Deeper Analysis of the Aug. 27, 2025 Shooting
Deeper Analysis of the Aug. 27, 2025 Shooting From Lone Gunmen to Manchurian Candidates Rev. Kat Carroll Even as I was publishing yesterday’s article on the church shooting, new revelations about the suspect, Robin/Robert Westman, were already breaking. Within hours, details surfaced about the parents, their professions, oddities in court records, and the rapid removal of key documents from the public record. Today, even more information has come forward, and the picture grows stranger. This follow-up is not meant to sensationalize tragedy but to examine the patterns that keep repeating: the uncanny overlaps in the lives of shooters, the vanishing evidence, the carefully managed media narratives, and the echoes of government programs that were supposedly dismantled decades ago. Here, I will: Review the anomalies in the Aug 27th Minneapolis shooting and the people involved. Place these details alongside similar cases, from school shooters who claimed memory gaps to high-profile assassination attempts. Trace the history of mind control programs — from CIA projects like MK Ultra and Project Orion to the cultural creation of the “Manchurian Candidate,” a figure programmed to kill and then forget. The question that haunts us is simple: Are we witnessing lone deranged actors, or are these events the continuation of a playbook designed long ago — one that still uses unwitting individuals as weapons? Anomalies in the August 27th Shooting - What We've Learned The suspect, identified as Robin (formerly Robert) Westman, didn’t fit neatly into any box. The official line was simple enough: a disturbed 23-year-old trans individual with a manifesto, weapons inscribed with hateful phrases, and a history of inner turmoil. But as more details surfaced, the questions multiplied. The Parents and Their Professions Robin’s mother, Mary Grace Westman, had once worked as a parish secretary at Annunciation Catholic School, the very location of the massacre. The father, James S. Westman, has spent nearly three decades at ESRI, a geospatial mapping company with deep contracts in defense and intelligence. At the same time, the fathers of the two slain children hold prominent positions in industries with heavy government overlap: Michael Moyski, a vice president at global logistics giant C.H. Robinson, and Jesse Merkel, an engineer at Xcel Energy, a major grid and government contractor. What are the odds that the shooter’s father and the fathers of both victims all hold careers tied, directly or indirectly, to government, defense, or intelligence networks? Individually it might be coincidence. Together, it forms a pattern that is hard to ignore. The Court Record That Vanished Adding to the unease, court records from Minnesota showed that in 2012, Mary Grace and James Westman filed for divorce. The document was labeled “dissolution without children” despite the fact that Robin would have been only ten years old at the time. In a matter of hours, that record vanished from the state’s database, leaving behind nothing but a handful of speeding tickets. If Robin was truly their biological child, why would the courts list the marriage as childless? And why would such a record suddenly be scrubbed from public access? The Professional-Grade Manifesto Videos Hours before the attack, Robin scheduled YouTube videos to go live. In them, he displayed his manifesto in a carefully lit, overhead shot that video professionals described as unusually sophisticated, not something an untrained amateur would casually pull off. The journals themselves showed disturbing self-portraits: Robin staring into a mirror, seeing a demon staring back. On his weapons, phrases were scrawled — “Kill Donald Trump”, “6 million wasn’t enough”, and bizarrely, “Sponsored by BlackRock.” All to convenient, and all to unlikely to have been carried out by Robin alone. The Oddities of Motive If Robin harbored hatred toward Jews and praised Hitler, why target a Catholic school? If his rage was personal, tied to his mother’s former workplace, why lace the weapons with political slogans? Why prepare professional-style videos timed to release as the bullets began flying? Each piece on its own could be dismissed as the chaos of a broken mind. But together, they begin to look less like chaos and more like choreography, the familiar choreography of a programmed patsy, a Manchurian Candidate cast into a modern tragedy. In 2020, when Robin was about 17, a petition was filed, by his mother, to change his legal name from Robert to Robin, reflecting a gender transition. That same mother now refuses to speak to the press, leaving unanswered questions about timing, motivation, and family dynamics. What might otherwise be a personal detail instead sits uneasily alongside the vanishing court records and professional-style manifesto videos, another fragment in a story that doesn’t quite add up. And media has a hair trigger when it

Deeper Analysis of the Aug. 27, 2025 Shooting From Lone Gunmen to Manchurian Candidates
Rev. Kat CarrollEven as I was publishing yesterday’s article on the church shooting, new revelations about the suspect, Robin/Robert Westman, were already breaking. Within hours, details surfaced about the parents, their professions, oddities in court records, and the rapid removal of key documents from the public record. Today, even more information has come forward, and the picture grows stranger.
This follow-up is not meant to sensationalize tragedy but to examine the patterns that keep repeating: the uncanny overlaps in the lives of shooters, the vanishing evidence, the carefully managed media narratives, and the echoes of government programs that were supposedly dismantled decades ago.
Here, I will:
-
Review the anomalies in the Aug 27th Minneapolis shooting and the people involved.
-
Place these details alongside similar cases, from school shooters who claimed memory gaps to high-profile assassination attempts.
-
Trace the history of mind control programs — from CIA projects like MK Ultra and Project Orion to the cultural creation of the “Manchurian Candidate,” a figure programmed to kill and then forget.
The question that haunts us is simple: Are we witnessing lone deranged actors, or are these events the continuation of a playbook designed long ago — one that still uses unwitting individuals as weapons?
Anomalies in the August 27th Shooting - What We've Learned
The suspect, identified as Robin (formerly Robert) Westman, didn’t fit neatly into any box. The official line was simple enough: a disturbed 23-year-old trans individual with a manifesto, weapons inscribed with hateful phrases, and a history of inner turmoil. But as more details surfaced, the questions multiplied. The Parents and Their Professions Robin’s mother, Mary Grace Westman, had once worked as a parish secretary at Annunciation Catholic School, the very location of the massacre. The father, James S. Westman, has spent nearly three decades at ESRI, a geospatial mapping company with deep contracts in defense and intelligence. At the same time, the fathers of the two slain children hold prominent positions in industries with heavy government overlap: Michael Moyski, a vice president at global logistics giant C.H. Robinson, and Jesse Merkel, an engineer at Xcel Energy, a major grid and government contractor.

