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Aug. 28, 2025 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
01:06:44
Glenn Takes Your Questions on the Minneapolis School Shooting

Glenn discusses the Minneapolis Catholic school shooting and the disturbing and revealing online reactions to the tragedy.  -------------------------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update:  Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook  

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Mass Shootings and Political Agendas 00:15:00
Good evening, everybody.
It is August 27th, the Wednesday.
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
As you can see, we are not in our studio.
We're in an undisclosed location.
So the show may be just slightly less formal, but as substantive and provocative and engaging as always, I would say even more so.
And we are going to devote the show tonight to getting to more questions that have come from our locals members over the week, continue it to be some really interesting ones raising all sorts of topics.
But we do have a question that we want to begin with that deals with what I think is the at least most discussed and talked about story of the day, if not the most important one, which is the school shooting, that mass shooting that took place in a Catholic church in Minneapolis earlier today, when a former student who attended that school went to the church and opened fire and shot 19 people, two of whom,
young students between eight and 10, were killed.
The other 17 were wounded.
And amazingly, expected all of them are to survive.
So the carnage could have been much worse.
The tragedy is manifest, however, and there is a lot of, as always, political commentary surrounding this mass shooting, attempts to identify the ideology of the shooter in a way that is designed to promote a lot of people's political agenda.
So let's get to the first question.
It is from Zell 5.
And Zell 5, who's a member of our locals community, offers this question, but also a viewpoint that I think really ought to be considered by a lot more people.
They write, quote, the shooting that happened today, what should we believe?
Everyone seems to jump on this so early, injecting partisan garbage that seems hard to believe.
How do you cut through it?
Do we just need to wait?
So I'm really glad that is one of the questions that we got today, because this is a point I've been arguing for so long.
So let me just try and give you as many facts as I possibly can, facts that seem to be confirmed by law enforcement rather than just circulating on the internet.
So the suspected killer is somebody named Robin, Robin Westman, who is 23 years old.
The killer after there, you see a picture of the shooter on the screen, the suspected shooter.
And after they shot 19 people inside this church, killing two young children, they then committed suicide with a weapon.
The person birth name is Robert Wetson and around 16 or 17 years old.
He decided that he identified as a woman, went to court, changed the legal name from Robert to Robin and began identifying as a trans woman.
So that obviously is going to provoke a lot of commentary and a lot of it.
And there's been a lot of commentary provoked around that.
We will definitely get to that.
The suspected killer also left a very lengthy manifesto, a written manifesto, which they filmed and uploaded on a video to YouTube, along with showing a huge arsenal of guns, including rifles and pistols and some automatic weapons.
I believe various automatic rifles as well.
I don't think they used any of those weapons at the school.
I believe they just use a rifle and a pistol, if I'm not mistaken.
But we'll see about that.
The YouTube was essentially a manifesto, both in written terms, but then they also wrote various slogans on each of these weapons and various parts of the weapons.
And we're going to go over a lot of what they put there because there's an obvious and instantaneous attempt, as there always is, to instantly exploit any of these shootings before the corpses are even removed from the ground.
And I mean that literally.
The effort already begins to inject partisan agenda, partisan ideology, ideological agendas to immediately try and depict the shooter as being representative of whatever faction the person offering this theory most hates, or to claim that they're motivated by or an adherent of whatever ideology the person offering the theory most hates.
It happens in every single case.
Oftentimes, there's an immediate attempt to squeeze some unrelated or perhaps even related agenda out of it instantly.
Liberals almost always insist that whenever there's a mass shooting, it proves the need for a greater gun control without bothering to demonstrate whether the gun control they favor would have actually stopped the person from acquiring these weapons in the first place, but whether they were legally acquired, whether they could have been legally acquired, even with gun control measures, it doesn't matter.
Instantaneously exploiting the emotions surrounding a shooting like this to try and increase support for gun control.
Whereas people on the right often do the opposite.
They typically will argue that more guns would have enabled somebody to neutralize the shooter more rapidly, that perhaps churches and schools need greater security.
We need more police.
So there's that kind of almost automatic and reflexive exploitation.
Again, almost before anything is known.
But there's an even more pernicious attempt to instantly declare that everyone knows the motives of the shooter, that they know the political outlook and perspective of the shooter.
They know their partisan ideology and their ideological beliefs in an attempt to demonize every whatever group the person hates most.
And this is unbelievably ignorant and deceitful and ill-advised for so many reasons.
The first of which is that every single political faction, every single ideological movement produces evil mass shooters.
For every far-leftist mass shooter that you want to show or white supremacist mass shooter that you want to show, you can show people who have murdered in defense of all kinds of causes.
And so even if you can pinpoint the ideology of the shooter on the same day the shooting happened, meaning you can develop a clear, reliable, concise, and specific understanding of the shooter that you never even heard of until four hours ago or five hours ago, but you're so insightful.
Your investigative skills are so profound that you're able to discern exactly what the motive of this person was in going and doing something so intrinsically insane and evil as shooting up a church filled with young school children.
The idea that anyone is able to do that is preposterous on its face.
I mean, the police always say, because they're actual investigators, actual law enforcement officers who want to collect evidence that stands up for public scrutiny and also in court.
We don't know yet what the motive is.
We're collecting clues, but almost nobody on Twitter or social media or in the commentariat are willing to say that.
Everybody insists immediately, no, the killer was motivated by the other party, the opposite party of the one I'm a member of, or this ideology that's not mine, or this religious, these, this religion that is the one I like to most demonize.
It's just so transparent and so blatant what is being done here.
And yet it's so prevalent.
I mean, you could go on to social media and principally the social media platform where the most journalists and political opponents and influencers and the like congregate, which is X, and you could, I could show you probably 40 different theories offered definitively with an authoritative voice, not like, hey, this might be possibly the case, but saying clearly we know that the motive, the killer was motivated by this particular ideology, this particular set of beliefs.
And I'm not talking about random X users.
