The Annunciation shooting reveals the savagery of identity politics

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. It suggests anti-Zionism might be a death cult masquerading as social justice. All I’m saying is that a cultural crusade that compels the young to obsess over the self at the expense of forging social bonds, and to loathe the Jewish nation above all other nations, is liable to birth a politics that is at the bare minimum hateful, and at its worst, murderous.

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.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy