Speaker 1: And welcome to the Big Podcast. Happy Wednesday to you.
Today is the twenty seventh day of August, year of
our Lord twenty twenty five. My name is Tom Sullivan,
and we start with his story that is the top
news today. It is a school shooting. And it's become
over the years where a lot of these shootings we mentioned,
we tell you it happened, but we don't go into
any more than just about that. And I've actually received
emails from people saying thank you for not going into
the depth of the stories regarding shootings. This one is
a little different, and it reminds me it's not the same,
but it's school children that have been shot, and it
reminds me so much of we have become rather jaded
about all of this. There was a school shooting in Connecticut.
This is years ago, and we heard it was school shooting,
and I went out to lunch. I told my producer,
let me know if it's if it's you know, any
more than two or three, and we didn't. I mean,
it's that jaded where somebody there's lots of school there's
lots of shootings where two or three it's like two
guys in a high school used to get in a
fist fight. Now they shoot at each other. And you
got a couple of guys that got mad at each
other and they shoot each other. It becomes the school shooting.
Speaker 2: But this is different.
Speaker 1: It's not New Town, which when I heard the numbers there,
I mean I just sunk in my chair. This is
out of Minneapolis at a Catholic church, Annunciation Catholic Church,
next to Annunciation Catholic School. It's a grade school kindergarten
through eighth grade. It a flashback for me since I
went to Catholic grade school. And one of the things
that Catholic schools do is the first week back to school,
they gather everybody, all of the kids. We all had
to march over to the church, which is usually right
next door to the school, and there's a mass that
we pray for a good school year, a successful school year.
And that is what was going on today at Annunciation School.
They marched the kids next door to Annunciation Church and
about fifteen minutes into this mass. The school has three
hundred and seventy nine students and I presume all of
them were there along with faculties, so probably around four
hundred people in this church, and this guy came up
with a gun, with a rifle, with a shotgun and
a pistol. Outside, he barricaded the doors. He brought two
by fours and shoved them in the door handles so
that nobody could get out of the church, and then
open fire through the stained glass windows into where the
pews were. He knew the pews were there and fired
away at the children and the prisoners that were in
the church. Let's get the rundown. Here's the Minneapolis Police
Department chief giving us the details.
Speaker 2: Earlier today, just before eight thirty am, our city experienced
an unthinkable tragedy. Aapolist police officers responded to a report
of a shooting at a mass that was happening at
the Annunciation Roman Catholic Church on the block behind me.
This worship service was marking the first week of school
for children that are attending the Annunciation Catholic School. During
the mass, a gunman approached on the outside on the
side of the building and began firing a rifle through
the church windows towards the children sitting in the pews
at the mess. Shooting through the windows, he struck children
and worshipers that were inside the building. The shooter was
armed with a rifle, a shotgun, and a pistol. This
was a deliberate act of violence against innocent children and
other people worshiping. The sheer, cruelty and cowardice of firing
into a church full of children is absolutely incomprehensible. Police
officers from the Minneapolis Police Department immediately responded, entered the
church and attempted to provide first aid and rescue some
of the children that were hiding throughout the building, while
other first responders came and ems responded to rush victims
to nearby hospitals. Two young children, ages eight and ten,
were killed where they sat in the pews. Their parents
have been notified. Seventeen other people were injured, fourteen of
them being children. Two of those children are in critical condition.
The coward who fired these shots ultimately took his own
life in the rear of the church. Our hearts are
broken for the families who have lost their children, for
these young lives that are now fighting to recover, and
for our entire community that has been so deeply traumatized
by this senseless attack. We will stand together to protect
our children, our schools, and our houses of worship. This
deliberate act of violence is just a sign of cruelty
that is beyond comprehension. Our hearts, our hearts are broken
for everyone that's been affected by this tragedy. As we
begin the difficult path of healing, I want the community
to know this that even in the face of such evil,
the Minneapolis Police Department and all of our law enforcement
partners stand with our community. We stand with these families
and with this parish. We will continue to be here
for you. With that investigation is obviously in its preliminary stages,
and I will attempt to take some questions to provide
further information. So we were looking. The question was what
can be said about the shooter. We believe it is
one suspect, a soul shooter. We believe he is deceased,
He is in his early twenties, does not have an
extensive known criminal history, and we are looking through information
left behind to try and determine some type of motive.