I'm talking about people with significant platforms, people who are well known.
I could probably show you 40 different theories like that, where every person is purporting to know definitively exactly what the motive of the shooter was.
And by huge coincidence, they all have latched on to whatever ideology or faction or motive most serves their own political worldview to demonize the people with whom they most disagree or whatever ideology or group of people they most hate.
That's always what is done.
And I guess in some cases, if a shooter leaves a particularly clear and coherent manifesto, and we have had those sometimes.
We had Anders Breivik in Norway who made very clear that his motive was hatred for Muslim immigrants who shut up a summer camp in Norway.
We had the church, the Christchurch New Zealand killer who attacked to mosque and mass murdered dozens of Muslims at a mosque and made clear he was doing so because of his view that Islam is a danger.
We had the mass shooter in a Buffalo supermarket or Dylan Roof who made manifest their white supremacist views.
We've had mass shooters who are motivated by hatred of Christianity as happened in the Nashville shooter attack on a Christian school there that we don't have.
I mean, I could go on and on.
As I said, every single political faction produces mass shooters, mass killers, evil, crazy people who use violence indiscriminately against innocents in advance of their belief.
But most of the time, and you might even be able to say all of the time.
I mean, maybe I don't like the phrase all of the time because you can conceive of exceptions, but close to all the time, most of the time, people who go and just randomly shoot at innocent people whom they don't know are above all else driven by mental illness and spiritual decay, not by political ideology or adherence to a political cause.
That often is the pretext for what they're doing.
That may be how they convince themselves that what they're doing is justified.
But far more often than not, the principal Overriding factor is the fact that the person is just mentally ill or spiritually broken, by which I mean just a completely nihilistic person who has given up on life and wants to just inflict suffering on other people because of the suffering that they feel or suffering from delusions.
And this isn't something I invented today in order to say, this is something I've long been saying.
And I just want to make one more point, which is, even though there are sometimes manifestos that are extremely clear that say, I am murdering people in a supermarket that is African American because I hate black people and don't think they belong in the United States, or I believe that white people are the sole proper citizens of the United States and I want to murder and kill inspired by those other mass murderers that I mentioned.
Even then, it may not be the case that that the person's representation of what they're doing is the actual motive because it could be driven by a whole variety of other factors, including mental illness or all kinds of other issues.
To be able to conclude in six hours, even with a crystal clear manifesto, that the person did it for reasons that you're ready to definitively assert are the reasons is so irresponsible.
It's just so intellectually bankrupt.
But in many cases, you don't have a clear manifesto at all.
You have a manifesto like the one here that is filled with all kinds of conflicting messages and ideas and viewpoints and ideologies that make it completely impossible to be able to read and to discern a coherent political ideology to impose on this person ever, let alone on the first day that it happens.
And yet that is exactly what's done.
And it's done by selectively choosing the parts of the message that you believe make the case that you're trying to make that you want to be true and ignoring everything else or mitigating it or dismissing it.
Sometimes people are just nihilistic.
Sometimes they're satanic.
Sometimes they're trolls and they want on purpose to leave message that makes no sense, that leaves everybody confounded.
Not everybody sits on political forums all day online or watches MSNBC or Fox News and has a clear political ideology that's defined by conventional right-left metrics.
That's true of a portion of the population, but not most people.
And I would submit that's not true of most shooters.
And I just want to show you an article that I wrote just to underscore how consistent I've been on this point for so long.
And this is by no means the first time I wrote about this, but this was when I was writing at Substack in 2022.
And it was in the wake of the shooting in that Buffalo supermarket, which I mentioned, where the killer left a very clear, well-written, well-articulated manifesto explicitly stating that he was doing it because he wanted to kill black people, because he didn't believe that anybody other than white people should be in the United States, that those are the only true and legitimate citizens of the United States.
And he cited Anders Beverick and the mass murderer in New Zealand as his inspirations, as his models, because they also attacked non-white people in their country, specifically Muslims.
And the shooter today, by the way, also cited those same two killers, as we'll show you, as inspirations, Anders Bevik and also the New Zealand mosque attacker.
And even in this case, where it seemed clear that the manifesto was so clear, left no doubt that the actions they took combined with the motivations they themselves explained in the manifesto they uploaded online, there was still an attempt to exploit it immediately by saying, for example, and this was the primary action of the commentariat at the time, that somehow Tucker Carlson was the one who bore responsibility for this attack because
Blood On Whose Hands? 00:13:25
according to the prevailing conventional wisdom, The killer cited a theory of the great replacement theory, which, according to this argument, was the one that corresponded to what Tucker Carlson had himself advocated.
And therefore, it was said that he inspired this killer and is responsible for it.
And the blood is on his hands.
And there were so many, there were so many reasons why that was ludicrous.
Beginning with the fact that the replacement, great replacement theory that this person advocated, namely that there is no such thing as a non-white, legitimate non-white citizen is not anything that Tucker Carlson believes or has ever advocated.
The killer left a, I don't remember how long, but it was a very lengthy manifesto citing all of his influences, citing the people that he believed helped shape and form his views and opened his eyes.
And he never once mentioned Tucker Carlson in this long list of people who he said inspired him politically and ideologically and intellectually.
There was no indication that he even knew who Tucker Carlson was, that he ever watched Tucker Carlson's show.
That wasn't who he was reading.
That wasn't who he was following.
And yet it was a horrific attack.
It left 10 people dead, 10 innocent people in a supermarket solely because they were black.
And obviously emotions were very high.
And so there was this instantaneous attempt to use those emotions and try and gin up hatred from Tucker Carlson by saying, oh, look, he's the one who inspired it before anything was known.
And you see that put the headline, the article that I wrote at the time in the wake of all of this, we can go back to the Substack article, the one that I wrote in 2022.
And the headline was the demented and selective game of instantly blaming political opponents for mass shootings.
And the subheadline was, all ideologies spawn psychopaths who kill innocents in its name, yet only some are blamed for their violent adherence by opportunists cravenly exploiting corpses while they still lie on the ground.
