The Horror in Minneapolis

The shooting in Minneapolis last week, leaving two children dead and many wounded, has been a horrible shock to the community.

The shooter, Robin Westman, was clearly mentally disturbed. He left behind alarming notes expressing violent fantasies and admiration for other mass murderers. When still a minor, he socially transitioned, identifying as a woman and changing his name. It’s unclear whether he underwent any surgeries. But what is evident “is that adults around him encouraged him to lean into his confusion and embrace a delusion about his identity,” Colin Wright observes.

Instead of relieving his distress, transitioning enhanced it, as “he became more alienated, more consumed by rage, and more obsessed with violence,” Wright points out. “When you take a generation of distressed youth and suggest that they might be trapped in the wrong body, that suicide is imminent if they are denied access to experimental drugs and surgeries, and that society is conspiring to wipe them out, you create a powder keg.”

Westman’s rampage illustrates what can ensue when it ignites.

Twenty years ago, Hurricane Katrina devasted the Gulf Coast, killing about 1,000 people in Louisiana and 200 in Mississippi.

Then-president George W. Bush accepted criticism for the lack of preparedness, saying that the storm “exposed serious problems in our response capability at all levels of government.”

“Try to imagine a public official saying that today, when ineptitude seems like the default,” Nicole Gelinas writes. “From the financial crisis of 2008 to the lockdown-induced social disintegration of 2020, things fall apart, and people notice—but nobody in charge wants to take long-term responsibility for fixing them.”

Read her take on how the storm offered a glimpse into the country’s future.

Canada’s McMaster University has long been renowned for founding evidence-based medicine. And yet, five researchers there recently condemned the “misuse” of reviews they authored that found “low certainty” evidence of gender “affirming care” as a beneficial form of treatment.

“Revealingly, the researchers did not dispute the reviews’ methodological integrity or findings,” Joseph Figliolia writes. Their real issue? Reputational fallout from their association with the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine (SEGM), which funded the reviews and has been smeared as a hate group.

Read more about the saga here.

President Trump recently signed an executive order calling on states to expand their use of involuntary treatment for the seriously mentally ill. But state commitment laws have been shaped by decades of court decisions, making them incredibly difficult to change.

That’s why the Department of Justice should use the tools at its disposal to “ensure that states have sufficient bed capacity to treat people with serious mental illness, including those living on the streets who are provably dangerous to themselves or others,” John Hirschauer writes. “These tools stem from the department’s investigative powers and its congressionally authorized role in interpreting the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).”

Read his three proposals for the Justice Department on treating those with disabilities and mental illness.

Dan Wang’s new book, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, looks at the governance cultures of China and the U.S. While the author “identifies the thicket of procedural hurdles that stifle growth in contemporary America as the source of its ills,” Jordan McGillis writes, he offers “only tepid prescriptions.”

Even so, McGillis argues, “Wang deserves praise for introducing nomenclature from China’s domestic discourse that carries over, in part, to America.”

Read his review here.

Nicole Nosek joins Judge Glock to discuss housing reform legislation spearheaded by Texans for Reasonable Solutions.

“‘Socialism—never works but it never dies.’”

Photo credits: Scott Olson / Staff / Getty Images News via Getty Images