Reports are that the shooter was a bullied loner who ate lunch by himself every day. His profile is closer to that of a school shooter than a political assassin like Gavrilo Princip.
And school shootings are just glorified suicides.
"Not even exceptional in being unexceptional, he has found immortality in taking his AR-15 to a Donald Trump rally instead of to a middle school"
Princip was a lonely, unsuccessful, nerd of a glorified school shooter too - the dominant meme for balkan kids of his generation just happened to be "go find a political leader to shoot before doing yourself in" instead of "go shoot up a school"
"Perhaps nothing so organized as a cult or terrorist cell will ever coalesce, thanks to the deadening effects of iPhones, opiates, Xbox, booze, Amazon, porn, TikTok."
Not to mention our very own FBI, NSA, etc..
When the Gretchen Whitmer Kidnap Plot ZOMG arrests were announced, the first things to come to mind was:
* how many of the plotters were FBI agents or informers?
* how much you want to bet they will conveniently develop amnesia when it comes time to recall just whose idea it was to kidnap the governor of Michigan?
I grew up homeschooled. My parents were/are great, but I was a lot like the boys you see responsible for events like this: nerdy, (mostly) lonely, given to fits of anger and self-pity at the unfair judgments of adolescence. By the time I was 18 I was also thoroughly addicted to porn and didn't really care about women in any other way. I was never violent, but it's not too difficult to imagine something like abuse or divorce pushing me down that path. The anger and alienation were there. The ingredients were mixing in the bowl even as I was getting old enough to really, permanently do something about it (either to someone else or myself).
Instead I became a Christian. And that has been the single most definitive source of meaning in my life. I honestly don't know how boys like me stay afloat without some kind of hope in something bigger than their fears and wounds. And I don't know how a society so confident in its post-religiosity can avoid creating these kinds of boys en masse for a long time.
I'm glad that works for you. I don't feel the need of religion but I think many people do. If nothing else, it's a source of community. It gives people a sense of purpose.
I would like to see many more people take up religion, or something community/family oriented, something outside of "my self".
"...young men who feel neither young nor manly..."
It's been posited that large numbers of single young men with no prospects for getting a mate are tremendously disruptive to the social fabric. In previous eras a war would have been declared to burn up them up and drive the population down. In the modern day it was used to predict massive upheaval in China because of the gender imbalance in its population that resulted from the One Child policy.
Irony or ironies, while in the US there's no such imbalance the numbers of single young men and women have sky rocketed compared to previous generations. Maybe the guys can keep themselves distracted with video games and online porn.
I would also point people at the work of writers like Christina Hoff Summers who have been raising the alarm for some time now that modern society increasingly penalizes behavior that may be core to the male psyche.
You can de-radicalize people by treating them with a little respect, but if they're your outgroup, then they are assholes and giving them any respect is just emboldening their asshole behavior.
"In previous eras a war would have been declared to burn up them up and drive the population down."
I've heard things like this a number of times...as if the war were the result of this "large numbers of single young men with no prospects" and it always rings false. Have we analyzed the number of such men prior to many other wars? Isn't it more likely that a higher number of wars (especially ones which require a draft) result in lower numbers of young men, if anything?
To be fair I think the argument is that the war culls the unattached young male population by killing a lot of them and I believe that the mechanism was the guy in charge recognizing the problem and going to war to deal with it.
I think it bears repeating how incredibly nihilistic Gen Z is.
Not sad and disaffected like Gen X. Not neurotic worrywarts like Millennials. In my generation there is a truly pervasive sense of bitter hopelessness, from Discord to dating apps.
God has been dead a while and I guess many have given up on waiting for anything to fill the hole. This guy's isolation was just a force multiplier for the prevailing Gen Z attitude.
My pet theory is that Millennials are just Boomers and Gen Z is just Gen X. Rejoice, you get to be the cooler generation: the label that was applied to Gen X wasn't "sad and disaffected", it was "cynical as fuck".
A few years ago there was a social media thing where Millennials blamed Boomers for ruining the world and there was some attempt to extend that to X'ers. It fizzled out. Why? I have a guess. Around that time I saw a debate on Facebook. Some grizzled X'er lady shut it down with a post that read "Awwww, that's so cute that they think we give a fuck what they think."
