Transcript - America This Week, August 29, 2025: "Everyone in Minnesota Has Gone Crazy"

Mass murder is one thing, but misgendering is apparently the real crime. Plus, wrapping up "That Hideous Strength" by C.S. Lewis

Matt Taibbi: All right. Welcome to America This Week. I’m Matt Taibbi.

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: Walter, how crazy is this country?

Walter Kirn: Getting crazier. Going from a very high baseline to something that I can barely tolerate day to day. I mean for the sake of my own sanity,

Matt Taibbi: It’s becoming more and more difficult. So we used to have mass shooters, and the rest of the country would sort of circle around and gape and wonder about the hidden problem in American society that was causing these issues, but now the insanity is no longer hidden. It’s now part of the reaction to these stories. It’s out in the open. You don’t know who’s crazier, the shooter or some of the people who are talking about the shooter. So we had the situation in Minnesota. Do we have just a basic TV account of what happened, or maybe the 911 video or something like that?

Andy Mac: Welcome back in here to LiveNOW from FOX. I am Andy Mac. Thank you so much for joining us. It’s a dark day in Minneapolis after this senseless shooting at a Catholic school that had children sitting in pews going to mass during their first week of school. And we’re learning more information right now about this tragedy that unfolded earlier on this morning as Minneapolis police chief Brian O’Hara said the shooter, armed with a rifle, shotgun, and pistol, approached the side of the church and shot through the windows toward the children sitting in the pews there at Annunciation Catholic School. And for the first time, our FOX 9 team, Nathan O’Neal, gathering some of these 911 calls to the dispatch there as this all went down around 8:30 local time.

Speaker 1: Minneapolis has a possible active shooter, 509 West 54th Street, Minneapolis.

Speaker 2: The first calls came in around 8:30 in the morning.

Speaker 1: All units, you’re heading to Minneapolis Mutual Aid on a shooting.

Speaker 2: An active shooter in South Minneapolis at the Annunciation Church and School.

Dr. Tom Wyatt: We first received a page that we were going to have a mass casualty incident at 8:46 AM.

Speaker 2: First responders from all over the region, rushing to the scene.

Speaker 3: Any troopers arriving, we just need medical. Bring all the guys that you have.

Speaker 2: Dispatch audio reveals the scope of the emergency response and the casualties after police say the shooter opened fire through a church window.

Speaker 3: We’ve got at least four criticals in the inside, the rest outside of the church. Couple DOAs, but at least 20 other patients.

Brian O’Hara: Two young children, ages eight and 10, were killed where they sat in the pews.

Speaker 1: We have two gunshot wounds, two patients with gunshot wounds to their head in front.

Matt Taibbi: I can’t even watch this stuff. So it’s horrible. So it’s another mass shooting. We have them just constantly in this country, and they’re always heavily politicized, but this one turns out to be sort of a new variety of horrible.

Walter Kirn: Well, first of all, it’s not a school shooting in the sense that we are now sadly used to, meaning that it’s not a student. It was an assassination of children from outside a building by an adult. And that’s a different kind of murder than some allegedly bullied student coming in, fed up, and killing his peers. This was an adult hunting schoolchildren.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. And very quickly, it emerges that the killer, whose name is Robin Westman, left behind quite a lot of material. There was a YouTube video. There’s an awful lot of stuff in the YouTube video. There’s a manifesto. He’s writing in English and Cyrillic in the manifesto. He’s writing things like, “I’m a nightmare,” and, “Kill Trump,” on his weapons, among other things. And we’re going to get to a key detail in a moment, but my initial impression watching the video... And he’s talking about how disturbed he is, “I’m not well.” He’s loading the magazines and singing, “Tomorrow, tomorrow.” The vibe with him-

Walter Kirn: Do we see him in that video, or do we just hear him?

