section, mentally ill people, and it is a mental illness. If you think you’re a boy and you don’t have nuts hanging down below you, you’re mentally ill,” he adds.

Gonzales notes that while not all shooters are transgender, transgenders make up such a small percentage of the population and have committed several of the devastating mass shootings in recent years.

“It’s pretty skewed when you look at that,” she says, adding, “And so it’s just hard because you want to prevent this from happening.”

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Trans lawmaker says conservatives are the 'weird' ones



Rep. Sarah McBride (D-Del.), who was previously known as Tim McBride, is the first “out” transgender person elected to Congress — and he is adamant that conservatives are the “weird” ones.

“They are obsessed with culture war issues. The Republican Party is obsessed with culture war issues. It is weird, and it is bizarre. And the American people deserve serious legislators, serious elected officials who are focused on bringing people together,” McBride said

BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales is not even close to being on the same page.

“If you are to believe this man, who believes that he is a woman, that’s your first mistake, is trusting anything that this person says,” Gonzales says. “If you are to believe Tim McBride, the right is weird because we believe in biological truths and that biological men are men and women are women.”


“That is so weird. That is so bizarre,” she mocks, before pulling up a selfie McBride posted to Instagram in the women’s bathroom in 2016.

“Here I am using a women’s restroom in North Carolina that I’m technically barred from being in. They say I’m a pervert. They say I’m a man dressed as a woman. They say I’m a threat to their children. They say I’m confused. They say I’m dangerous. And they say accepting me as the person I have fought my life to be seen as reflects the downfall of a once great nation,” McBride wrote in the caption.

“I'm just a person. We are all just people. Trying to pee in peace. Trying to live our lives as fully and authentically as possible. Barring me from this restroom doesn't help anyone. And allowing me to continue to use this bathroom — just without fear of discrimination and harassment — doesn't hurt anyone. Stop this. We are good people,” he added.

“This is a man entering a woman’s bathroom and taking pictures of himself in a woman’s bathroom and posting it on social media for likes and clicks is telling you that it’s weird that you care that he’s doing this,” Gonzales comments, adding, “That is so mind-boggling.”

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Two church shootings, two killers, endless media double standards



Two church shootings, a decade apart, received strikingly different treatment from America’s corporate media. The first occurred in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015. The second took place in Minneapolis just last week.

On June 18, 2015, CBS News reported:

A white man opened fire in a historic black church, in Charleston, South Carolina, the night of June 17, 2015, killing nine people, including a pastor, during a prayer meeting. The suspect, Dylann Roof, was arrested in North Carolina and extradited to South Carolina June 18, 2015, for what authorities are calling a hate crime.

On June 28, 2025, CBS News reported:

Two young children were killed and 18 others were injured in a shooting during a Catholic Mass packed with young students in south Minneapolis Wednesday morning. The shooter is also dead.

Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said the shooting triggered a massive law enforcement response to Annunciation Catholic Church at West 54th Street between Harriet and Garfield avenues around 8:30 a.m. The church is connected to a school building.

The shooter approached from the outside of the building and fired a rifle through the church windows toward children and worshippers. The shooter also used a shotgun and a pistol that he had legally purchased ‘recently,’ O’Hara said.

Both reports were written one day after the massacres. Both shooters were identified by that point. Yet the second account omitted key information about the shooter.

Establishment media needs to look at the facts — and report them. While they do, they should also look in the mirror.

What a shock when Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey used a press conference on the very day of the church massacre to pivot from murdered children to a lecture on transgender rights and gun control.

“I have heard about a whole lot of hate that’s being directed at our trans community,” Frey told reporters at an afternoon briefing.

He went on:

Anybody who is using this ... as an opportunity to villainize our trans community, or any other community out there, has lost their sense of common humanity. We should not be operating out of a place of hate for anyone.

In truth, no one should be shocked by Frey’s diversion. This is the same mayor who let Minneapolis burn in 2020, which included the torching of a police station. His record of weakness is already clear.