I'm almost ready to lump the X'ers in with the Boomers. Basically anyone who thinks Bill Maher is still funny and/or interesting is Boomer.
It's not even so much that Boomers have fucked everything up, it's that they insist on perpetuating our current political and social dynamics onto younger generations. If we could just guarantee them their social security, continued stock market returns, films and television shows that continue to center them, maybe they could fuck off to The Villages and just leave the rest of us alone.
As for those `cynical as fuck' Gen Xers, `While We're Young' lays bare the insecurity behind all of that.
"Basically anyone who thinks Bill Maher is still funny and/or interesting is Boomer."
Because of his politics, right?
The Boomers aren't perpetuating anything on anybody. They, like everyone else, are busy living through the day to day grunt work of living their lives. The problem is that younger generations were lied to by a bunch of snake oil salesmen who filled their heads with fictions like "You will change the world", "A just society is inevitable", "There will be a happy ending", blah blah blah.
Nobody gets to change the world. What happens when people realize that they've been lied to and that their fundamental beliefs are wrong? Typically they don't calmly correct their assumptions--instead they lash out and start looking for scapegoats.
Gen Xers are cynical because a large percentage of them come from broken homes and they had to entertain themselves with drugs and alcohol. When I was in high school one of my friends got hooked on heroine and once her veins collapsed she started shooting into her eyeballs. Thankfully by the time I met her she was cleaned up but she had some great stories.
Not just his politics but his utter condescension towards those younger than him who hold opposing views. He seems to have also conveniently forgotten his stand against `ageism' recently.
His jokes are formulaic and he sounds like every other heterodox thinker out there. Know his position on an issue, and the lame jokes that will follow, before he says anything. He's predictable. He doesn't change his mind and he thinks the problems his generation faced are still the problems miring my generation; e.g., Caitlin Clark and racism.
`The Boomers aren't perpetuating anything on anybody.'
The gerontocracy has nothing to do with Boomers?
Yes, we were lied to by previous generations but the fictions you mention weren't the important lies. Conveniently the Boomers were the ones spreading those lies.
`Gen Xers are cynical because...'
You think we didn't go through something similar? I grew up in the rural midwest and drugs, alcohol, and sex were just what you did for fun---not as a coping mechanism for a broken home, which were plentiful.
If you want to change his mind I suggest beating him in a debate. As for his views the fact that Trump is the overwhelming favorite now suggests to me that Maher's positions are closer to the mean than his opponents (although ironically enough Maher is anti-Trump). Who's out of touch?
The real difference between Millennials and X'ers is that of a teacher told an X'er that they were going to change the world he or she would have laughed in their face. Then they would have gone out behind the football field and smoked a bowl.
Millennials on the other hand swallowed that bullshit whole. We'll, it sure looks like Trump is going to stroll back into office in November. How's that change the world stuff going?
I respect Patrick Boyle's brand of financial standup, but I responded to his concerns about Gen Z "financial nihilism" that financial nihilism is an entirely rational response to a game that is obviously rigged.
But its all odd, because in a lot of ways, life has never been better. They just can't believe it and don't know how to access it.
I think more young people should be redirected to some sort of public service at earlier junctures - military, Americorp, whatever. Get them out, get them doing stuff, get them meeting people. Let them see the world outside their TikTok bubble.
>You read about some other era and the losers look dignified, dressed in purpose. Now losing only makes losers.
I wonder if that's true only in hindsight. I also feel the pull of the bygone era, the sense that things used to be...better. But I wonder how much if that is distance. Will people someday look back on the Trump shooter and say, my gosh, what determination?
I'm part of a therapy/support group that meets on the weekends and, to the extent that the assassination attempt came up, it was entirely people lamenting -- with verve -- that the shooter missed. And I think: is it weird that I don't like that? That the honest reactions from a group of people ostensibly committed to bettering themselves is to not even see that the guy they want dead is human, too?
