Better in their words…

School shooting spurs hot takes but early evidence piles up; CDC chief canned in 30 days; Kennedy kills jab EUA; Trump targets Soros; Gates dumps Arabella; DC juries balk at crime surge cases.

Source: HORMONAL ☙ Thursday, August 27, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS

WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY

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Unless you are on a radical news diet, you’ve heard about the latest multiple shooting yesterday, as social media exploded with the 23-year-old’s manifesto and his extremely disturbing selfie videos (not recommended). But, and I wish I were making this up, as of this morning the New York Times remained baffled about the now-deceased shooter’s motive: “Motive Sought in Minneapolis School Shooting That Killed 2 Children and Injured 17.”

The Times isn’t the only one stubbornly perplexed: “We don’t have a motive at this time,” Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said on Wednesday afternoon. I suppose it’s possible Chief O’Hara has been too busy with the rush of current events to check social media.

But either way, the normal playbook won’t work, this time.

Within hours, social media platforms scrubbed Robin (formerly Robert) Westman’s accounts and deleted the trove of materials he’d uploaded right before his murderous shooting spree. But independent investigators were faster than the platforms, this time. So the usual media/blue-official technique of concealing evidence of all the usual factors is useless for narrative control, this time, even though —as the Times story shows— they are still trying to run with bafflement, for now.

Assuming that most readers have already had a chance to review Westman’s public information for themselves, I’ll simply summarize some of what is known from his own verbose words. Westman believed he’d been “born in the wrong body,” that President Trump and Republicans “hate trans people,” his life was useless and vain, he fantasized about torturing animals, he was obsessed with other mass shooters, he was suicidal, and was convinced that violence would help balance the cosmic scales of justice.

“I was corrupted by this world,” Westman accurately wrote in a letter addressed to his parents. “And I have learned to hate what life is.” In his journal, Westman further explained, “I don’t want to [do] it to spread a message. I do it to please myself. I do it because I am sick.”

According to a story in the New York Post (which did not struggle to find motive like the Times), Westman “officially” changed his gender in 2017 while he was still in high school at Annunciation Catholic School, where he returned to perform his plan. His mother worked at the school. Photos and social media comments suggest both Westman’s parents cooperated with or encouraged his “transition.”

The FBI is treating the mass shooting as an act of domestic terrorism carried out by a trans gunman and a hate crime targeting Catholics, FBI Director Kash Patel said yesterday.

As usual, we’re mired in the difficult hot takes moment, where the fog of mass speculation makes it fruitless to draw any conclusions despite temptations to harden positions. We’ll wait and see how this shakes out, but one thing is clear— this time the story has escaped the narrative guardrails and some real reckoning looms.

🔥 I attended high school between 1981-1985. We didn’t have anytransgender students. It wasn’t a “thing.” Any hint of effeminate male behavior was mercilessly mocked and socially extinguished before it could spread or get worse. Experts hadn’t yet conceived their dangerous ideas about kids gobbling handfuls of gender-bending hormone pills to magically opt out of their sexual “assignment.”

It was a different time back then. In the 1980’s, the biggest problem most families faced was sourcing black-market phone-cord extensions. Like others, we used “unapproved” equipment that voided the warranty. My Gainesville, Florida family transformed our wall-mounted model into a “portable phone” using a massive wire that could extend the corded range from the kitchen counter to somewhere in the outskirts of St. Louis.

Life got a significant upgrade in the mid-80s when a brilliant NASA scientist invented the automatic cord winder, which was installed midway down the line, and which looked and sounded almost exactly like a 20-pound commercial fishing reel under load. That allowed us to remove the paint bucket that normally held the excess wiring when not in use, and reduced the risks of snags, snarls, and Golden Retriever wire-chewing. We happily traded that convenience for an acceptable risk of equally automatic strangulation (but only, of course, if you were careless and didn’t get out of the way).

Then, as now, post-pubescent teenagers faced a difficult time navigating the flood of unfamiliar normal hormones that cause their erratic emotions to wildly seesaw. In the 80’s, we joked, “Dad, I hate you, please take me to the mall.” (Portlanders: “malls” were large, indoor shopping and unaccompanied juvenile babysitting centers.)

It seems unimaginable how modern experts believe adding more hormonesto that already unmanageable stew produces any beneficial effect. Never mind that they’re also constantly experimenting with dosages and jacking hormone levels whenever body hair crops up. But it’s not unimaginable that pushing kids who are already struggling with their normal emotional states into artificially intensified and unnatural hormonal levels would cause some of them to experience truly unmanageable feelings.

Take that infernal landscape, then air-drop those same over-hormoned, struggling kids right into the toxic high-school environment, bursting with non-trans kids who are also trying to master emotional control, and are seething with passive-aggressive rage about being forced to be nice to the trans kids, when all their biological instincts are to enforce social norms by bullying the effeminate kids into conforming.