How many children I don't have an exactly The question
was how many children at the school? There were dozens
of children inside the mass at the time. I don't
have an exact count. The children have been relocated into
the school, which is where their families are reunifying with them. Bret.
The question was do we know if the student was,
if the shooter was a former school employee or a
former student. We don't have that information. There's a vehicle.
The question was, was anything left behind. There's a vehicle
that we believe that the suspect used that is being
searched and we will be conducting other searches related to
this inside the parking lot here yep. So the question
was neighbors had said that the door to the church
had been barricaded. The shooter approached on one side of
the church building and on that side at least two doors.
It appears there had been like a two by four placed,
so not all of the doors around the building, but
on the side where the shooter did fire on the outside. Yes.
The question was was there any explosives? There were reports
of that. There were no explosives or improvised devices that
we found. I dove there was one. I guess you
would call it a smoke bomb, like not an explosive,
but a sort of a firework that would release smoke.
The side that is closest to us here on this side.
I don't have specific information on that that I can release. Yeah.
The question was is he dead from a gunshot wound?
The answer is yes, we believe he took his own
life in the parking lot. The question was was he
shooting outside and inside? He was absolutely shooting outside of
the building on the side of the church. Inside through
the windows. It appears he may have gone inside, but
I don't believe we've located any casings inside the building,
so I'm not certain if he fired also while inside.
It appears, if not all, most of the shooting happened
outside the building. So yeah. Taylor's asking is this related
to any of the other shootings? This does not appear
to be related to any other shooting in the city.
The question was how many rounds? I would say it's
in the dozens. We don't have an exact count. There's
a sidewalk on the outside as well as a grassy area,
so obviously we are we are going through and taking
our time to process the scene. The question was was
he firing one weapon? We believe he had fired all three.
He had a rifle, a shotgun, and a pistol. Were
the weapons?
Speaker 3: Uh?
Speaker 2: Was he lawfully carrying the weapons. I don't have that information,
and I don't have any information on any uh significant
criminal history either. It appeared he had some black clothing
on his cargo type pants. I guess you could interpret
that as you know however you like.
Speaker 1: So we're getting very early information. We don't know who
the shooter is at the time we're doing this recording,
but apparently he had sent messages to friends and family
about You're going to be very unhappy, very upset with
me about what I'm about to do, and you're going
to be disappointed in me. But I've got I'm living
in a lot of pain. And so it brings up
the question about if somebody sounds like they're going to
do something like this, do you who do you tell?
Minnesota last year passed a red flag law which does
allow for guns to be taken away from people who
appear to be potentially a danger to society. So that
still there's a lot that needs to be uncovered from
all of this. Here's a young ten year old boy
that was in the church describing what happened.
Speaker 3: It was like shots fired and then he kind of
like got under the pews. It kind of they shot
through the the stained glass windows, I think, and it
was really scary.
Speaker 2: What did you do after that?
Speaker 3: Well, we waited like ten to five minutes, I don't
really know. And then we went to the gym and
then the doors locked just to make sure she didn't come.
And then the waiting in the gym for more news
and everyone was okay, most people. My friend got hit
in the back.
Speaker 2: Did he go to the hospital?
Speaker 3: He act, he went to the hospital.
Speaker 2: Went through your mind when you saw that.
Speaker 3: I was super scared for him, But I think now
he's okay.
Speaker 1: Well, we hope he's okay. The rest of the story is,
it turns out where this ten year old boy, when
you know, they've dove under the pews as best as
they could, and his friend jumped on his back to
protect him. His little ten year old friend jumped on
his back to protect him, and the little ten year
old friend took a bullet into his back. So we
again there's we don't know the status of that little friend,
but innocent boy describing what happened inside the church. Jonathan
Miller John Miller, the former counter terrorism guy for the NYPD.