The people I know who wish he'd been hit are the same ones worried about the fate of our democracy. But, brothers, if you pine for violence against your political enemies then the spirit of democracy is already dead in your heart.
They don't give a damn about the "fate of our democracy", because they don't believe in democracy, many of them apparently unwittingly. They believe in the unwashed understanding their betters' instructions, and barring that, at least having the decency to behave by following those instructions.
It does say something about our lack of public spiritedness when no managed to even throw a rock at the guy as he was rather suspiciously approaching a political event with an assault weapon.
That's one of the questions. How did he get in place? I don't know enough about guns. Maybe it broke down into small pieces so it looked like nothing suspicious.
I read that local law enforcement was in charge of a certain amount of the security. It definitely sounds like a breach of security.
However, who in their right mind is going to lob a rock at someone with an assault rifle?
"I'm part of a therapy/support group that meets on the weekends and, to the extent that the assassination attempt came up, it was entirely people lamenting -- with verve -- that the shooter missed."
For five years, I was part of what may have been a similar "therapy" group, with NOKD navel-gazing, well... monsters, right smack at ground zero in Cambridge, MA, with a "highly-regarded" (non-advertising) ringleader to boot, after looking a while in the right places back in my market-man days. I entered that world (along with education, marriage, and career) in my early twenties, left a madman in my late thirties, now decades ago. In ways that matter, I am certainly much saner today.
So I can only break out the popcorn in amazed entertainment when Freddie writes a really, um... frustrated column like this one. I think I'll leave it at that.
1. The kids are responsible for regulating their political media consumption so they don't go insane and commit political violence?
2. The media and its content providers are responsible for the constant bombardment of hate and fear political content that makes media consumers insane enough to commit political violence?
Because I don't think you are credible bouncing back and forth with preference over one or the other depending on the day and the topic.
My perspective is that the most educated adults among us are clearly brainwashed and ideologically captured from their media consumption... and given that evidence, it is idiotic to expect that the kids will just be able to power through it all and come to rational and objective perspectives about what is right and wrong.
I purposely post on Facebook and Twitter fake Trump hate comments and searches so I can see what the algorithms will do. It is more than alarming the firehose of propaganda that attempts to convince me that Trump and MAGA are worse that Nazis and life as we know it will be destroyed and replaced with some authoritarian hunger games nightmare. The fantastic hyperbole and fatalism is repeated over and over and over again... and consumers of this messaging just wake up believing it.
Then get some of them together to form another group or page where they postulate taking action.
I cannot help but see the Democrat machine as having taken up the same strategy as terrorists. They inject fear and anger into the population and then call them to action.
This 20 year old shooter might just be some insane loner, but more likely he was made violent by his media feeds.
And what would be your solution? The "firehose of propaganda that attempts to convince me that Trump and MAGA are worse that Nazis" is largely russian and chinese bots and other subversive trolls. I have not seen the "Democratic Machine" doing this (and I'm on all their lists). Warning people that Trump has vowed to be a dictator on day one, to use the justice department to go after his enemies, to contravene the law, to send troops into the street to round up undocumenteds, and to take our country to an authoritarian place it's never been is not fantastic hyperbole -- it's what he says he will do.
Chinese maybe (Trump didn't get on too well with them last time) but Russian? I thought Trump and Putin were friends and one of the first acts of Trump 2.0 would be to make Ukraine accept partition, and then talk about leaving NATO?
The original question was why Russia, which favored Trump, would disseminate negative disinformation about Trump. Not whether Democrats or the Chinese or anyone else has ever done it.
Which doesn't speak to whether Russia ever used fake accounts with negative disinformation about Trump disseminated to create chaos and distrust, as M.R. Cohen asserted.
So are you ant-globalism? Because you are suggesting US Internet nationalism. If you are a globalist then how do you keep other countries off your platforms?
Putin was only seeking to sow discord. Given we’re still talking about the Russia hoax shows what $100,000 in facebook posts hardly anyone saw could do.
Most of what you just wrote about Trump is the same media fatalism and hyperbole. I hope you are calm and do not own guns. Republicans are wired to treat the sanctity of law as one of their key moral filters. Democrats see the law as just a tool to their political end. There is no worry about Trump authoritarianism anything close to what the Democrats have reigned down on the people. The pandemic was proof that the Democrat collectivist authoritarian agenda is not only real, it is worse that we could have imagined.
