Is Motiveless Political Violence Really on the Rise?

‘The message is there is no message.” Those were the words the 23-year-old Robin Westman penned in the manifesto he wrote ahead of the massacre he carried out last August at the Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, where he killed two young children and wounded 18 others.

Westman insisted that the violence he committed was “not a church or religion attack,” even though he’d shot up a church during services. His dubious assertion was a great help to the Washington Post’s Peter Whoriskey’s investigative report on the alleged rise of motiveless political violence defined by “the absence of a recognizable agenda.”