These are his observations.
Speaker 4: Let's break that down because you know, throughout the Chief
Brian o'haris comments, there were these details that emerged that
tell us a few things. So the individual shows up
at eight thirty, the all school.
Speaker 2: Mass is going on.
Speaker 4: We heard the mayor say I don't want to hear
about thoughts and prayers. These children were gunned down while
they were literally praying in church.
Speaker 2: Quite a dramatic statement.
Speaker 4: But on the gunman, what Chief O'Hara tells us is
three guns, the rifle, the pistol, the shotgun. He says
that they believe, based on the shellcasings on the scene,
that he fired all three, which explains what an eyewitness
told us some time ago about hearing sporadic bursts of gunfire.
The pauses in between likely as the gunman transitioned from
one weapon that he had emptied to another which he
emptied to another. Talking about dozens of shellcasings found on
the scene, according to Chief O'Hara, which may indicate even
that he either exhausted the ammunition in those weapons or
possibly reloaded. Couldn't even give us a count on the
number of shots fired because they're still recovering evidence. But
let's get to what you pointed out a minute ago.
The idea of two sets of two by fours placed
at the doors on the outside of the church. Now,
typically what we see in these active shooters involving schools
or churches is were the doors locked, could the gunman
have gotten access to the inside. In this case, he
reversed that process. It appears it appears that by putting
those two by fours through the door handles, if people
tried to flee the shooting, flee the building, that they
wouldn't have been able to get out. Was that an
effort on his part to contain them basically into this
fish bowl where he was firing through the windows at
these targets. He also told us, and we had grappled
with this earlier, a report of an explosive device that
rather what they recovered inside was a smoke device. These
are common, They can be purchased online. They're used for
various purposes in shooting games with paintball and things like that.
But that also may have been used as a distraction
device to let smoke out inside the building to hamper
people's escape or vision as to where to go. When
you combine all of these things, showing up dressed in
black fifteen minutes after the start of the event, to
make sure that it would be full of people wearing
tactical clothing, possessing multiple firearms, barricading the doors, potentially to
block the escape of victims who could have fled, and
taking his life roughly around the time when police would
have been arriving at the scene. You see an enormous
amount of pre operational planning of intent. We talk about
these shooters and how there was this person and they
had issues and they suddenly snapped. We know they don't snap.
This is a slow boil, and they do a lot
of planning in advance, and they have a vision of
how this is going to unfold. And even with all
of the confusion and trauma intention that goes on when
an event like this begins, we see a pattern where
they amazingly stay focused on trying to achieve maximum lethality,
which is the effort that occurred today.
Speaker 1: So I won't be surprised to hear that he was
somehow affiliated with this Catholic parish or Catholic school, because
how many of you that never went to Catholic schools
knew that Catholic schools Traditionally the first week of school
have an all school mass and all the children are
marched over to the church. And if he knew this,
I suspect he did, that gives him a field of
targets that he otherwise would have to run through the
school to try and shoot people when they were all
collected in this building and they were trapped in there.
One more from Jonathan Wackrowe, whose former law enforcement and
he lays it out in four different main points.
Speaker 5: It really speaks to this premeditation and calculated nature of
the attack. So let me break that down in four ways. One,
let's just think about the attack location. Right, the student
body and the faculty were gathered together at a really
unknown point in time. The attacker knew that he could
amplify the number of potential victims just by that, you know,
selecting that target location. The fact that the attacker had
multiple weapons really again goes to his motivation here, ensuring
that he had the capacity both with the rifle, the
shotgun and the handgun, the capacity to launch the attack
even if one of those weapons systems failed. Then you
think about the smoke canisters, right, We don't see that
quite often, but that was another element that was added
into this really to disorient victims in obscure vision. What
was it during the attack? Was it to delay potential
police response? We don't know, But again these dynamics need
to be reviewed. And really, to me, the barricading of
the door, trapping victims really, you know, you know, speaks
to the horrific nature of this attacker's intent. He wanted
to prolong this assault again, making sure that victims could
not escape. All of this, Brionna, are what investigators are
looking at right now. They're treating this as a premeditated
act of violence rather than a spontaneous outburst. So through
that and because of that, they're going to take a
series of actions, you know, through their investigation to really
get to the root cause of why did this happen?
