After hearing shots fired on Wednesday, Aug. 27, Minneapolis resident Pat Scallen raced from his home to the nearby Annunciation Catholic School. He spotted an empty magazine from a firearm on the ground, then ran to the front of the church, where the victims and others were already staggering outside. Many of the children were terrified and in shock, and just wanted their parents.
Scallen comforted one little girl who had been wounded in the head. “Please,” she said, “just hold my hand.”
Two children, ages eight and 10, were murdered in this shooting. Eighteen others, three of them in their 80s and the rest between the ages of six and 15, were wounded.
The murderer, a 23-year-old man, who since age 17 had claimed to be a woman, killed himself at the scene. According to Fox News 9, court records show that he identifies “as a female and wants her name to reflect that identification.” He had previously attended the school, and his mother had worked there, leaving in 2021.
My heart goes out to these victims and their loved ones. As a parent and grandparent, I can’t imagine losing one of my children or grandchildren to this madness.
And that is what it is: madness. This mentally deranged killer was created by a mentally deranged American culture.
The New York Post reports that the shooter shared a handwritten journal on YouTube before the attack in which he seemed to regret his move to transgenderism. Here he wrote statements like these:
“I only keep [the long hair] because it is pretty much my last shred of being trans. I am tired of being trans, I wish I never brain-washed myself.”
“I can’t cut my hair now as it would be an embarrassing defeat, and it might be a concerning change of character that could get me reported. It just always gets in my way. I will probably chop it on the day of the attack.”
“I regret being trans.. I wish I was a girl I just know I cannot achieve that body with the technology we have today. I also can’t afford that.”
Note the span of years that the killer began his deluded transition from male to female and then became disillusioned: 2019-2025.
Now note the following. The Williams Institute of the UCLA School of Law advertises itself as “the leading research center on sexual orientation and gender identity law and public policy.” The site goes on to say, “We ensure that facts – not stereotypes – inform laws, policies, and judicial decisions that affect the LGBTQ community.”
In June 2022, the Institute issued a report which begins, “Over 1.6 million adults (ages 18 and older) and youth (ages 13 to 17) identify as transgender in the United States, or 0.6% of those ages 13 and older,” a substantial increase from less than a decade earlier.
In August 2025, the Institute declared that this number had increased to 2.8 million people using the same age parameters.
If the Williams Institute figures are accurate, then this incredible leap in numbers reveals the powerful effects of propaganda foisted onto the American people through their schools, their libraries, the mainstream media, and certain politicians and corporations during the past few years. Many Americans bought into the idea that men who believe they are women, and vice versa, do in fact become so. The killer apparently discovered the lie behind this propaganda.
To lose one’s grip on reality lies at the heart of madness. Most of us would judge as insane someone who sincerely declared himself to be Napoleon or Jesus Christ, yet many, many people in the 21st century have bought into the idea that a man can become a woman, or a woman a man, simply by declaring it so.
In his 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell famously wrote:
Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
In our culture, we have given solidity to wind in our sexual behavior and beliefs.
“Please hold my hand,” that wounded girl said to Scallen. Many children today are asking the same of their parents, teachers, and guardians, but some adults have relinquished that grip and allowed the madness of a demonic culture to infect the young. Others have kept silent for fear of repercussion from this powerful subculture.
“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought,” wrote Orwell in this same essay. In America today, thought and language have corrupted behavior and belief. Unless we reject this thought and language that have polluted our culture, the madness will continue.
We can begin with our children, holding tightly to their hands and teaching them truth with love.
