If you read the NYT newsletter in the morning hoping to understand the news, good luck knowing anything notable about what happened in Minneapolis yesterday.
If Minnesota is a state trans refuge, Minneapolis must be the capital. In the wake of the mass shooting yesterday at Annunciation Church by trans madperson Robin Westman, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey instructed us: “Anybody who is using this as an opportunity to villainize our trans community or any other community out there has lost their sense of common humanity.” He means to shut down those of us who have do not concur in the wisdom of the party’s program.
Frey also disparaged “thoughts and prayers” for the two children and others injured in Westman’s murder spree. He apparently wants to tout gun control. “Gun violence” is the question and “gun control” is the answer. Amen.
Westman’s reported video/manifestos include anti-Semitic and anti-Christian phrases and symbols as well as calls to kill President Donald Trump and destroy the state of Israel. He wrote of murdering “filthy Zionist Jews,” that “six million wasn’t enough,” and “free Palestine,” the New York Post reported yesterday. “If I will carry out a racially motivated attack, it would be most likely against filthy Zionist jews,” Westman reportedly wrote in a journal that the paper said was “full of antisemitic slurs.”
It sounds like a slightly expanded edition of the whole party package. Miranda Devine gets inside Minnesota’s political culture in her New York Post column “Deadly Minnesota school shooting reflects tragic cost of a disordered society — including Dem leaders who lost the plot.”
The lineup of public officials at the press briefing after the shooting yesterday is a joke: Walz, Frey, O’Hara, Minneapolis public safety commissioner Toddrick Barnette, and Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar. They make for an unintentionally satirical portrait of political clowns. It is the visual counterpart to Devine’s column.
We have followed the exodus of sworn officers from the Minneapolis Police Department, the demoralization of the department under Chief Brian O’Hara, the lawlessly lax law enforcement of Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, the promotion of Minneapolis and Minnesota as “sanctuary” jurisdictions for illegal immigration, and so on. Minneapolis is down some 350 officers of the more than 900 that populated the ranks at the time of the death of Saint George Floyd. Five years later, Minneapolis’s police department more than 150 officers short of the legal minimum.
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The Star Tribune.
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Media coverage of the latest tragedy hits another new low.
It’s the most glaring example I can remember of a news organization apologizing for its own reporting.
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Listened to @NPR for the first time in months. Lengthy reporting on the shooting today, completely avoided saying anything about the shooter and the shooter’s ideology, except for admonishing Sen. Klobuhar for referring to the shoot as a “he” when “their gender identity is not known at this time.” NPR has totally become a parody of itself.
The details are still emerging about the person who shot up a church full of Catholic school children in Minneapolis on Wednesday at a celebratory Mass for the first week of the new school year. But the signs so far point to a case of a young person, as in many other such tragedies, beset by a murderous madness.
Law enforcement identified the suspect as 23-year-old Robin Westman of suburban Minneapolis. News reports say the transgender woman who had changed her name from Robert had attended the same Annunciation Catholic School that the children attended, and that Westman’s mother had been an employee there.
The Minnesota shooter wrote in his manifesto:
“I am sick of my hair, I want to chop it off. I only keep it because it is pretty much my last shred of being trans. I am tired of being trans, I wish I never brain-washed myself.”
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Ann Althouse summary.