And then more importantly, how do we not let this
tragedy happen again?
Speaker 1: Well, I know that's wishful thinking, but these tragedies will
happen again. I don't mean to be that way, but
they will happen as long as you have mental illness,
and that always is the center of all of this.
And take a look again, this is a soft target
a church, which actually some churches now are have armed
guards usually parishioners that are volunteers that have either law
enforcement or military experience, and they are in the congregation
and they are armed. But for this it was a
school event. So I don't know if they have an
arm guard on Sundays, but they did not have one
there today. They didn't have any school security officer there.
But it's a soft target in a place where people
the last thing you think of is that you're going
to get shot while you are praying at church. The
only answer I've ever come up with in my thoughts
on how to slow this down you're never going to
stop it, is to harden the target, to make it
so that schools and churches and other soft targets are
adequately protect did by making it next to him possible
to get in the door. In this case, he didn't
get in. He shot through stained glass windows, knowing that
people were in the pews on the other side, so
he had his killing field. He couldn't see them, but
he knew as long as he kept firing in there,
he was going to he was going to hit people.
And like I said at the beginning, I don't like
to go into depth on these because there's just too
many of them, and yes, I probably have become hardened
about it, but this one, I'm sorry. But when you
start getting children that are killed or shot at or wounded,
it's it's another hole level of hate. So let's change subjects.
Let's go on to the rest of the news of
the day. Capitalism. I think most of us in this
country we are the shining city on the hill because
of capitalism, not socialism, communism. Capitalism. Is it perfect?
Speaker 2: Nope?
Speaker 1: Does it work better than all the other systems? Absolutely?
And a guy that I admire tremendously is Arthur Brooks.
He's a Harvard professor, don't hold that against him. He's
also an AEI and he's just a brilliant thinker. And
he was talking today. He was asked about the industrial
policy that we now have seems to have been adopted
in this country. And industrial policy is the government's thoughts
and roles and rules about owning private enterprise. And this
is Arthur Brooks responding to that whole concept, starting with intel, I.
Speaker 6: Hate industrial policy, you do. I hate it. I mean
I don't like it. I think it's bad for free markets,
it's bad for growth, and it's bad for freedom in general. Now,
I understand that it's always existed. It would be naive
of me to say this is a new thing. On
the contry, the Biden administration was unbelievably aggressive in industrial policy.
That the weird thing is that, you know, most people
associate Republicans with going the other direction, and the Republicans
kind of aren't. But the truth is that we have
this big wave of greater industrial policy. It's encroaching on
American capitalism and I don't like it. I think can't
speak for the shape of commerce. I certainly can't, But
I see scholars every day from the American enterprise and as
the dude who are talking about the problem is that
that they that the counter argument doesn't get as much weight.
Right now, what really gets to wait with the media
is focusing on is sort of an audacious move by
the Republican administration to weigh more heavily into industrial policy
than they've done in the pic. And then where Republican
Congressmen or Republican senators that historically you know, supported these
positions that you have. This is a problem with the
way that conservative politics is moving today. This is a
problem with the Republican Party today. Now this is out
of the equilibrium. I have faith that we're actually going
to come back to our free market roots.
Speaker 2: You do on the Yeah, on the I think so.
And you don't think this is generational because I think.
Speaker 6: I think you're right that these things do tend to
be pretty sticky. But I think that the ideology is
going to move away from that because the status quo
among American conservatives tends to be more toward economic freedom. Right,
That's the general way that they think, and I think
they will get back into that groove at some point.