And this year, he’s locked in a tough re-election fight against Omar Fateh, a bona fide democratic socialist. To survive, Frey is racing leftward, stooping to whatever level he thinks will protect his job.

The real revelation from his comments wasn’t his tired blame-shifting but his admission that the shooter identified as transgender — a fact establishment media has rushed to bury.

The killer, born Robert Westman, legally changed his name to Robin Westman in January 2020 at age 17. The petition states that he “identifies as a female and wants her name to reflect that identification.”

Such details were not hidden for anyone willing to look. Hours before the massacre, Westman posted videos that exposed both his planning and his hatred.

In one, he flipped through pages of a handwritten manifesto laying out why he chose Annunciation — the Catholic church and school he had graduated from in 2017:

I am feeling good about Annunciation. It seems like a good combo of easy attack form and devastating tragedy and I want to do more research. I have concerns about finding a large enough group. I want to avoid any parents, but pre and post school drop off.

In another, Westman showed off his arsenal. His gun magazines bore hand-scrawled taunts, including the chilling phrase: “Where is your God?”

Basic facts become optional

Ten years ago, coverage of Charleston leaned heavily on words like “white” and “white supremacist.” Reporters stressed Dylann Roof’s race from the outset, and his racist motivations were treated as central to the story. That was fair. His ideology mattered, and his identity explained why he targeted a black church.

But why is the same standard not applied today?

RELATED: If ‘words are violence,’ why won’t the left own theirs?

Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images

Westman was transgender. Court filings documented his legal name change to “Robin” and the reasons behind it. His own videos revealed a deeply disturbed mind, with specific plans to attack Annunciation and taunts of his victims scrawled on his weapons. These are facts. They belong in basic reporting. Including them doesn’t equate “transgender” with “deranged” any more than “white” equates to “white supremacist.”

Yet the difference in coverage is glaring. In Charleston, identity was headline news. In Minneapolis, it was buried. Everyone knows why. Westman’s story doesn’t serve the establishment narrative, so the press ignored it.

A reckoning for mainstream media

Journalism once prided itself on covering the unexpected — the classic “man bites dog.” That’s over. News today is about reinforcing narratives, not reporting facts.

Americans see through it. They know why trust in media sits at historic lows. They see newspapers hemorrhaging readers, network news losing viewers, and MSNBC shrinking into a dumb rebrand. The bias is obvious, the omission blatant, and the public is done playing along.

People usually know when they’re being lied to. They also know that half-truths amount to half-lies at best. The press pushed the Russia hoax with glee. They buried Hunter Biden’s laptop. They shielded the public from Joe Biden’s obvious cognitive decline.

The left depends on this cocoon. It shelters them from the clash between their mistaken beliefs and stubborn reality. And the establishment media — blind to their own collapse in credibility — gladly supply the insulation.

In Minneapolis, the slaughter of Catholic schoolchildren should have shattered the narrative. Instead, the media treated it like an inconvenience. They will glance at it briefly before memory-holing what doesn’t fit.

If they have any integrity left, they’ll face the facts — and face themselves. Because the real scandal isn’t just what they cover. It’s what they refuse to see.

Rosie O’Donnell forced to apologize after blaming MAGA for Minneapolis shooting



After the atrocious Minneapolis shooting, one celebrity made a fool of herself when she was quick to place blame where it didn’t belong: Rosie O'Donnell.

This isn’t the first time O’Donnell has made it clear in a public rant that she is vehemently anti-MAGA, after famously fleeing the United States for Dublin, Ireland, to escape President Trump when he took office for the second time.

“I saw about the Minnesota shooting, and it brought me right back to Columbine in 1999, where I just could not get it through my head that students in America were shooting each other in schools. And this was a church inside a Catholic school,” O’Donnell in a rant posted to her social media.

“And what do you know, was a white guy, Republican, a MAGA person. What do you know? A white supremacist,” she added.


However, O’Donnell shortly had to walk back her comments and issue an apology — as she was completely wrong.

“My apologies to maga for saying the school shooter was one of u — that is incorrect — i made a mistake,” the caption of another selfie video read.