The Butler, PA Trump Assassination Attempt
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Past Assassinations and Attempts
None of this is new. Sirhan Sirhan, accused of killing Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, famously said he could not remember firing his gun. Hypnotists who examined him later testified he was “highly suggestible,” a perfect subject for post-hypnotic programming. Mark David Chapman, who shot John Lennon, fixated obsessively on The Catcher in the Rye as if it were his “trigger text.” John Hinckley Jr., who shot Ronald Reagan, was under psychiatric care, obsessed with actress Jodie Foster, and has long been suspected of being manipulated. The common thread? A dissociated actor, triggered beyond their will, unable to explain their actions — raising the question of who was really in control.School Shooters Who “Don’t Remember What or Why”
In May 1998, Kip Kinkel opened fire at Thurston High School in Oregon after killing his parents, leaving 2 dead and 25 wounded. Afterward, he reportedly told investigators: “I don’t remember it happening. I loved my parents… I had to kill them. I had no choice.” Others echo the same haze:- Seung-Hui Cho (Virginia Tech, 2007) left a fragmented manifesto and was described by classmates as robotic, dissociated, “not present.”
- Multiple school shooters over the decades have displayed the same blankness, the same gaps in memory, the same eerie post-event calm.
The Script
Each time, the story reads the same:- Pre-conditioning — psychiatric care, SSRIs, hypnosis, trauma.
- Trigger — breakup, words, sounds, images.
- Mission — carried out with precision.
- Termination — suicide, police shot, or programmed amnesia.
- Cover Story — manifesto or online trail suddenly appears.
- Disappearance — trial endlessly delayed, or memory-holed entirely.
The History of Mind Control
From Operation Paperclip, which brought Nazi scientists into the U.S., to CIA projects like BLUEBIRD, ARTICHOKE, and MK Ultra, the goal was simple: to break minds, implant triggers, and create programmable individuals. The experiments — LSD, electroshock, sensory deprivation, hypnosis — were all designed to shatter identity and rebuild it around a trigger. By the 1970s, the program was “shut down,” but survivors and whistleblowers insist it simply changed names. The term Manchurian Candidate entered the culture to describe those under hidden external control. From The Bourne Identity to Marvel’s Winter Soldier, the archetype of the sleeper agent activated by a word or symbol keeps resurfacing. And in real life, the parallels grow harder to dismiss.The Spell of Forgetting
Sometimes the most telling part of these events is not what we are shown, but what is left out. Take the 1998 Thurston High School shooting in Oregon. During Kip Kinkel’s rampage, two teenage brothers, Jake and Josh Ryker, recognized a crucial detail: when Kip stopped to reload, he would be vulnerable. Drawing on the firearm safety training their father, Navy veteran Rob Ryker, had instilled in them, the boys acted. Despite being wounded himself, Jake lunged forward, tackled Kinkel, and wrestled the rifle away while Josh helped subdue him. Jake then slammed Kinkel’s head against the floor until he could no longer continue the assault and other school mates jumped in. Their courage saved countless lives. This was heroism not born of fear, but of knowledge. They weren’t armed, but they knew the rhythm of a weapon well enough to act at the right moment, literally taking aim at the issue in front of them. The boys were treated like heroes, the family flown to meet a country music star. But the deeper truth — that their knowledge of weapons stopped the killing — was deliberately left out of the crosshairs of the national narrative. Guns are not the problem, untrained, unqualified and unvetted people are, and those who would give or sell them weapons. During interviews afterward, Rob appeared wearing his NRA baseball cap. The footage was aired, but the cap was blurred, as though the three letters were too dangerous to be seen. The boys were treated like heroes, yes — flown to meet a country music star. But the deeper truth — that their knowledge of weapons stopped the killing — was edited out of the broader narrative. This is how the spell of forgetting works: inconvenient truths are buried, and the script proceeds unchanged. The patsy’s act remains, the fear remains — but the human courage that interrupted the plan is erased. Few videos remain about these brothers who were trained in the safe and proper use of handling weapons. Here is one I could find. Kip Kinkel was sentenced to a total of 111 years in prison without the possibility of parole. Will anyone ever know the truth of what lead up to that fateful day? Archived short clip of the Kip Kinkel shootingClosing Reflection
We are told to see these shooters as lone actors with broken minds, lashing out. But the patterns suggest something else: the continuation of a decades-old program, perfected in the shadows and projected into the present. The legal structures to prevent tragedies already exists in various forms in every state. Background checks, permit systems, and red flags should have been enough. The real issue is accountability. When safeguards are ignored, when systems are bypassed, when sellers provide weapons without due diligence... Who is accountable besides the shooter? We don't need new laws and limitations to our 2nd amendment rights. We need gun dealers to be held accountable for failing to follow through with safety checks designed to protect citizens.


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