And I talked about at the time other mass murderers who seemed motivated by left-wing ideologies, such as the killer in 2017 who went to a softball field where Republican members of Congress gathered each week to play softball and opened fire trying to kill them and shot several of them, including one of the leaders of the GOP House caucus, Steve Scalise, who almost died.
And the social media activity and the various postings of this person left no doubt that he was on the left, that he was a big fan of Bernie Sanders, that he watched Rachel Maddow every night constantly accusing Republicans of being traitors to the country, of being loyal to Russia.
And this was the ideology filling his head.
And he talked about his love of Rachel Maddow and his support for Bernie Sanders.
And at the time, no one blamed Rachel Maddow for inspiring a killer because she went on there and spewed crazy conspiracy theories every night, or Bernie Sanders for espousing an ideology with which this killer happened to agree because that's idiotic.
As I've said many times, you can go and espouse any idea and someone may hear you and go and be violent in the name of what they've heard because you've convinced them it's true and you're not responsible for the violence that they engage in if you haven't instructed them to do so.
You can go and write an article saying abortion is murder and someone may read it and be convinced and go murder an abortion doctor.
You are not responsible because you oppose abortion and made arguments against abortion.
Or you may defend abortion and argue why anti-abortion laws are threatening to women's health and will result in women's deaths.
And someone reads that and goes bomb and bombs a pro-life clinic, as has also happened.
You're not responsible simply because your ideology matched the killers.
We've had mass murderers in the name of environmentalism, in the name of Antifa, in the name of resistance liberalism, as the one I just described, in the name of racism, in the name of anti-black hatred, in the name of anti-Muslim hatred.
We've had killers in the name of anti-Semitism.
It's every cause, every ideology spelts these killers.
So even if you can pinpoint the ideology of the person, what does that prove?
What does it show?
Because I can just point to mass murders and mass shootings equally heinous, carried out explicitly in the name of the cause that you represent or the ideology that you believe in.
But it's so much worse when you're claiming that the shooter was motivated by an ideology that only your imagination and willingness to just selectively grab facts to fabricate a case is the only support you can find for it.
And that was the case today.
So let's look a little bit at the clues left by the suspected killer at this Catholic church.
Now, I just want to give a little bit more background because it is true that as people are pointing out, look, one clue that we know for sure is that this killer went and went and shot up a Catholic church while children at a school inside the Catholic Church were engaged in mass.
It was the first day of school.
It was the time for their mass.
And the killer didn't attack a synagogue.
He didn't attack a mosque.
He attacked the Catholic Church.
And so this theory goes, it stands to reason.
He must hate Christians and must hate Catholics.
But one potentially complicating factor is that, according to the New York Times and other media outlets, this was the school that the suspected killer attended.
So this is not just a case of a killer randomly selecting a Catholic church or a Christian school to go and attack.
It's a case of somebody who went to that school, returning to the school to engage in murder.
We've seen that many times.
People work at a certain place.
They develop a hatred for the place.
They return to that place.
They kill their coworkers.
They kill their other people that they resent.
They just want to attack the institution that they feel wrong them.
We've seen people go to schools and then as an adult or once they're gone or before they graduate go to that school.
So it could have to do with both.
It could be that the person hates Catholicism and Christianity.
There's evidence that that is true.
And at the same time, that they were motivated by the fact that they attended the school and are carrying out some kind of apolitical resentment.
And this is why you don't psychoanalyze people or declare that someone that you never heard of until four hours ago is now someone whose motives you clearly understand in order to derive some political benefit from the corpses that are laying on the ground and the young children who are in the hospital recovering from their wounds.
So let's look at what Robin Westman, their legal name, once they changed their name to a female name to match what they said was their identity.
The kinds of things that they cited as they sometimes they just put names on there.
Sometimes they made clear that they had admiration for people.
So this was part of the images that you can see on the screen in terms of various messages that they left.
So there you see the, let me just see here.
This is Lanza, which is the name of the killer who went and attacked mosques and mass murdered Muslims in the name of anti-Muslim hatred in New Zealand.
And then you see the names of other mass shooters as well, including James Holmes, who in Aurora, Colorado, Adam Lanza, who was the shooter at Sandy Hook, Charles Whitman, who killed people at the University of Texas, and others as well.
So what does it mean if you admire the school shooter at Sandy Hook?
Is that any kind of a ideology that you can identify from that?
And how about the sighting of the person who went and killed Muslims deliberately at two mosques that you attack in New Zealand?
Does that indicate admiration for that person that you hate Muslims?
Because those are among your heroes.
Here are other images that they put.
I'm Columbine.
Israel, Israel must fall from a, you see psycho killer there as well.
And there you see Andrew Brevik, who is the mass murderer in Norway, who explicitly went and engaged in mass murder in the name of keeping non-white people out of Norway and specifically Muslims.
So what does that mean that he put that there?
Is that just an admiration for mass shooters in general?
Is it that he or she, whatever the proper gendering is?
I don't think we should care that much, finds admiration in that person's cause.
These are little bits and pieces of clues.
And to say that you can know for certain what the motive is, I mean, they call themselves psycho killer, psycho killer, almost declaring like, I'm psychotic.
That's what that means.
And psychotic people don't aren't motivated by political ideology.
They're motivated by their psychosis.
All right, let's look at a few other clues that the shooter left in some of these images.
There you see one, these are the magazines, I believe.
I'm not a gun expert, but the magazines of the bullets that were used, were not even used, but that they had laid out on their bed.
One says, where is your God?
Another one says, Israel must fall.
Like a phoenix, we rise from the ashes.
So Israel must fall.
There were other references to anti-Semitic theories.
Does that put the person on the left?
Does it put them on the right?
I don't know if you know this.
A lot of people are saying, oh, if they hate Israel, they must be on the left.
Or if they're anti-Semitic, they must be on the left.
I think there's been some anti-Semitism known to appear on the right as well, historically and currently.