I was with you right up until you started doing the exact same thing as the person you're responding to. There are people from every political party who see the law as nothing more than a weapon they can use against their enemies.
While I disagree strongly that there are no good ideas left as to why these young losers are like this, or what can be done about it (perhaps that's not what you meant), I have to say -- this is an excellent piece and is exactly why I subscribe.
I feel a little called out. I was definitely one of those guys that never felt young or manly, and I did have a lot of anger growing up. One time, instead of the doing the assigned essay, I instead submitted something on my desire to shoot up the school. And what can I say really, it's only natural to be this way when people treat like you like you're some kind of second-class citizen. At least for some of us. I think I have to back up the guy in this thread who said it was Christianity that got him out of it, as my solution was also spiritual, though not that specific one: only way out is to have a principle that is bigger than your emotions. But of course, our society teaches that nothing is bigger than your desire.
I think you're being too hard on the true weirdos/loners: most of us don't become violent towards others, but a significant contingent will kill themselves over this. I did end up in a psych ward once, suicidally depressed because I couldn't talk to women even if they smiled at me.
I've been violent though, but not against people. OWS really fired me up back in the day and I hurled a big rock at a bank's glass pane. Police nearly got me too. Quite the adrenaline rush. But that was more thrill-seeking than anything else.
"[The] only way out is to have a principle that is bigger than your emotions. But of course, our society teaches that nothing is bigger than your desire."
I grew up like you in the 70s, and what saved me then was high culture. But people don't believe in or even approve of high culture these days; I don't know what I would do if I were a teenager now. Ever since 1980, society has been busily dismantling the pretensions of culture and science alike while making sure that honest work of any kind is rendered as meaningless as possible. Nowadays, it is universally acknowledged that in the age of AI the only honorable occupations for a human being are childrearing and punditry, and the only alternative to subjecting everything to your desire is to subject your desire to some totalizing political ideology thst controls your every move. I can't live in such a world.
What? What about being an electrician, or a plumber. What about landscaping, painting houses or roofing? Teaching school, a career in medical...there are lots of worthwhile jobs.
What is high culture anyway? When did childrearing become honorable? It always seemed to me to be synonymous with low skilled work.
Why couldn't you talk to women, even if they smiled at you? Did you have sisters? Friends who were girls? I don't understand what's going on. I've got a 20 year old daughter who's never been on a date. She's got friends, including a mixed friend group.
No sisters and no female friends no (am nerd, nearly all nerds are men). I never got the impression that it's ok to talk to strangers, which may be a cultural thing. This particular incident happened in the gym 9 years ago, and I definitely was not in the habit of talking to people there. Still kind of aren't, but I do it occasionally, even told a couple girls that I thought they were cute.
As for your daughter, yeah, I get the impression a lot of guys these days don't get the memo that they're supposed to show initiative. I have a cousin that is a very social guy, but pretty useless with girls. His friends can't help him much, because they happen to be the sort of guys for whom these things just work themselves out naturally. It is interesting to me, why these mechanisms have at least partially broken down.
Thank you for answering me. This is all very interesting. I was terrible at flirting. The whole making eye contact and significant looks totally evaded me when I was young. I was better at talking to men in my 30s but I was still awful at the pick up game. I like real conversations and want to connect on a person to person level before anything else. But that's me.
I wonder how the mechanisms of boy meets girl have gotten so broken. When you talk to girls/women do you see them as just another person or does the sex aspect get in the way? Things definitely seem different from how they were 50 or even 30 years ago.
I can talk to other women, even ones I'm attracted to, as just people, but if she's really beautiful, it can be intimidating. I think the main barrier is that I'm not used to talking to strangers in general. I can do better in a bar, where it's more expected (and provided they're not in a group), but I don't find it particularly enjoyable being in a bar. Hobbies I've picked up have been pretty male skewed, with the exception of volunteer work I do, but that only happens once a month.