Behold: the progressive notion of “progress.” Pure chaos, misery, and despair, with the added insult of adults unhelpfully assuring these poor, deluded children that they are “normal”— when that’s the last thing they feel like. No wonder some of them decide life isn’t much fun, if this is “normal.”

Robin/Robert Westman’s parents and teachers promised him that everything would get better once he transitioned into gender-adjusted adulthood. But they lied. It didn’t get better. It doesn’t surprise me at all that Westman returned to the original source of his pain —his school— even though he’d graduated seven years before in 2017.

Westman was the perpetrator. He’s dead now. And a whole lot of completely innocent folks are also dead or injured. But Westman wasn’t the only one responsible for what happened. I pray for the families of the victims and the injured, and I pray the FBI will pursue everyone at fault, to the ends of the Earth.

As noted, I will wait out the hot takes phase to draw any conclusions. But something definitely has to give.

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In much more optimistic news, the Washington Post ran a delicious, Apprentice-style story yesterday headlined, “White House fires CDC director who says RFK Jr. is ‘weaponizing public health.’” Progress!

Nobody in MAHA much liked former CDC Director Susan Monarez, who never met a mask or vaccine she didn’t love. Though the facts of her appointment a month ago remain mysterious, the most likely theory is that, since Secretary Kennedy made various promises to Senator Bill Cassidy (R-La.) to support his confirmation, Cassidy successfully demanded Monarez after Kennedy’s first choice for CDC Director fell through.

Either way, yesterday the White House finally fired her. Media reports suggested she was protecting a cascade of cartoon-like career CDC employees, such as “Monkeypox Czar” Demetre Daskalakis, pictured above. Daskalakis, who employees praised as being a “hands-on” manager, also resigned yesterday, presumably preempting his own termination. You can’t fire me, I quit!

Of course, Demetre also posted a whiny and self-pitying “resignation tweet”that both managed to include the phrase “pregnant persons” and also ended, predictably, with his pronouns. Case closed.

Unlike Demetre, but like mortgage fraud and Fed Governor Lisa Cook, CDC Director Monarez is currently refusing to quit. According to the article, her attorney insisted, “Monarez never intended to resign, never told anyone that she intended to do so, and legally remains in the position because President Donald Trump did not personally fire her.”

She’s probably waiting to see it on Truth Social, when her firing will become official. Tick, tock.

We’ve also learned that Monarez —not Kennedy— was behind the delay in cancelling the covid shots. “Monarez was pressed for days by Kennedy, administration lawyers and other officials,” WaPo reported, “over whether she would support rescinding certain approvals for coronavirus vaccines.” And there it was.

The other covid officials Monarez was protecting are also making like trees and leaving. Besides Mr. Monkeypox, the CDC’s chief medical officer, Debra Houry, has also resigned, as has Dan Jernigan, a “longtime official who helped oversee the CDC’s infectious-disease response.” Voluntary self-deportation.

💉 Kennedy wasted no time. The Infectious Disease Special Edition ran the story headlined, “FDA Rescinds EUA but Approves Updated 2025-2026 COVID Vaccines.” With Monarez out, Kennedy announced on X that he’d ended the still-onoing “Emergency Use Authorization” for the covid vaccines, which changes everything.

Note that, even though covid vaccines got formal approval, pharma and medical fetishists are freaking out. First example (not entirely accurate in his facts, but still):

Lefty lunatic and jab lover Keith Olbermann:

I could go on and on. There are two very good reasons for all the progressive hysteria. First, even the new, non-EUA shot approvals greatly reduce who the FDA allows the vaccines may be prescribed for, and excludes healthy kids and adults under 65. But even more important, that means the “approved” shots will never be on the childhood vaccine schedule.

It’s a legal death notice. The two ways the covid shotmakers can get liability immunity is either through EUA —now ended— or as childhood vaccines under the 1986 Act. But since the jabs aren’t indicated for kids, that avenue of protection is now also walled off.

Pfizer and Moderna know better than anybody how dangerous their shots are. They are now completely exposed to lawsuits for vaccine injuries. Injuries to kids always bring the biggest jury awards. And their repeat adult customers are already loaded to the eye-teeth with spike. How hard will they market their shots?

Pass the popcorn. 🍿

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Let’s connect some dots! First, yesterday President Trump randomly and quite colorfully posted about how the Soros family should be investigated for mob-like racketeering:

Fair enough. No arguments here. But … why now?

Two days ago, seemingly unrelated, the New York Times “quietly” broke this fascinating story:

The headlined but unnamed “firm” is mega-NGO Arabella Advisors, which the Times admitted “manages several ‘dark money’ funds that support Democrats and the progressive movement.” By “several dark money funds,” it meant hundreds.