A lot of hostility toward Israel, a lot of hostility toward Jews, a lot of hostility toward Muslims as well.
Let's look at a little bit more of these.
Anybody who claims that they can derive a clear, consistent ideology, here's release the list, which presumably refers to the Epstein list.
That was a major cause, as you know, among the MAGA movement, the American right.
It's now kind of migrated cynically to Democrats who are saying release the list, presumably meaning the Epstein list.
Here's one, kill pedos, meaning kill pedophiles.
Some trolling messages like, well, you're here, a reference to Ted K, which is Ted Kaczynski, who this is, what is this in terms of classic left-wing or classic right-wing ideology?
All right, let's look at more.
Kill Donald Trump, rip and tear.
So the person hates Donald Trump.
Do they hate Donald Trump from the right?
Because they.
He refused to release the Epstein list because he's a pedophile and he says, kill all pedophiles.
Is that his belief?
Does he hate Donald Trump from the left?
Because Donald who knows?
Obviously it's possible he hates Donald Trump from the left, but there's a lot of other indicia that he's not on the left, like this, hail uh Brevek, hail uh Breedon.
So this is not just a neutral mention of the two shooters who went on a rampage, in particular one in Norway, one in New Zealand, in the name of Anti-muslim hatred.
These are the two killers who he specifically hailed heralded, praised.
I've been around for a long time.
I have never heard anybody on the left praise Anders Brevek or the Christchurch uh shooter in New Zealand.
That is not a common view of the left.
Do we have other images?
I think uh, to put up here?
Um, let me just see.
I mean, I think that's more than enough to make the point.
Um, but let's just see uh, if there are others.
Yeah, I think that's that's all the ones we have um, and you know there.
There are other there, there are others as well.
There's the, the essay.
Oh, I think we have some here okay uh well let's, let's include this one in just a second, because this is Alex Berenson, who is obsessed with the evils of drugs, including marijuana, who decided to insist that marijuana was the cause because there were some references to weed.
So he looked at all those different messages that I just cited but decided oh, this was about love of marijuana, even though because one tiny one happened to relate to the cause that he most vocally advocates, and it was across the political spectrum where people did that.
Waco: Right-Wing Anger Symbol 00:11:29
They just picked the little bits and pieces of the slogan.
I guess I should also note that there were other references that are causes almost entirely on the right.
There's references to Waco, which became a right-wing cause celebrity in the 1990s when the Clinton administration under attorney general Janet Reno sent the FBI to torch and ultimately murder the UH followers of David Kresh and the Branch Davidians, killing dozens of children in the name of saving them, and this became a symbol of right-wing anger toward the federal government led by the Clinton administration, a very anti-government sentiment.
That Timothy Mcveigh when, three years later, on the anniversary of Waco, went and allegedly blew up this UH courthouse in Oklahoma City a horrific act of of uh murder that killed, I think, 170 UH people, including large numbers of children.
There was a nursery of children who were who were blown up cited the the anger over the the Waco attack as his motive and that became a cause.
Celebr on the right, not Timothy McVeigh, but Waco.
He also paid homage to someone named Vicki Weaver.
Vicki Weaver was someone who in the 1990s, she was married to Randy Weaver.
And Randy Weaver was a white separatist who believed that white people should live separately.
He insisted he wasn't a white supremacist.
He didn't have hostility toward black people.
He just thought that the races should live apart.
And he bought land in Montana and preached from there about white separatism and lived around white people on his property.
And the FBI couldn't stand it, couldn't stand that there was a white separatist.
The Clinton administration believed that was terrorism.
They sent the FBI there.
The FBI shot and killed his dog and his wife, his wife named Vicki Weaver.
And I believe they shot his son as well.
And this also was a huge cause on the right in this anti-government fervor about the evils of these law enforcement agencies, the standing DEA and the FBI and the ADF and all of these agencies that became a right-wing cause.
No one on the left goes around.
I wish they did because I also thought that the murder of the Weavers on their property, as well as the attack on Waco, were legitimate dangers illustrated by an untrammeled federal government.
But on the left, that is a view that almost nobody has.
That is a view that exclusively people, especially in the 1990s, on the right had.
If you were complaining about Waco and Randy Weaver, 100% you are on the right.
So you have this shooter mentioning Waco, praising Vicki Weaver, and somehow people are going to heralding Andres Brevik and the New Zealand church shooter.
And someone's going to try and tell me that the person here was on the left, like a normal leftist, like a clearly identifiable leftist.
They also had racist phrases like kick or kill the spick or kick the spick.
Not exactly like woke language that you typically find on the modern day left among young trans people.
It's not typically what you hear.
It's certainly not a common left-wing phrase.
And there's so many of those.
But there's also a lot of left-wing ideology that you can find as well, starting with the fact that it's a trans person who attacked a Catholic church.
And you can twist that into whatever you want.
The reality is no one knows.
Nobody knows at this point what motivated this person.
And it may never, we may never know.
It may be that the person is a nihilist, a Satanist, and above all else, someone who is deeply ill.
And yet this did not stop huge numbers of people from instantly proclaiming that by huge coincidence, not only could they divine exactly what the motive is here or the cause was, but by coincidence, everyone who did it, it just so happened that the motive that they identified and the cause that they divined was perfectly suited to advance the political agenda to which they're most devoted.
Here was, and I'm just, I'm singling people out almost randomly.
I could show you all night these kind of examples.
Here's Christopher Rufo earlier today, just hours after the story broke, and he says this, what we should now put to rest the libertarian delusion that transgenderism is a matter of quote personal choice or liver or let live.
It's an ideology that has done grave damage to millions of Americans and has unleashed a nihilistic wave of violence on our society enough.
Is the fact that the person is trans a cause or a factor or a motive in this killing?
I don't know.
It could be.
The person was trans.
The person was also white.
