(The Daily Signal)—The man who opened fire at a Minneapolis Catholic school Wednesday, killing two and injuring 17 before taking his own life, drew renewed attention to the threat of transgender mass shooters.
He joins a surprisingly long list of violent offenders who identify or identified as transgender or non-binary, in the context of a broader movement that suggests such people live under a constant threat of death—from themselves and others. Many of them have explicitly targeted or shown hatred towards Christians.
None of this means most people who identify as transgender pose a violent threat, nor that activist groups like the Human Rights Campaign are intentionally inspiring people to commit violence.
However, the violent trend raises serious questions about the unintended consequences of transgender activists’ rhetoric.
The Transgender Offenders
Authorities have reportedly confirmed that the Minneapolis shooter, whom FBI Director Kash Patel identified as 23-year-old “Robin Westman, a male born as Robert Westman,” identified as transgender.
Westman joined the ignominious ranks of male-identifying Audrey Elizabeth Hale, 28, who shot and killed three children and three adults on March 27, 2023, at The Covenant School, a Presbyterian school in Nashville, Tennessee. Police fatally shot her during the attack.
On Sept. 20, 2018, 26-year-old Snochia Moseley shot and killed four people at a Rite Aid distribution center in Aberdeen, Maryland, before killing herself. A close friend of Moseley’s told The Washington Post the perpetrator identified as transgender.
On May 7, 2019, then-16-year-old Maya “Alec” McKinney and her 19-year-old fellow student, Devon Erickson, opened fire at STEM School Highlands Ranch in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, killing one and injuring eight. Both have been sentenced to life in prison. McKinney, a female, identifies as male.
On Jan. 4, 2024, 17-year-old Dylan Butler opened fire at his school, Perry High School in Perry, Iowa. He killed one student and the school’s principal, injured six more people, and shot himself. Butler does not appear to have identified as transgender, though his TikTok profile used “he/they” pronouns and he identified himself as “genderfluid” in one post.
In November 2023, a grand jury indicted 47-year-old Jason Lee Willie on 14 counts of threatening to injure people across state lines. Willie, a resident of Nashville, Illinois, allegedly threatened to rape girls in girls’ restrooms, carry out a mass shooting at schools, and bomb churches. Willie identifies as female and goes by the name “Alexia.”
(While 22-year-old Anderson Lee Aldrich—the shooter who killed five and injured 25 at a Colorado Springs LGBTQ nightclub on Nov. 19, 2022—identified as nonbinary in court documents, critics have suggested that identity represented a false flag, an attempt to avoid federal hate crime charges. Aldrich currently faces life in prison but escaped the death penalty.)
Hatred Toward Christians
Many of these offenders targeted Christians or threatened them because of their faith.
The Daily Wire obtained notes written by Audrey Hale in which the shooter condemned her parents for trying to “force Christian friends” in her life. She wrote that “F—ing parents like them who think of themselves first and their preference of conservative religion-gay s— make them believe that the child they are given should” suffer.
Erickson, the STEM School Highlands Ranch shooter who teamed up with the transgender McKinney, had previously posted on Facebook, “You know what I hate? All these Christians who hate gays.”
Willie, the man indicted for threats, condemned black Christians as “trash,” calling them “transphobic” and “homophobic” and comparing them to “the f—ing white supremacists.”
In a video call to a church, he said, “But I promise you, [if] I catch your daughters in them bathrooms alone, I am gonna f— them,” he said. “I mean I am gonna f—ing f— them until they’re dead.”
Where Does This Come From?
Christians who believe the Bible cannot endorse same-sex relations or gender ideology, but mere disagreement does not explain or excuse this hatred.
On the contrary, the transgender movement itself encourages a victimization narrative that may play a role in radicalizing these people.
The Human Rights Campaign, the premier transgender activist group, has described the deaths of people identifying as transgender as an “epidemic.” However, homicides are actually more common among people who don’t identify as transgender—according to the Human Rights Campaign’s own data.
This claim represents the fountainhead of a constant stream of hyperbolic transgender rhetoric. For instance, MSNBC columnist Katelyn Burns described a move to restrict the Frankensteinian treatments of “gender-affirming care” as an act of genocide.
Supporters of “gender-affirming care” maintain—with a straight face—that people with gender dysphoria (the painful and persistent identification with the gender opposite one’s sex) cannot prevent themselves from committing suicide if they do not receive these interventions. Yet, at the Supreme Court, the lawyer arguing for “gender-affirming care” admitted there is “no evidence” these interventions reduce suicide.
Online influencers who identify as transgender have amassed huge followings, and members of their audiences may find themselves bombarded with hyperbolic rhetoric about the “hate” of those who dare to disagree with their preferred pronouns. In fact, the influential Southern Poverty Law Center repeatedly compares conservative Christians who disagree with gender ideology to the KKK.
If you legitimately believed that there is an “epidemic” of murder against people like you, that opposition to your agenda is a form of “genocide,” and that Christians’ disagreement with gender ideology is fueling this, you might be tempted to lash out.
The Post Millennial’s Andy Ngo has documented a growing movement on the Left that merges transgender with Antifa for the term “Trantifa.” Based on the idea that transgender people face constant threats, they arm themselves.
The Human Rights Campaign isn’t responsible for the heinous murders committed by Robert Westman or Audrey Hale, but its rhetoric arguably helps create the atmosphere in which such hatred grows.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