I can sympathize with that. When I found myself single in my thirties with two teen age kids after being married for 18 years, it was daunting. I was an elementary school teacher and my main hobbies were horses, hiking, reading and gardening. Not exactly the kinds of places you meet men.
I did go to bars with single friends, but the music was too loud for anything but the most superficial conversation.
There was more success doing contra dancing and a writing based dating service called Science Connection. This was before e-mail was widespread and smart phones were decades away. I liked it because it was interests based. You didn't even have photos of each other. I like to say my husband was mail order.
I'm curious about dating apps. One of my daughters had some success there and one of my sons met his girlfriend on Tinder. My niece met her husband on Match.com and a friend of mine just got married to a guy she met through Harmony.
One of my kids said there was a competitiveness on dating apps, like how many responses have you had. That would be horrible.
Do you think there is a separation in people's minds between just people/just friends and romantic partner? It always seemed logical to me that the best beginning was as friends, people who like each other and then it becomes more.
I should get into hiking, that's something that I enjoy, but I don't do it a lot. I don't know about competitiveness in dating apps, I haven't got into discussions like that with men (actually, what I've heard from all guys is that they suck, which jives with my own experience. I think the workability of dating apps is heavily dependent on location.)
I think there isn't a separation in people's minds between friends/romantic partner, since I know of at least 2 couples that started out as friends, but I think I don't like it as a strategy, as I feel I would be being very dishonest if I'm befriending a woman, but in reality, I'm romantically interested in her and keeping that secret. I think I could befriend a woman that has already shot me down though, since I wouldn't be pretending (I'm currently in this situation with a woman, where I'm interested in developing a friendship even though she rejected me romantically). Basically, if I'm going to be friends with a woman, I can't do it with some kind of hope or expectation that it will develop into something more, I prefer taking the shot directly and seeing what happens.
Your perspective is interesting though, I feel like if a woman wanted to take it that slow I would assume she's uninterested. Certainly, if I keep talking to her, I would be pursuing other prospects simultaneously.
I *think* you mean increasing the probability of Trump being inaugurated from the (? 60%?) it was a few days ago to (?? 80%? 90%?), yes? If not, please clarify.
Not _quite_ giving Trump the presidency, but a gift nonetheless.
The models are going to lag because their inputs are primarily public polling, and obviously the polls haven't yet captured the impact of the assassination attempt.
My strong suspicion is that it's essentially over. The underlying terrain is that Biden was trailing (simple average of existing polls) and he needed to catch up. Even before the shooting I think that would have been almost impossible due to the controversy regarding his age. In the aftermath of the shooting it's an even more daunting task.
Agreed with models lagging and race over barring extraneous events. I think it was more likely than not (hence my 60%, probably conservative) before and without the shooting; I don't think you were disagreeing.
I think that iconic photo of Trump will win him a lot of votes from the subset of voters who don't watch much political coverage, because everyone not living in a cave will see that image.
Honestly, I think one of the big, BIG issues is that young people—particularly young men—don't have hobbies anymore. Something that captures their interest apart from the Internet, video games, & their peers.
EXCEPTIONALLY well-written piece, this. "...there’s my ineradicable feeling that many millions of people live lives exsanguinated of meaning." That "exsanguinated"—_perfectly_ used though I've never _seen_ it used that way before—gave me goosebumps.
I have to disagree. What young men need is a cause, by which I mean something larger than themselves where they can work with others to advance towards a common goal and, along the way, reap the benefits of community. And it helps if the other members of that group are also men.
I was thinking more of the Elks Club, or the Boy Scouts. If you like pipe smoking, fine, but I'm not sure how that translates into group action. Trying to get more people interested in smoking perhaps?
At best you get to congregate with fellow enthusiasts. But real community isn't about sitting around together and knitting--it's about sitting around together and knitting sweaters for the homeless and then passing them out with free lunches.
I can't stress this enough: guys needs a cause that is bigger than themselves. Like a militia.
Uh—the FIRST step to sitting around & knitting sweaters for the homeless is developing an enthusiasm for knitting.
But I can't imagine that many boys will be saved from anomie by knitting, so I can only imagine yr bizarre interjection here is some dis on what you imagine female hobbies to be.