Was his whiteness or her whiteness, whatever, was the person's whiteness a cause of the shooting, like the person's whiteness in Buffalo and Norway and the Dylan Roof attack on the Charleston, South Carolina church and the attack in New Zealand where whiteness clearly was a factor, a belief in whiteness, a belief in white supremacy.
Did that show that white people are now to be regarded as dangerous or that a belief in white identity is quoted an ideology that has done grave damage to millions of Americans?
How do you possibly know enough to psychoanalyze this person within hours that their transgenderism was a primary factor or major factor or a factor at all in their decision to go and shoot up this church?
It's possible for sure, but no, he doesn't remotely know that.
But what he knows is that he views transgenderism as an evil and therefore has a personal motive in seeing it this way.
As I said, everybody who divined a motive quickly, by coincidence, everyone, by coincidence, as we'll show you, it just so happens to comport perfectly with their political ideology.
And also, what does this mean?
It's time to put to rest the libertarian delusion that transgenderism is a matter of live and let live.
It's an ideology that has done grave damage to millions enough.
Does that mean that adults should no longer be permitted to identify as transgender?
Does it mean that 25-year-olds who want to dress as women or change their legal name should be prohibited from doing so?
Does it mean that medical professionals or journalists or ordinary citizens who support transgender rights should be criminalized for doing so?
Because it's a what exactly does Chris Rufo mean when he says enough?
What does that mean?
Enough?
How are we going to do away with what he calls transgenderism on the grounds that it's a major factor, not just in this crime, but others as well?
Like, what are we going to do about it?
Are we going to ban transgenderism in terms of the way people live?
Are we going to ban it as terms of how people identify?
Are we going to ban?
Yeah, my dogs are very worked up about this as well.
They don't like speculative thinking in any way.
They've made that clear on many occasions.
But are they?
So how do we end transgenderism?
Is it a crime to advocate it?
Here's Mike Cernovich, pretty much on the same page.
Society tried compassion and indulged the trans stuff.
It was the esto no fancy au program podium floor.
Here's Mike Cernovich.
I just asked for help from my kids.
Society tried compassion and indulged the trans stuff.
It was a mistake.
No more of it and other unnatural behaviors.
Again, what is we don't know that transgenderism played a role in this at all?
We could speculate.
Again, perhaps it did.
Perhaps it didn't.
Perhaps it played a minor role.
Who knows?
But what does that mean?
No more of it and other unnatural behaviors.
I mean, we're going to ban people from identifying as transgender.
Does it mean we're banning people that advocate it?
What other unnatural behaviors need to be criminalized and banned that adults engage in through their consent?
I've always said the question of what underage kids should be able to do in terms of cross-uh-gender hormones and certainly surgeries or social transition is a legitimate question.
I think when their parents believe it's in the best interest of their kid, when you have medical professionals and therapists who say it's in the best interest of the kid, that definitely complicates what society can and should do.
Although we do override all sorts of things that are in the parents' judgment.
A parent might think that their child is ready to consume alcohol at the age of 15 or 16, that they're mature enough, or that they can drive at 14, or that they can see X-rated films at 16.
It doesn't matter if the parents think that.
It doesn't matter if you have a therapist certifying it.
We still don't allow it as a society.
We impose our judgment between the parent and the child.
So maybe this is a case where you do that.
Or maybe parents have the right to treat gender dysphoria, which is a known pathology in the way that their doctors most strongly advise.
So there's a question there to debate, but when someone's over 18 and is an adult, what are you going to do?
You're going to say if you're born a man, you have to avoid no dresses, no makeup, no growing out your hair and identifying as a woman.
You're going to bar them from doing that.
You're going to force all boys who are biological boys to have crew cuts, short hair, like above the collar, and all biological girls to have long hair and wear makeup.
What does this mean?
Enough.
No more of this.
We're not tolerating anymore.
Here is someone named Bonsi, who's a longtime writer with Red State, sort of a very conventional, never Trump establishment Republican.
And they posted this.
At some point, they quietly deleted it because I think they realized how dumb it was, but it was very indicative.
There was a lot of support for this.
This is what Bonshi said.
Bonshi is a very traditional Republican, very pro-Israel, kind of pro-Trump, really was never Trump, but now is pro-Trump to the extent that he represents the Republican Party movement.
So this is what this person wrote, quote, so the shooter was trans, hated Israel, hated Trump, and hated Israel.
Wow, going to be really hard to spin this into, quote, had no actual ideology.
I don't know why they deleted it.
They didn't give any explanation as to why.
Two Attacks, One Narrative 00:15:31
I don't know Bonshi's gender.
I don't know.
Usually if you delete a tweet, especially once it viralizes to some extent, a lot of people retweet it, support it.
You explain why you deleted it.
Not always.
Sometimes people delete tweets.
I've done it too, where you feel like it hasn't gotten enough attention.
I usually delete tweets if it's being misunderstood.
I don't want to spend all day clarifying what I meant if I didn't express it clearly.
So I don't know why they deleted it.
I could speculate that it is true there were things that said kill Trump and hate Israel, but there were, and the person was trans, but there were all those other things that I went through that make this sarcastic claim, oh, wow, going to be really hard to spin it into, had no actual ideology.
Yes, actually, it is extremely difficult to identify a clear and coherent ideology.
Here is the fanatical Zionist Yal Jacobi, who got attention, I would say, very embarrassing notoriety when in the middle of protests on his campus at the University of Pennsylvania.
That is one of the most privileged things you can be, which is a American Ivy League student.
He was called by Mike Johnson.
He went and stood at the podium and said, I am not safe.
I am not safe.
Nobody had attacked him.
No one had threatened to attack him.
He just got upset that he was hearing criticisms of in protest against his sacred country of Israel.
So that's what he's known for.
So you'll never guess what he decided was the real motive here.
Quote, the Minneapolis church shooter wrote in his journal, quote, I will carry out a racially motivated attack.
I would be most likely, I would be most likely against filthy Zionist Jews, in quote, free Palestine.
First, they came for the Saturday people, then they came for the Sunday people.