The sooner the better. Politics never raises happiness. Anytime a
politician says I'm going to make you.
Speaker 2: Happy, you should be very very near.
Speaker 7: I was about to ask that we always say people vote,
particularly in America, vote with their wallet. Yeah. Do they
vote with the happiness eva?
Speaker 2: Oh? Yeah, all the time.
Speaker 6: This is actually how they form their families, this is
how they make their decisions. Ultimately, the reason they're voting
with their wallets is because it's soundstrained from their happiness.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you hear the point you made about the fact
that Republicans and Conservatives have always been for economic freedom
and the industrial policy that we're going down is just
the opposite of that. Walter Isaacson, who is the guy
who did the interview get, wrote the book on Steve Jobs,
wrote the book on Elon Musk. He's a very thoughtful,
well connected guy. He was asked about American industrial policy
of late.
Speaker 8: I mean, I think state capitalism is always a bad idea,
whether it's the way you do it in China or
you do it in other places. You don't want the
federal government to be controlling major corporations, and for that matter,
to be competing against other corporations if they have a
stake at Intel. What does that mean for competition. We've
always resisted that there's a tradition that goes back, I
don't know, four or five hundred years, where you know
King Lewis the fourteenth has Jean Baptiste Colbert doing this
mercantile system and making companies be partly owned by the
state with their gilded palaces. That's the type of thing
we've always tried to avoid in America. Well, first of all,
you've heard from things like the Wall Street Journal's editorial page,
which is very much you know, aligned with free markets,
free trade, free ideas, being totally against it. You're asking
a larger question, which is why do not senators and
republic mainstream Republicans feel like standing up to Trump? And
that's up and down the board on these things. Certainly
creating a type of cronyish capitalism where some are favored
and some aren't goes against the grain of most Republican
thinking for fifty years. Well, you know, imagine do the
thought experiment, because every now and then people on your
show sometimes say, what about is them? What about when
Obama Solendra or Joe Biden, whatever. Imagine the thought experiment
of a Democratic president deciding to do similar things and
to take stakes in companies and tell those companies, you know,
how to do their logos, how to put sugar in
their you know, their Coca Cola formulas, how to fire
a CEO. I think I think we'd be outraged. So
if twenty years from now this is happening with both parties,
we've gone down a really bad path here. I mean,
we need competition, we need any trust enforcement. We don't
need the government favoring certain companies.
Speaker 1: Basically, I'm in a state of shock about the fact
that Republican administration is going down the road of industrial
policy where we take ownership of private companies, it's never
it's the wrong. It's exactly what they do in China.
Let me put it that way. So Treasury Secretary Scott Besant,
very thoughtful guy, he was. It seems like there's a
conflict among the cabinet because yesterday we played for you
Howard Lutnick saying, yeah, we're thinking about taking ownership of
you know, Lokee Martin and all these other defense contractors
that are you know, they're making most of their me
from from government contracts. We need to have ownership for
the taxpayer. Well, here's Scott Benson, which seems to have
a totally different view.
Speaker 7: I don't know if we need to take stakes in
defense companies. You know, we'll we'll see whether the defense
companies are fulfilling their mission in terms of providing adequate
and timely deliveries for the US military, as opposed to, uh,
maybe an over emphasis on.
Speaker 2: The shareholders.
Speaker 1: Yeah, to put it bluntly, remember the government owns Amtrak
and the Post Office and DMV, and there's a long
list of, shall I say, of bureaucratic nightmares that the
government runs. And that is why the private sector is fast,
they're cheaper, smarter, more efficient than getting the government involved
in private sector anyway, to my horror, tariffs, they're also
I've been playing for you the last couple of days.
There's a lot of people that are, i mean, our
laugher totally against the tariffs, especially in some limited way maybe,
but mostly bad, bad, bad policy. Steven Moore same thing,
he hates tariffs. So Scott Besson was at the three
and three hour, seventeen minute cabinet meeting yesterday and it
was his turn to talk, and he was talking about
how much money is being brought in by the tariffs.