“I know a lot of you were very upset about the video I made before I went away for a few days. I didn’t go online and haven’t seen them till today. But you are right. I did not do my due diligence before I made that. I said things about the shooter that were incorrect,” O’Donnell said in the video.

Despite apparently learning her lesson, O’Donnell went on to say that most shooters fit the description she originally believed to match the Minneapolis shooter.

“I assumed like most shooters, they followed a standard MO and standard, you know, feelings of, you know, NRA-loving kind of gun people. Anyway, the truth is I messed up. And when you mess up, you fess up. I’m sorry. This is my apology video, and I hope it’s enough,” she said.

“It’s not,” BlazeTV host Pat Gray comments, disgusted.

“Not only does she not mention the fact that the guy wasn’t Republican, he was trans and part of her community. As 11 others have been over the last few years. So why don’t you talk about what really is going on in America right now?” he says.

“People with real problems are manifesting them in this way. And that’s whether they’re white straight people or whether they’re transgender people,” he continues, adding, “They’re mentally ill.”

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Affirming delusion, denying reality — and burying kids



The horror of a man setting out to murder children at church defies belief. The Minnesota Catholic school shooting last week left the nation stunned, with many grasping for explanations and redirecting grief into attacks on gun policies, school security, and even, outrageously, on prayer itself.

But one factor demands attention: the worsening mental health crisis in America. Our culture increasingly enables, rather than treats, serious psychological disorders. And in this case, one condition in particular — transgenderism — deserves special scrutiny.

The recurring presence of trans-identifying shooters should alarm every lawmaker and every medical professional.

The emerging facts about the shooter reveal a deeply disturbed individual. His writings and grotesque images showed a man in desperate need of psychiatric care, yet he found affirmation instead of help. His delusions were encouraged, not confronted, and the result was catastrophic.

The pattern is becoming familiar. This tragedy mirrors the 2023 Nashville shooting, where a woman identifying as a man killed six students and teachers at her former Christian school. Other recent attacks, from Colorado Springs to Aberdeen, Maryland, also involved trans-identifying shooters.

Meanwhile, a staggering number of young Americans are being swept into this delusion. Surveys suggest that nearly 1 in 3 teenagers now claim some form of trans or “gender-diverse” identity. The trend skews heavily under age 35, a clear sign that cultural indoctrination and medical malpractice are driving young Americans to deny biological reality.

The truth remains unchanged: Humanity has two sexes. Males produce small gametes, females produce large ones. That is the basis of reproduction. That is science. “Follow the science,” we are told — until it points somewhere inconvenient.

Parents are bullied with the claim that failing to “affirm” their child’s identity will cause suicide. Schools push the ideology on children barely old enough to read. Doctors who should offer counseling instead pump minors full of dangerous hormones, mutilate their healthy bodies, and reinforce the lie that society, not their confusion, is the real problem. The result is not relief but deeper misery and hostility.

RELATED: Trans-identifying man with a ‘twisted mind’ said, ‘I want to die,’ before opening fire on Catholic Mass in Minneapolis

Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images

The Minnesota shooter himself admitted the betrayal in his final writings, expressing regret over the “brainwashing” he had embraced. His screeds were filled with self-loathing that soon turned outward. When “affirmation” fails, when surgeries and hormones leave the underlying pain untouched, some lash out — against themselves or against others.

The responsibility for the massacre in Minneapolis rests with the man who plotted, armed himself, and carried out this evil act. His hatred was written in loathsome slogans on his weapons and shouted through his crimes. But America ignores the mental health crisis feeding such hatred at its peril.

The recurring presence of trans-identifying shooters should alarm every lawmaker and every medical professional. It is past time to end the malpractice of so-called gender-affirming care. Those struggling with gender dysphoria need real psychiatric help, not a dangerous charade. Until that happens, more atrocities will follow — and more innocents will get hurt.

Violence Is The Logical And Desired Outcome Of Leftists’ Trans Victim Narrative

After wallowing in the left's grievance politics, people are beginning to behave in predictably violent ways.