What sorts of things are you thinking of? I can't think of a lot of things. I wonder if that's one of the reasons gun culture and survivalism is so popular.
It's really hard to find causes that are bigger than yourself, but I agree they are needed. Parenting used to be the biggest one.
There's nothing wrong with being a woman, but men and women are different. And a society that ignores what makes for healthy males gets unhealthy ones.
Too true. I'm an assertive woman who walks in no man's shadow, but I absolutely agree that men and women are different. We need to start coming up with positive ways for masculinity to be expressed and channeled.
This is a horrifying universal human problem when you have a bunch of hopeless, directionless young men. Whenever something like this happens and people jump on how it was the unique evil of whatever belief systems the gunman followed that really pulled the trigger, I think about Juramentado.
In the Philippines under Spanish and American (and Japanese) occupation, young men would make elaborate preparations to attack military and police targets with blade weapons, tourniqueting their limbs at each joint so they could keep fighting even after having a limb shot or disabled.
It was sort of a predecessor to suicide bombing, before that was technologically feasible. It relied on institutions of men who created a permission structure for violence and made the kids who went off to die feel like heroes.
Now people can cobble together permission structures from all the various disparate arguments for violence from Fanon to Evola to create their own bespoke justifications for murder. But it's not the existence of those arguments that made the person murder - they're looking for any justification for what they already emotionally want to do. Blaming the words instead of the person who decided to arrange them into a permission slip for murder seems really short sighted.
Reports are that the shooter was a bullied loner who ate lunch by himself every day. His profile is closer to that of a school shooter than a political assassin like Gavrilo Princip.
And school shootings are just glorified suicides.
"Not even exceptional in being unexceptional, he has found immortality in taking his AR-15 to a Donald Trump rally instead of to a middle school"
Pretty much nails it.
Princip was a lonely, unsuccessful, nerd of a glorified school shooter too - the dominant meme for balkan kids of his generation just happened to be "go find a political leader to shoot before doing yourself in" instead of "go shoot up a school"
I concede there's a lot of overlap. People who lead happy, productive lives are unlikely to want to overturn the status quo.
People can’t even turn and turn in a widening gyre anymore…
You've brought the image in the first line. As you can see, it doesn't get better in the last:
"And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"
William Butler Yeats more prophetic than he could have ever dreamed, or am I underestimating him.
"Perhaps nothing so organized as a cult or terrorist cell will ever coalesce, thanks to the deadening effects of iPhones, opiates, Xbox, booze, Amazon, porn, TikTok."
Not to mention our very own FBI, NSA, etc..
When the Gretchen Whitmer Kidnap Plot ZOMG arrests were announced, the first things to come to mind was:
* how many of the plotters were FBI agents or informers?
* how much you want to bet they will conveniently develop amnesia when it comes time to recall just whose idea it was to kidnap the governor of Michigan?
What is ZOMG?
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/ZOMG
Thank you!
I grew up homeschooled. My parents were/are great, but I was a lot like the boys you see responsible for events like this: nerdy, (mostly) lonely, given to fits of anger and self-pity at the unfair judgments of adolescence. By the time I was 18 I was also thoroughly addicted to porn and didn't really care about women in any other way. I was never violent, but it's not too difficult to imagine something like abuse or divorce pushing me down that path. The anger and alienation were there. The ingredients were mixing in the bowl even as I was getting old enough to really, permanently do something about it (either to someone else or myself).
Instead I became a Christian. And that has been the single most definitive source of meaning in my life. I honestly don't know how boys like me stay afloat without some kind of hope in something bigger than their fears and wounds. And I don't know how a society so confident in its post-religiosity can avoid creating these kinds of boys en masse for a long time.
I'm glad that works for you. I don't feel the need of religion but I think many people do. If nothing else, it's a source of community. It gives people a sense of purpose.
I would like to see many more people take up religion, or something community/family oriented, something outside of "my self".
I'm also really glad you found something to get you out of that loop.
"...young men who feel neither young nor manly..."
