Leftists are the progressive people. They have moved on from hateful Biblical morality and old-fashioned notions of sin and redemption. They believe in liberation, more and more of it. People are basically good, just insufficiently liberated. Fallen creatures may need weapons to defend themselves from those who would do evil, but for leftists there isn’t evil in hearts, only in guns and religion.

Conservatives, by contrast, “cling” to those things. Pathetically so. Back in April, 2008, then-senator Barack Obama told a group of fellow progressives in San Francisco that the people of Pennsylvania were desperate to hold on to their Bibles and their rifles. Those are the only things people like that have, he implied.

The truth is somewhat more complicated.

In late August 2025, a man named Robert Westman went on a rampage in Minneapolis at a Catholic Mass heavily attended by children. He killed at least three people, not including himself, and wounded at least a dozen more. He had scrawled bigoted messages against Christians and conservatives on his weapons before using them to murder in cold blood. Why would Robert Westman do such a thing? The media gave out Westman’s legal name, Robin Westman, and took to referring to him as a “she.” In today’s Pravda America, the propaganda is the answer to the question. Robert Westman claimed to be transgender. As journalist Andy Ngo reports, his parents supported his so-called transition. Westman’s transgenderism was the proximate cause of his cowardly decision to hurt kids and unleash mayhem in Minnesota. Robert Westman wasn’t “Robin.” He was a trans terrorist, neither the first nor the last in our dying republic.

Westman hated Catholicism because the Church has not, to his mind, sufficiently embraced transgender ideology. For Westman, and for many other progressives in Minnesota (the governor of which, Planned Parenthood puppet Tim Walz, declared Minnesota a “trans refuge state” in 2023), the trouble is that liberation from corporeal reality never materializes. This stubborn refusal of the physical world to yield to the diseased imaginations of progressives is blamed on the Catholic Church and other Christian groups. Andy Ngo reminds his readers that Audrey Hale (another “transgender” lunatic) shot up a Presbyterian school in Nashville in 2023. The media called her “Aiden” and pretended then, too, that being sick of mind had nothing to do with being a mass murderer.

Robert Westman, Audrey Hale — these delusional people need religion more than anyone. So do progressives. They cling to it, one might say. Christianity is a convenient scapegoat for the “transgender” crowd and their cheerleaders in the media. They need to be able to say that the failure of “trans people” to “transition” is not the fault of physical reality, or of a twisted ideology, but of the Christians. Without the Christians, transgenders and their supporters would be forced to confront the truth. And so, they cling to religion, using it as a crutch, as a blindfold.

And then the usual talk about guns starts as soon as yet another progressive goes on a rampage. Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey, suddenly in the national spotlight after Robert Westman’s hate crime in his city, used the opportunity to call for yet more restrictions on guns (see here). Mayor Frey also spoke in solidarity with the “trans” community, despite the fact that a member of that community had just committed one of the worst hate crimes in recent memory. Frey was hardly the only progressive to take up these rhetorical lines. Westman’s actions were definitely *not* about his transgender madness, the progressives cried. The blame for Westman’s state of mind is with the Christians, and the blame for what Westman did must fall squarely on the things he used to do them with. Mayor Frey and other leftists cling to guns almost as badly as Westman clung to religion. They need the conversation to be about guns, about Christians’ hate, about how awful conservatives are.

Leftists cling to guns and religion. As Obama might have said, to a sea of nodding heads in any progressive stronghold: “Guns and religion — that’s all those poor folks have.”