But you know what?
The person didn't go and carry out an attack against filthy Zionist Jews.
He didn't attack a synagogue.
He attacked a church.
And two of his heroes are people who hate Muslims.
So do you see how just all these people are just picking these little tiny pieces out, like some little game where you just break off a little piece of a crumb, like a breadcrumb, and you're like, oh, I know exactly where this bread crumb leads.
And I know exactly what motivates it.
It just so happens that the cause I hate most was the real cause that killed it.
So of course it has to be that the person was mostly motivated by a hatred of Israel.
Here's from the New York Post, trans Minneapolis shooter Robin Westman mused about slaughtering filthy Giantist Jews in a sick journal before a deadly Catholic school massacre.
You know what?
Again, he didn't go and murder Zionist Jews, filthy Zionist Jews.
And what if someone says, I want to go murder filthy Zionist Jews, does that put them on the left or does it put them on the right?
Does it just make them someone who hates Israel?
How about if they say it and didn't do it?
How about if they cite as their two heroes and inspirations two of the most vicious mass murderers on earth who went and purposely killed as many Muslims as they came in the name could in the name of anti-Muslim ideology?
What does that say about the cause and motive and outlook of this person?
Again, here's Alex Berenson, the former New York Times reporter, who is obsessed with the view that marijuana is this incredibly deadly or harmful drug, or just he's a drug warrior in general.
And he said this, cannabis is the drug of choice for mass shooters from coast to coast.
And he cited, I'm not even sure what the message was, primarily arms, oh, bull-pilled.
So he had all these other things that you can see on the screen.
Fuck optics, kill Trump, all those other messages, but there's one message, bull-pilled, that implies that the accused killer, the suspected killer, had some kind of affinity for marijuana.
And Alex Berenson decided that since that's his main cause, he's going to blame it.
He also is a big Zionist as well.
So he might have had another post blaming it on anti-Zionism or anti-Semitism as well.
But he decided, at least in this case, that, oh, this is always, this is clearly cannabis.
Cannabis causes it.
It's the drug choice for mass shooters from coast to coast.
He looked at a gigantic manifesto, endless numbers, dozens of messages written on these guns.
One was about marijuana, and he decided that that was the real cause since that's his cause as well.
They just invent things based on whatever they want it to be.
Here's my favorite one.
There's two favorite examples of this that unsurprisingly come from the pronounced sophisticated intellectual Laura Loomer, who she was able to discern as well what the motive of the killer was, similar to what a couple other people said, but she had her own very clear view.
This is what she wrote.
The Minnesota shooter lives in one of the most Muslim cities in America with a Muslim congresswoman, Ilyan Omar, and had Islamic words, anti-Israel and pro-Holocaust phrases written on their guns and magazines.
We don't have a gun problem.
We have a Muslim problem.
Now, Laura Loomer doesn't, I don't think she cares much about the trans issue.
Israel is her main issue.
Hating Muslims is her main issue.
So unlike others who decided, oh, this is caused by transgenderism, since that's not the thing she hates most, what she hates most are Muslims.
She decided it's because the person is somehow influenced by Ilyan Omar and Muslims because they live in a Muslim city.
And yes, they had anti-Semitic phrases on parts of their weaponry.
And they also had things like nuke India.
And as I said, hail these two mass shooters who are motivated by anti-Muslim hatred.
Do you see the endless conflict and this fargo of ideologies of all different kinds?
And everyone's just picking the one they want it to be and then announcing that that's the real reason.
Here's a second Laura Loomer tweet, kind of like a cherry on top of the cake.
She's quoting different parts of what the person wrote: quote, Israel must fall.
Six million wasn't enough.
Kill Trump.
Where's your God?
Lasale, nuke India.
These are some of the things written on the Minnesota shooter's gun before they opened the fire on a Catholic church.
Shooter lives in Minneapolis, one of the most Muslim cities in America.
Have you ever read anything that's more of a non-sequitur than that?
I mean, so the person is so indoctrinated with Muslim ideology, but went to attack a Catholic church.
If you really were indoctrinated with Muslim ideology, you would think they would go and attack a synagogue.
That would be a lot better for your case if that's the case you wanted to make.
But they don't really have any evidence, so they just decide that that's what they want it to be.
All right, it wasn't just confined to people on the right, obviously.
Here is a tweet that went relatively viral by someone named Zenel Pulse, who said this, quote, the Minneapolis shooter is a terror right-wing grooming victim, a thread.
Anyone who's been paying attention to patterns among mass shooters for the past decade can easily tell the above due to a number of commonalities.
I went through this entire dissertation on how this is a group of people victimized by right-wing grooming, and they come to hate the right wing, or that they're basically satanic was part of the implication.
Here's Pastor Ben, who is a very good leftist, very good Democrat.
His name is actually Benjamin Dixon.
I don't know when he became a pastor.
He's basically just like a hardcore partisan Democrat, loves Democrats, wants to elect Democrats.
You'll never guess what his theory was.
So not only was Robert Westman a racist.
Oh, I don't know if that's going to go over well.
He used the shooter's dead name, Robert Westman.
But anyway, so not only was Robert Westman a racist and a Russian-speaking fan of Columbine shooting, he was also anti-Semitic.
Gripers, you're not beating the charges here.
So according to Benjamin Dixon, Pastor Ben, good, good, good, good, good Democrat, very loyal Democrat, he decided that it's not transgenderism that's to blame.
He doesn't have a problem with that, so he has no interest in blaming it on that.
It's not hatred for Israel that was to blame because he's not a big fan of Israel.
Instead, he's like Russian, which he thinks everybody on the far right is.
I like Groipers in particular.
I've never seen them be particularly favorable of Russia, but whatever.
He decided they were Groipers because the person was a racist, spoke Russian, was a fan of Columbine shooting.
Did Columbine have an ideology to it?
And was ultra anti-Semitic.
Therefore, it's the Groipers who are responsible.