It's been posited that large numbers of single young men with no prospects for getting a mate are tremendously disruptive to the social fabric. In previous eras a war would have been declared to burn up them up and drive the population down. In the modern day it was used to predict massive upheaval in China because of the gender imbalance in its population that resulted from the One Child policy.
Irony or ironies, while in the US there's no such imbalance the numbers of single young men and women have sky rocketed compared to previous generations. Maybe the guys can keep themselves distracted with video games and online porn.
I would also point people at the work of writers like Christina Hoff Summers who have been raising the alarm for some time now that modern society increasingly penalizes behavior that may be core to the male psyche.
You can de-radicalize people by treating them with a little respect, but if they're your outgroup, then they are assholes and giving them any respect is just emboldening their asshole behavior.
"In previous eras a war would have been declared to burn up them up and drive the population down."
I've heard things like this a number of times...as if the war were the result of this "large numbers of single young men with no prospects" and it always rings false. Have we analyzed the number of such men prior to many other wars? Isn't it more likely that a higher number of wars (especially ones which require a draft) result in lower numbers of young men, if anything?
To be fair I think the argument is that the war culls the unattached young male population by killing a lot of them and I believe that the mechanism was the guy in charge recognizing the problem and going to war to deal with it.
That is, in fact, the argument.
I think it bears repeating how incredibly nihilistic Gen Z is.
Not sad and disaffected like Gen X. Not neurotic worrywarts like Millennials. In my generation there is a truly pervasive sense of bitter hopelessness, from Discord to dating apps.
God has been dead a while and I guess many have given up on waiting for anything to fill the hole. This guy's isolation was just a force multiplier for the prevailing Gen Z attitude.
My pet theory is that Millennials are just Boomers and Gen Z is just Gen X. Rejoice, you get to be the cooler generation: the label that was applied to Gen X wasn't "sad and disaffected", it was "cynical as fuck".
A few years ago there was a social media thing where Millennials blamed Boomers for ruining the world and there was some attempt to extend that to X'ers. It fizzled out. Why? I have a guess. Around that time I saw a debate on Facebook. Some grizzled X'er lady shut it down with a post that read "Awwww, that's so cute that they think we give a fuck what they think."
Same love for drenching everything in mean-spirited irony. I wonder if Lil Peep was our Cobain.
I'm almost ready to lump the X'ers in with the Boomers. Basically anyone who thinks Bill Maher is still funny and/or interesting is Boomer.
It's not even so much that Boomers have fucked everything up, it's that they insist on perpetuating our current political and social dynamics onto younger generations. If we could just guarantee them their social security, continued stock market returns, films and television shows that continue to center them, maybe they could fuck off to The Villages and just leave the rest of us alone.
As for those `cynical as fuck' Gen Xers, `While We're Young' lays bare the insecurity behind all of that.
"Basically anyone who thinks Bill Maher is still funny and/or interesting is Boomer."
Because of his politics, right?
The Boomers aren't perpetuating anything on anybody. They, like everyone else, are busy living through the day to day grunt work of living their lives. The problem is that younger generations were lied to by a bunch of snake oil salesmen who filled their heads with fictions like "You will change the world", "A just society is inevitable", "There will be a happy ending", blah blah blah.
Nobody gets to change the world. What happens when people realize that they've been lied to and that their fundamental beliefs are wrong? Typically they don't calmly correct their assumptions--instead they lash out and start looking for scapegoats.
Gen Xers are cynical because a large percentage of them come from broken homes and they had to entertain themselves with drugs and alcohol. When I was in high school one of my friends got hooked on heroine and once her veins collapsed she started shooting into her eyeballs. Thankfully by the time I met her she was cleaned up but she had some great stories.
Not just his politics but his utter condescension towards those younger than him who hold opposing views. He seems to have also conveniently forgotten his stand against `ageism' recently.
His jokes are formulaic and he sounds like every other heterodox thinker out there. Know his position on an issue, and the lame jokes that will follow, before he says anything. He's predictable. He doesn't change his mind and he thinks the problems his generation faced are still the problems miring my generation; e.g., Caitlin Clark and racism.
`The Boomers aren't perpetuating anything on anybody.'
