MAGA social-media personality Benny Johnson blamed transgenderism; Westman started identifying as female in 2020, when he was 17. (Robin Westman used to be Robert Westman.)
“The trans movement is radicalizing the mentally ill into becoming violent terrorists who target children for murder,” Johnson posted on X. The writer and activist Christopher F. Rufo added that the transgender movement “has done grave damage to millions of Americans, and has unleashed a nihilistic wave of violence on our society. Enough.”
The anti-gun activists blamed guns. “Back to school should never mean back to school shootings,” Moms Demand Action tweeted shortly after the shooting. “This is the devastating reality of America’s gun violence crisis.”
Conservatives, hoping perhaps to deflect the blame from guns, blamed mental illness. “This is the profile, all too common in such cases, of a young person who is mentally ill,” The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board noted.
Meanwhile, former Democratic lawmaker Dave Aronberg, in Florida, singled out Westman’s Jew hatred. “Antisemitism starts with Jews, but never ends with Jews,” Aronberg tweeted.
And the antisemites blamed the Jews. “Westman is a racial jew, that’s how you have ‘Satanic jewish’ people,” the X account Six Million posted. “Ffs.”
All that finger-pointing obscures a deeper point: Westman seems to have been driven by an all-consuming, destructive force, a nihilism—the conviction that life is meaningless; that words like truth, justice and God ar
e empty slogans; that everything must be razed. Peter Savodnik | “Robin Westman and the Rise of American Nihilism” | August 28, 2025
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I think this is a penetrating analysis and one the Church needs to take seriously and intentionally combat with the means of grace. Nihilism permeates so much of our media, both social and otherwise, and few people are even aware of the influence. I don’t think media is to blame, but it is an echo chamber for the hearts and souls of far too many. I think the rash of suicides by young people should be laid at the feet of nihilism more than TikTok. It’s just that none of them can express themselves as eloquently as Sartre before they take the exit.