As predictable as the Sun rising in the East, death, and taxes: CBS’s John Dickerson delivering an insufferable editorial to close out the day’s broadcast of CBS Evening News Plus. Last night was no different, after a transgender individual shot up a Catholic church during a back-to-school Mass, killing two children and injuring many others.
Here is that editorial in its entirety, as aired on CBS Evening News Plus on Wednesday, August 28th, 2025 (click “expand” to view transcript):
JOHN DICKERSON: Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them. For the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as these. That Bible verse from Matthew is about welcome and protection. But in America, the welcome at school now begins with a different kind of preparation. A section in the parents’ handbook about what to do, who to call. Drills for children who are still learning the multiplication tables. At that age they are just learning how to sound out words, how to share crayons, how to line up without jostling, how to raise a hand before speaking. They also learn how to hide from a gunman. Today, for Annunciation Catholic School, that training became necessary. They were at Mass- one of the ways we mark new beginnings in the fall along with a fresh backpack, new clothes and the sight of faces you missed all summer. Now these students have been initiated into another ritual: the American communion of violence. At eight, the age of one of the victims, you're memorizing multiplication tables. At ten, the age of the other, you're learning fractions, grammar, punctuation. At both ages you are supposed to be mastering cooperation, not survival. You're supposed to play hide and seek for fun. This is now a second generation growing up knowing they might die at school. And with each shooting, they see that the adults in charge tolerate a political system- whether in laws, or in mental health care, or in personal responsibility, unwilling to address the violence. From sacrament to sacrilege, from communion to rupture, from students offering thoughts and prayers, to being the subject of them. The children pay the price for the national failure to address this reality. The Scripture books in the pews where those little children in their new green uniforms hid their rubbery limbs have words for the way adults have failed them. They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. Peace, peace, they say, when there is no peace. And that's tonight's CBS Evening News Plus. Thank you for joining us. I’m John Dickerson. Good night.
Given that the shooting occurred inside a church, it is not unexpected that Dickerson would open with a Bible verse. Scriptural citation is intended to lend a veneer of gravitas and spirituality to everything that follows thereafter. Unfortunately, what followed was the kind of boilerplate gun control do-somethingism we get fed after each mass shooting.
Before working school shooter drills into his prose, Dickerson condemned “the American communion of violence”, and vaguely calls for action “whether in laws, whether in mental health care, or in personal responsibility.” But Dickerson never addresses the underlying cause of THIS shooting, and an increasing rash of recent others. If there is an "American communion of violence”, there must be a willingness to address its officiants in a manner not yet seen. That much is evident by the legacy news’ refusal to even address the shooter as transgender. To put a finer point: a deranged, self-hating transgender who hated minorities, Donald Trump, saw himself as a demon, and was obsessed with other mass shooters.
Dickerson’s plea for action, while florid, falls flat. And insofar as it fails to address what happened in Minneapolis, it is an appearance of piety devoid of substance. These false pieties were also addressed in the Gospel of St. Matthew (23:27) from whence Dickerson began his sermon:
Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean.