Matt Taibbi: We see his thumb, yeah. So I got kind of a Dylan Klebold sociopath vibe from him. This is someone who talks repeatedly about bad thoughts that he has, or she has now. And we have to get to that. Robin Westman used to be Robert Westman. And there were early warnings all over social media in the first blush. There are right wing efforts to try to paint this person as transgender. Don’t fall for it, blah, blah, blah. And I was one of those people. I was very cautious about that news initially. And then gradually, it comes out that there’s a legal name change. The New York Times even puts it in that there’s a document on file that his mother signed changing his name from Robert to Robin, because the person identifies as female. So apparently, if I’m getting this correctly, Walter, it’s a man who identifies as female, not actually a transsexual, not a post-op person.

Walter Kirn: I don’t know all the flavors of trans identity, and I don’t know if he received hormone therapy. I’ve known trans people who don’t get surgery, but only use drugs or hormones. Maybe he didn’t use those. I’m unsure, but it does seem legitimate to note these facts. He does seem to have changed his appearance over the years and, as you say, changed his name legally, and made quite an effort to identify as the other gender. How that worked out medically is, I guess, not something that we’re going to get information on right away.

The interesting thing to me was in this abundance of evidence in this manifesto, this video, these pictures of guns with your mottos on them, there was a sense of a kind of potpourri of past crimes. We’re building up a kind of folklore with these shooters. They learn from each other. They build on one another’s past behavior. And this one had everything, as I say: all the social media, the manifesto, the drawings, the drawing of him looking in the mirror and seeing a devil or a demon staring back at him, the writing on the guns. Remember, with the Luigi shooting, we had writing on the bullets and-

Matt Taibbi: What did it say on Luigi’s bullets?

Walter Kirn: I don’t remember, but I think it had to do with the healthcare job of the victim, the UnitedHealthcare position. UHC kills maybe, or something like that. My memory is fuzzy on that. But in the totality of all these documents and videos and so on, you get a pretty clear sense of motive. They always, after these things, come out and say, “The motive is unclear. We’re studying it,” and so on. Well, I don’t know that you can have any more information from the first-hand source than you’re getting in this case. And the motive seems to be he wanted to commit murder, and he wanted the power and the feelings that come with committing murder, and he wanted particularly to hurt children.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. He talks about being... “I’m sorry, Mom and Dad, but you’re the only people I’m sorry to. Fuck those kids.” It’s very cold-blooded, the video. It’ll send chills up your spine watching it. And if we could put up the manifesto again for a second... Because this was posted before the shooting, so everybody had this. And it talks about... It’s a little hard to decipher, because he’s writing it in English. Could we blow it up just a little bit? All right. I can’t see that, but anyway.

Walter Kirn: But let’s concentrate on the sticker on the left here, which is a collage of disturbing and somewhat contradictory, I guess, images, one a devil, then an AR over a pride flag. Defend equality. I don’t know if that’s a slogan that’s widely used. But altogether, it portrays some form of militarized grievance over gender and sexuality.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, there’s another page where he writes, “I’m sick of my life. I’m tired of the charade of being trans. I’m tired of being trans.”

Walter Kirn: What does that mean? I’m tired of being trans. Hmm.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. So you can see, again, it’s in Cyrillic, but...

Walter Kirn: So how well does Cyrillic map onto the English alphabet?

Matt Taibbi: It’s really hard to read. I guess it’s a way to keep your parents from reading it-

Walter Kirn: I see.

Matt Taibbi: ... but it’s frustrating. There are indications that this person does know Russian a little bit, because he uses the letters correctly, and uses some of the little signs. But right here, at the underlined person, says, “Charade of being trans,” basically. And then in the next line is, “I’m tired of being trans.” So there’s a bunch of stuff in there about this, but mainly, it’s a series of grievances. And see at the top, it says, “Kill myself,” or, “Kill me,” at the top. “Death. I will kill.” And some of those things are in Russian, some of those are in English. And so the fact that this person is trans and identifies as female, it’s relevant for a bunch of reasons, but one of them is just maybe it’s a contributing factor to the unhappiness of this person, right?