But what it didn’t admit was who runs Arabella: The Soros family.

General Flynn has been showing this chart to anyone who’d look since at least 2020, when I first saw him explain it in a private meeting.

Now let’s add the USAID connection. Over the last decade, Arabella Advisors and its woketopus of blandly named subsidiaries minted a cottage industry for USAID careerists, hiring them in the septic-tanker loads. And Arabella’s biggest donors, including the aforementioned Gates Foundation, were also —not coincidentally— some of the nation’s largest USAID grant recipients.

Now we can see the entire, obscene length and girth of the woke gravy train. Our own money flowed from USAID to the Gates Foundation and other big platforms, then to Arabella, and then to leftwing NGOs, Democrat politicians, and progressive activist groups. It was a kind of perpetual-motion donor machine where accountability disappeared in a puff of sulphuric smoke at each handoff.

You must admit it was a devilishly brilliant scheme, tricking us into paying for our own destruction.

With the USAID tap now cut off, Gates would’ve had to start coughing up his own foundation money to fund Arabella, instead of using our money. And he’s probably witting to the fact that DOGE investigators are carefully tracing where all the USAID money went. So it’s a very good time to jump off the Arabella bandwagon. (Maybe too late.)

By way of explanation, the Gates Foundation excreted a buzzwordy statement insisting that its move to cut ties with Arabella was only “a business decision that reflects our regular strategic assessments of partnerships and operating models.” Nothing to see here.

Whilst the Times pitched Gates’ move as a “business decision,” Trump’s RICO drumbeat against Soros hints that this whole philanthropy-politics pipeline is about to be treated as what it is: a criminal enterprise. Trump’s post about Soros and RICO and the Gates–Arabella unraveling link up at the same networked-funding “philanthropic” ecosystem.

🧩 However it happens, if that USAID → Mega-platforms (like Gates) → Arabella → progressive activist pipeline is finally switched off, the political effect would be massive. Arabella’s fiscal-sponsor funds have quietly underwritten much of the left’s operational backbone: voter registration groups, climate activism, racial justice nonprofits, education campaigns, and ballot initiatives. Cutting the pipeline means many of those groups would lose dependable, pooled, and largely anonymous funding streams. They’ll struggle to sustain staff, payroll, and field operations at the current scale.

For the last decade, Arabella’s network has functioned as the Democrats’ equivalent of a shadowy political machine — like a Koch-style network on steroids. Without it, Democrats face a major asymmetry: Republicans still have legitimate small-donor engines like WinRed, while Democrats’ pooled dark money machine is now hobbled.

Groups that Arabella underwrote (e.g. those doing “civic engagement” that in practice boosted Democratic turnout) must suddenly shrink. That could hamper Democrats’ ground game in 2026 and 2028, especially in swing states where margin-of-error operations matter most.

Best of all, they can’t cry about it without giving away the game.

In short, plugging up the Arabella dark-money sewer pipeline means a sudden, catastrophic disengagement of the Democrat Party’s secret financing/activism septic infrastructure. Gross! Republicans keep their grassroots donations; Democrats lose their megadonor-fueled machinery.

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Finally, they always say prosecutors can indict a ham sandwich. Apparently not in DC, though. Yesterday, the Washington Post ran a triumphal story headlined, D.C. judges and grand jurors push back on Trump policing surge. DC hero Ham Sandwich Guy will probably skate. (He’s still fired, though.)

According to the story, Trump’s law-enforcement surge in DC “is meeting #resistance in the city’s federal courthouse, where magistrate judges have admonished prosecutors, and grand jurors have repeatedly refused to issue indictments.”

The problem seems to be the local judges and juries. The Grand Jury failed to indict former DOJ employee and hoagie-chucker Sean Charles Dunn on a felony count of assaulting, resisting or impeding a federal officer. This one actually troubles me least. I can see how a sane grand jury could reasonably refuse to indict someone on charges that could bring five years in federal prison— for sandwich tossing.

Another grand jury this month refused three times to indict a D.C. woman accused of “assaulting an FBI agent” (she hawked a loogie on him). Again, it’s not like they’re letting carjackers or drug dealers off the hook. You can fairly argue that, in other towns, indictments would have issued promptly. But these politicized cases face heavy weather in 90%-Democrat DC.

More concerning is what the article reported about the judges, who seem to be on a crime spree of their own, dismissing dockets of cases for “illegal searches” and lack of due process. But let’s not jump to conclusions. Again, I could easily see that federal officials —like National Guardsmen or FBI desk jockeys— might be unfamiliar with all the constitutional rules related to arrests. It’s not as easy to make a “good” arrest as you might think.

But they’ll get the hang of it.

Have a terrific Thursday! Wander back here tomorrow morning, when C&C shall return with even more essential news and commentary.

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