Well, folks, we planned for a slow week for the end of summer. But the news cycle had other plans. And no story deserves more attention this week than the murders in Minneapolis.
A Church Shooting—and the Rise of American Nihilism
In the wake of man-made tragedy, we’re left with the pressing question: Why would someone do something so evil?
But what if the answer is that there was no reason at all?
Yearning for a motive in the Minneapolis shooting perpetrated by Robin Westman—Westman murdered an 8-year-old and a 10-year-old while they were praying at Mass—MAGA personalities blamed the Minneapolis shooting on transgenderism (Robin used to be Robert). Liberal activists blamed the guns. Others pointed to mental illness, or to antisemitism.
“All that finger-pointing,” Peter Savodnik writes, “obscures a deeper point: Westman seems to have been driven by an all-consuming, destructive force, a nihilism—the conviction that life is meaningless; that words like truth, justice and God are empty slogans; that everything must be razed.”
Read Peter:
For nearly 20 years, Pat McMonigle investigated national security crimes for the FBI. He signed up to fight terrorists whose ideologies, hostile to our way of life, are well known.
But it was faceless nihilists like Robin Westman—“evil demons,” as McGonigle puts it—who broke him.
Frannie Block spoke to McMonigle in the aftermath of this week’s mass shooting at Annunciation Catholic School to ask him about why nihilistic ideology is infecting young people around the world, how easily it can spread, and what we can do to fight it. Read their talk here:
And for on-the-ground coverage of the shooting, read Dave Kansas’s report from Minneapolis:
Wide Open Roads. . .
In lieu of The Front Page, this week you woke up to Journeys in your inbox, a series about the trips that change us. I wanted to share two that made my heart sing.
Paul Kingsnorth wrote for us about finding freedom along the Alaska Highway: a wide expanse guarded by eccentric innkeepers and free-roaming moose, and accompanied by Dolly Parton on the stereo at 2 a.m.
“These places are the last redoubts of an old way of life,” writes Kingsnorth. “Unproductive, inefficient, offline but in place, and therefore actually real.”
And the brilliant Agnes Callard wrote about motorcycles, falling in love, and what it feels like to fly. “In order to feel motion, it is not enough to be in motion,” she writes. “On a motorcycle nothing stands between you and the feeling of rushing along, and also, you control it, you drive the rush.”
America’s Royal Wedding
Few things have ever caused more excitement in our newsroom than Taylor Swift’s engagement to Travis Kelce. And who better to write about the virtues of marrying up—specifically, marrying a woman smarter than you—than our beloved editor and straight male correspondent and editor: Will Rahn.
Well, I hope you’ve all had a wonderful summer. We’ve got a jam-packed September for you: a live conversation with Justice Amy Coney Barrett; a debate about gene editing; Coleman Hughes live with Steven Pinker; Paul Kingsnorth; and more. And that’s just next month.
It’s going to be a banner year.
Subscribe to make sure you don’t miss out on any of it.
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Author: Bari Weiss
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