Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. There’s been another shooting, mass shooting, this time in Minneapolis at Annunciation, a private Catholic school.
One Robert Westman, who transitioned a few years ago to female status, now called Robin Westman, shot and killed two youths, two kids, I should say, inside a church and wounded 18 others.
The church was locked. He stood outside with a variety of weapons and kept firing through the windows at the pews to kill small children. Killed two and wounded 18.
I would say it’s another one of these tragic mass shootings, but I don’t like the word “tragic” because tragedy, a good Greek word, does not denote culpability. It’s not just tragic. These things just don’t happen. They happen because of evil, and this man, this young man, was evil.
But here’s what is really disturbing: In the reaction to it, to this shooting, we got moral lectures and strictures from the mayor of Minneapolis, from the governor of Minneapolis, from the governor of California. And almost immediately they said, “Do not politicize this.” And then they went and politicized it.
They did that in two ways. One, they said, “It’s verboten. You cannot talk about the transgender status of the shooter.” And two: “This was only because of the easy accessibility of guns. Mr. Westman or Ms. Westman—Ms. Westman acquired these guns legally, and therefore, the law should be tightened.”
I don’t know what we’re going to do about that. There are over 400 million guns, and the Left can’t even distinguish between an automatic and semi-automatic rifle. If you have a .22 and it’s a semi-automatic rifle and you painted it black and dressed it up, you could say that it was an assault weapon because it fired semi-automatically.
But nonetheless, they won’t have any discussion over transgenderism. This falls in the broader category of exempt DEI woke topics, but I think we should talk about this.
This is the fourth or fifth incident—I don’t even like the word “incident”—occurrence of transgendered shooters who are protected by authorities. I don’t mean from their criminal acts, but after they are killed or after they commit suicide, the authorities and the public at large do not wanna discuss the implications of the act.
And so, in the case of the Tennessee transgendered shooter, we were not given any information about his/her handbook or her/his manifesto, which expressed hatred toward Christianity and society at large, traditional society.
In this case, Mr. Westman put his own hate-filled rants, including one that suggested that he was angry that he had transitioned to female status, on the internet. It was quickly put down, but otherwise, we wouldn’t have known much about him.
But there’s another thing that DEI does that we don’t really talk about. It exempts certain topics that before warranted free discussion.
What do I mean? Now, in this case, for example, Jake Tapper was more worried about getting the proper pronouns than he was about condemning the shooter. And that was true of a lot of people.
Some people just said, “Well, this is a white male MAGA shooter.” Obviously, that was Rosie O’Donnell. She was mimicking the CNN anchorwoman who said in the New York Manhattan shooting at the NFL headquarters, her first response was, “It was a white male.” It was not, of course.
So, people on the left are quite prone to jump to conclusions and stereotypes, but not when it comes to honest discussion about transgenderism.
And here’s my point, again. Prior to the transgendered movement, we were told by scientists to psychologists, medical experts that gender dysphoria was a very rare syndrome. It was classified as a mental disorder, and it was about one or two per 100,000, not 30% of some of the campuses in which students feel that they might want to transition. It’s more or less, I don’t wanna say a cult, but it’s a fad.
There’s another disturbing point about it, other than its exaggerated numbers and frequency, and that is the drugs used to transition one from one gender or sex to another. Usually, they are, respectively, massive doses of testosterone or estrogen.
I grew up with the Left’s warning about both of them. We were told that you have to be very careful about injecting testosterone. And we used kind of a patois about it. Roid rage was for steroids, but testosterone rage was another symptom.
Every time a football player died or a weightlifter died, the media suggested that they had courted death by using massive doses of testosterone. In the 1950s and early ’60s, women who went into menopause were regularly and without caution prescribed large doses of estrogen.
We were told, “Be careful about Big Pharma. Be careful about Big Med.” All of those worries and prohibitions and cautions were thrown out the window, as were SSRI antidepressants. These were selective serotonin prohibitors. In other words, they altered the chemistry of the brain, supposedly, to correct mental disturbances, depression, bipolarity. But they’re very dangerous drugs.
But when it came to the exempt topic of transgenderism, suddenly the society was supposed to accept that this was not a mental disorder. It was not a rare occurrence. It was a national crisis where large percentages of the population were transgendering. It was completely fine to enhance that transformation through the use of prior very serious and often dangerous drugs. And any criticism of the general public of this new civil rights issue branded one as a transphobe or otherwise, a bigot.
And even in some extremes, as we see in Minnesota, they pass laws suggesting that you cannot prohibit a youth, depending on the age, from transitioning. They have a freedom to do that.
And if, in a free society, when you have an inordinate amount of shooters and a more inordinate amount of death, and there seems to be a pattern of overrepresentation, whether it is white males or black males or Asian women, if any of these groups is overrepresented, the Left usually says, “We have to investigate.”
By that I mean, if the victims were—this was a school or a medical center for trans children or teenagers and a white MAGA male with a red hat had come in and shot up that center and killed some, God forbid, I think you would see the Left would be quick to stereotype and say that we have a pathology of white males shooting up trans children. But we don’t apply the same rules in opposite.
And just to finish, that is one of the great problems with DEI, which I’d like to discuss at a later moment. But DEI gives exemptions, or I should say it censors legitimate controversies, discussions, disagreements about certain topics, race, ethnic background, and sexual orientation, transgenderism.
I’m not talking about -isms and -ologies or bigotry. I’m just talking about normal questions of whether it is proper or not proper to apply particular rules or exemptions to particular groups.
Until we have that discussion, I think we’re going to be, as a society, completely unable to talk honestly and empirically about these mass shootings.
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