Speaker 2: We could be on our way.
Speaker 7: Well over half a trillion, maybe towards the trillion dollar number.
Speaker 6: Your administration has made a meaningful dent in the budget deficit.
Speaker 1: Oh, they've made a meaningful bumping the deficit, no question
about it. The question scope comes down to who's paying
the tariffs, and that is a lot of studies already
on the early the early receipts of tariffs. It's a
mixture of foreign companies, US corporations and you and me
the consumer. But it is going to be very hard
for this government, this administration or even future administrations to
give up on half a trillion to a trillion dollars
worth of money coming in. Anthony chann is an economist.
He was on with Stuart Farney today.
Speaker 9: No, it isn't, but it has worked in the past.
I remember in the nineteen thirties when the United States
took a huge take in a lot of the banks
Reconstruction Finance Corporation in the nineteen thirties. It saved the
banking system. So they do have some experience and being
successful now. The Bank Continental ill annoying teen ninety four
is sort of a neutral. But the thing that made
me a little nervous is the post office in Amtrak.
They were running those things and haven't done so well.
Speaker 1: My point exactly. But yes, the government has. In fact
that Barack Obama went in and bailed out General Motors
and Chrysler and that turned out well. They a lot
of shenanigans regarding bankruptcy law, but they did save General
Motors and Chrysler.
Speaker 2: You can go back.
Speaker 1: Chrysler was saved by back when Leiyacoca was the head
of it decades ago. So the government has dipped in
to help companies that are important that are about ready
to go under. That's different than tariffs or taking long
term ownership of these companies. Carlos Hajmenez, who is a
Republican from Florida, he was asked about putting tariffs on
India and China.
Speaker 10: It's what he said, Oh, I think we should double
terrorists on both of them, to be honest with you,
So I have no problem with what he's done with India.
I think he's still trying to negotiate something with China,
and I certainly would not have any kind of problem
with him doubling the tarroiffts on China. You know how
I stand where I stand with China. Well, well, the
problem with China is that we are so much more
interlocked with China economically. It's tough to decouple from China.
And so I'm gonna wait the President out on this one.
But if he said tomorrow that he was doubling the
terroriffts on China because of their use of Russian oil,
I would applaud that effort. I've been saying from for
a long time, we need to decouple from China. Every
single dollar that we sent to China is going to
be used against us and our interests around the world
and so, but that's easier said than done. So let's
see what actually transpires with the president in China. I
would hope that he'd be a little tougher on China
because that's where I want to land. I want to
be very tough on China. I want to decouple from China,
and I think we need to on shore near shore
as much as possible all the stuff that we're buying
from China right now.
Speaker 1: So the tariffs on India, the fifty percent tariff goes
into effect today, and the tariffs on China, there's a
twenty percent tariff I believe that's the one that has
been assessed to them because of fentanyl, and a ten
percent tariff, which is the standard base rate around the world.
So there's a thirty percent tariff currently on China and
a fifty percent on Indias of today, on Wall Street,
everybody was pins and needles because then Vidia earnings were
going to come out right after the market closed. So
the market closed, the S and P five hundred closed
that a record high, thinking, okay, things are going to
be great. But what happened was and Nvidia announced their
second quarter earnings and they say their data centers missed
sales estimates, so it just adds to the nervousness about
whether there's an AI bubble or not because all of
the AI stocks have been on fire. As far as
the stock market, though, when the closing bell did ring,
the market was positive. Dow Jones Industrials up one hundred
and forty seven to forty five thousand and five sixty five,
SMP new record, up fifteen points, Nazdak up forty five.
The price of gold was up seventeen dollars now at
thirty four fifty for an ounce, and oil up fifty cents.
It's just under sixty four dollars for one barrel of oil.
Thank you for coming by today. We'll be here again tomorrow,
and I hope you are too. We'll see them