Wajah Ali, also a very, very, very good partisan Democrat, also blamed it on his political enemies, but with a slightly different or even radically different theory.
Quote, now that the shooter has been identified as a white male, which again, it's so interesting.
I guess they feel justified in just ignoring the trans identity, which usually they would insist is only something right-wing bigots would do, just so blatantly misgendering the shooter.
But I don't know if it's okay because it's the shooter.
I don't know if they just pick and choose when it's okay to do it.
But anyway, both of them did this.
And Wajad Ali says, now that the shooter has been identified as a white male, I mean, it is so ironic.
Of course, he wants to blame everything on white males because that's his worldview, even though this person does not identify as a white male, legally is a white woman.
But I guess you can transgender when you want to just pretend the person or blame it on white men.
Now that the shooter has been identified as a white male who is radicalized in part by previous white nationalist racist shooters who promoted the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that MAGA and the GOP promote, I expect him to fall out of the news cycle like Vince Bolter.
Remember him?
So his theory is that this is basically a MA adherent, even though he wrote killed Trump.
Somehow MAGA and the GOP promote these anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, even though all of MAGA, at least at the elected official level of the Trump White House and in Congress and the GOP, are fanatical supporters of Israel.
Even though Donald Trump has launched a nationwide crackdown on anti-Semitism to the point that he's imposing hate speech codes, even though his daughter and son-in-law and grandchildren are all Jewish, somehow anti-Semitic conspiracy theories now make you MAGA, especially if you're a white male.
So because he says the person is obviously MAGA and Republican, the shooter, the media won't pay attention, I guess, because the media is in favor of Trump and the MAGA movement.
So this is the kind of thing that you see.
You don't just see it today.
You see it every single time there's one of these mass shooters.
And I have to say, this is actually something I learned covering the war on terror, which I pretty much covered exclusively or overwhelmingly.
I had other issues, but primarily was the war on terror from, say, the time I began writing about politics and reporting on politics in 2005 to maybe say, I don't know, the Snowden story, 2013, even though Snowden story was also part of the war on terror with mass surveillance.
But in that period, sort of the second term of the Bush administration, the first term of the Obama administration, I was very much focused on the war on terror.
And I talked about this yesterday in the context of entrapment, where they would target Muslims and kind of lure them into terror plots that the FBI created and then announced that they had broken up a terror plot that, in fact, the FBI had manufactured and planned and financed and recruited for.
But another thing that would happen is every single time there was a mass shooting, the minute this is the code that was always used.
If the shooter were Muslim, even though nothing else were known about them, the media would say it's a suspected terrorist attack or it's a terrorist attack.
If though you hear very early on when there's a mass shooting like this, it's likely not a terrorist attack.
People don't believe it's a terrorist attack.
What that really is code for is the Muslim is the shooter is not Muslim.
Now, in this case, Kash Patel decided to declare it an investigation into domestic terrorism aimed at Catholics because obviously that's part of the administration's ideology.
But so often, sometimes it was absolutely true that the killer or attempted killer who was Muslim was acting in the name of the ideology that led to 9-11, anger over U.S. foreign policy and killing of civilians.
There was, I covered many of these cases.
There was the person who tried to detonate a serious bomb in New York subway, another in Times Square.
There were others who were arrested and they would explicitly say my motive, oh, the pulse killer as well, the person who massacred roughly 50 people at the gay bar in Orlando, originally depicted as a homophobic attack.
It absolutely wasn't.
The killer didn't even know that that was a gay bar.
I've written about this endlessly.
People who follow the trial know this, but he was motivated, as he said over the phone, by what he said was constant U.S. killing of civilians in the Muslim world.
So there are times when they are motivated by that ideology, but many times they too are mentally unwell.
Muslims can be mentally unwell.
They can be spiritually broken.
They can be delusional.
They can be acting in the name of some cause that they don't actually mean.
And so many of these cases, I remember the biggest one being there was a 2015, 2016, 2015 attack on the Canadian parliament in Ottawa.
And I just so happened to be in Canada that week.
There were actually two attacks.
One where they tried to, someone in a car tried to run down two Canadian soldiers in a parking lot outside of Ottawa.
Exploiting Victims' Outrage 00:10:53
And then following that, two days later, there was an attack on the parliament building.
They killed one person, a security guard who was outside of the Canadian parliament in Ottawa.
And in that second case, it was instantly declared to be a terrorist attack.
And I remember Canadians saying, oh my God, why would anyone want to attack us?
Just like, you know, the U.S., why would anyone attack the United States?
And without realizing that Canada was participating in bombing campaigns throughout the Muslim world, they had actually right then been bombing in Syria and Iraq in the name of bombing ISIS, killing huge numbers of Muslim civilians, but they don't make this connection.
But as it turned out, that attacker in Ottawa really was not political.
He was not religious.
He had a history of mental illness.
And that only becomes evident after several days or several weeks.
And a lot of the cases in the war on terror that got blamed on terrorism were actually motivated by mental illness.
And that's why I started off by saying, I don't want to say in all cases mental illness is the principal factor, because I do think people can convince themselves to murder in the name of a cause.
And, you know, a lot of people believe that killing in the name of a cause is justified, even if you're killing civilians.
You'll find no short of defenders of what Israel is doing.
I think you can make an argument that what Hamas did on October 7th is justified, not to the extent that they targeted civilians, but that they attacked military bases and police bases.
You can find any number of people.
There have been, you know, Israel was founded based on terrorism.
The Irgun was a Israeli terrorist group led by Venachim Begin who became the prime minister of Israel.
They blew up the King David Hotel and killed Palestinians and Brits.
They were trying to drive Britain out of Israel.
They regarded the British as an occupying power who was occupying Israel, their homeland.
Ironic, isn't it?
And they believe they have the right to take up arms and kill innocent people and bomb civilian infrastructure like the King David Hotel in Jerusalem.
Just go Google it.
And you go around the world.
I mean, you can find all kinds of examples like that.
So sometimes people do, they're in a very calculated, mentally balanced way, embrace a political ideology or a form of morality that tells them that killing in the name of a cause is actually justified.
I don't think it's always mental illness.
But I would say most times, in order to get yourself to be able to just go and randomly kill innocent people.
And I think in almost all cases where you decide that your targets are going to be young school children, you go to Sandy Hook Elementary School and shoot up the school and kill 22 kids.
I don't remember the exact count.
Or you go to a church where you know eight and 10 year olds are gathered in a primary school.
I believe it goes up to middle school, but this person having gone there knew the layout, had drawn the layout of this church, knew where they were gathering and presumably knew there'd be a lot of young children.
To get yourself to go and kill young children, just like shoot and kill as many young kids as you can, like eight-year-old kids.
You can tell me all you want that that person is motivated by ideology or whatever, but unless you show me extremely compelling proof, I'm going to believe that the overriding primary factor is mental illness and spiritual depravity.
I don't think you can get people to go and deliberately target and shoot and murder and slaughter and massacre young children absent serious mental illness and spiritual depravity.
It just, it has to be part of, I would say a very significant part of, I would even say the overriding part of what motivated them.
But I think the most sensible thing to do, especially on the first day, not even 24 hours have elapsed.
You don't know anything about the victim.
There's been no investigation.
All you're doing is piecing together conveniently what you want to believe, what you want to encourage other people to believe, because it helps your political agenda.
The best thing to do is just to remain silent about the motive.
I'm not saying you shouldn't report pieces of evidence.
I think pointing to the YouTube video and the manifesto, those are all legitimate journalistic activities.
The public has a right to know, to see whatever evidence is available, but to authoritatively and definitively assert that you know why this person did this and therefore to issue proclamations, no more transgenderism, crack down on Muslims, monitor white males who are Republicans.
That is insanity.
You don't know anything that you're claiming to know.
And it's not just what offends me about it is not just the ignorance and the just evidentiary baselessness of it, although that is grotesque.
It's exploiting the very victims that you claim to be so saddened and outraged over.
You're exploiting the emotions surrounding those kids to advance your pre-existing political agenda.
It's so opportunistic.
And if it were based on truth, I wouldn't even mind so much.
Like if we knew for sure why the person killed and what motivated them and exactly what beliefs they were seeking to advance, then you could maybe start to talk about policy prescriptions.
Even then, I think it would be incredibly premature, exploitative.
You don't, it's not, the best environment to create policy prescriptions is not when people are in an extremely emotional state, which any decent person is reading about a story like this.
But the fact that people doing it have no clue whether what they're saying is true and don't care in the slightest if it is, which is why you have 40 different theories all asserted in the same authoritative and definitive voice, even though they're radically different and completely contradictory.
And even though there's evidence that I could point to for every one of those theories that negates the theory, certainly subverts it and undercuts it.
Is this proof that these people are exploiting a situation that they pretend to be so outraged by?
And not just a situation, but exploiting the very victims in whose name they're claiming that their political agenda is necessary.
I find it reprehensible.
I guess I understand the motive.
I guess I understand the opportunism that leads people to do that.
But you see it across the political spectrum.
And so I'm glad that the first question here was the one that not just asked what I thought about all of this, but which actually implied what I think is exactly the right mindset, which is, Let's just go back to that first question that was asked that prompted this discourse, which is this, is Zelle five, the shooting that happened today?
What should we believe?
Everyone seems to jump on this so early, injecting partisan garbage that seems hard to believe.
How do you cut through it?
Do we need to just wait?
Yeah, why not just wait?
Like what's the harm in just waiting?
The huge headline in the NEW YORK Times right now is police search for motive.
No one in law enforcement is saying, oh, we know why they did this so obvious.
No investigator, no person actually interested in building a case and seeking the truth and demonstrating its validity would jump to these conclusions.
Only irresponsible people do that are extremely opportunistic ones, demagogues.
I'm not saying everyone who did it is a demagogue in every sense or the reckless in every sense.
Many of the people who did it have a lot of other valid things to say.
We all err.
We all act emotionally or opportunistically.
But if you're a person who's actually interested in understanding why this happened, not only do you have to wait, you have to accept that you may never understand it.
Certain human behavior is not discernible in terms of coherent rational motives.
Sometimes it is just because people are sick.
Sometimes they're just motivated by nihilism.
They hate themselves.
They hate their lives.
They want to end their lives and therefore they want to cause others to suffer before they go.
That is not an uncommon or rare impulse.
Sometimes it's trolling.
There's a whole online community.
It's related to nihilism.
And there were trolling messages as part of what they put.
Where's your God now?
Ha ha.
Putting smiley faces on the end of the gun of the pistol.
And there's just people who get so nihilistic, so dark and twisted.
Maybe they're influenced by online communities.
Maybe they're influenced by satanic communities.
Who knows?
But this idea that, oh, since we're all political, politically engaged people and we see the world through left and right, we have to immediately take this person we know nothing about and stick them into the spectrum of left and right that we live in.
And to do so in a way that's most politically advantageous for us, this is worthless.
It's worse than worthless.
And I find it so ugly every time it's happened.
I've been writing about it since the war on terror, when a lot of times it turned out that what was called terrorism was motivated by this same type of mental illness or nihilism.
I wrote about it in 2022 in that article that I showed you and encourage you to go read on Substack where liberals tried to blame Tucker Carlson and others who were against immigration for the shooter in Buffalo who just went murder black people based on his belief that only white people are legitimate citizens of the United States.
It happens constantly.
It's been happening for years and my reaction is always the same, which is really one of intellectual and moral revulsion.
All right, so given we're not at the studio and that went on quite a while and I think there's a lot to chew on in all of this, we're going to make that the only question, the only topic that we covered tonight.
I think a lot of people are focused on this anyway.
And there's a lot of political manipulation surrounding it that I think is worth trying to debunk as much as possible.
Rate, Review, Follow Us 00:01:04
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