The gerontocracy has nothing to do with Boomers?
Yes, we were lied to by previous generations but the fictions you mention weren't the important lies. Conveniently the Boomers were the ones spreading those lies.
`Gen Xers are cynical because...'
You think we didn't go through something similar? I grew up in the rural midwest and drugs, alcohol, and sex were just what you did for fun---not as a coping mechanism for a broken home, which were plentiful.
If you want to change his mind I suggest beating him in a debate. As for his views the fact that Trump is the overwhelming favorite now suggests to me that Maher's positions are closer to the mean than his opponents (although ironically enough Maher is anti-Trump). Who's out of touch?
The real difference between Millennials and X'ers is that of a teacher told an X'er that they were going to change the world he or she would have laughed in their face. Then they would have gone out behind the football field and smoked a bowl.
Millennials on the other hand swallowed that bullshit whole. We'll, it sure looks like Trump is going to stroll back into office in November. How's that change the world stuff going?
You'd be surprised how many people my age like Bill Maher. Most of us just haven't heard of him.
I respect Patrick Boyle's brand of financial standup, but I responded to his concerns about Gen Z "financial nihilism" that financial nihilism is an entirely rational response to a game that is obviously rigged.
The Gen X solution was to fantasize about burning it all down. Nobody remembers "Fight Club"?
And humans have not gotten more and more mad with seething white hot incandescent rage since then?
The FBI has guns.
The FBI didn't, back then?
It was only a movie. That's as far as it got.
But its all odd, because in a lot of ways, life has never been better. They just can't believe it and don't know how to access it.
I think more young people should be redirected to some sort of public service at earlier junctures - military, Americorp, whatever. Get them out, get them doing stuff, get them meeting people. Let them see the world outside their TikTok bubble.
>You read about some other era and the losers look dignified, dressed in purpose. Now losing only makes losers.
I wonder if that's true only in hindsight. I also feel the pull of the bygone era, the sense that things used to be...better. But I wonder how much if that is distance. Will people someday look back on the Trump shooter and say, my gosh, what determination?
I'm part of a therapy/support group that meets on the weekends and, to the extent that the assassination attempt came up, it was entirely people lamenting -- with verve -- that the shooter missed. And I think: is it weird that I don't like that? That the honest reactions from a group of people ostensibly committed to bettering themselves is to not even see that the guy they want dead is human, too?
If Trump died of COVID, or a heart attack or stroke...I wouldn't be sad. I'd like to see him gone and out of politics. Not in jail, just irrelevant.
But assassination is bad for democracy. It smacks of monarchy, dictatorship, rule of oligarchy.
That too.
The people I know who wish he'd been hit are the same ones worried about the fate of our democracy. But, brothers, if you pine for violence against your political enemies then the spirit of democracy is already dead in your heart.
They don't give a damn about the "fate of our democracy", because they don't believe in democracy, many of them apparently unwittingly. They believe in the unwashed understanding their betters' instructions, and barring that, at least having the decency to behave by following those instructions.
Iain Murray wrote this on Twitter:
It appears to have been confirmed that an audience member died.
An ordinary citizen, participating in the political process by attending a rally of his favored candidate (presumably) has been murdered for it.
That’s what an attack on democracy looks like.
It does say something about our lack of public spiritedness when no managed to even throw a rock at the guy as he was rather suspiciously approaching a political event with an assault weapon.
Oh right, open carry.
I mean, it's kind of a given that if you're going to shoot at a presidential candidate that you need a gun.
That's one of the questions. How did he get in place? I don't know enough about guns. Maybe it broke down into small pieces so it looked like nothing suspicious.
I read that local law enforcement was in charge of a certain amount of the security. It definitely sounds like a breach of security.
However, who in their right mind is going to lob a rock at someone with an assault rifle?
"I'm part of a therapy/support group that meets on the weekends and, to the extent that the assassination attempt came up, it was entirely people lamenting -- with verve -- that the shooter missed."
For five years, I was part of what may have been a similar "therapy" group, with NOKD navel-gazing, well... monsters, right smack at ground zero in Cambridge, MA, with a "highly-regarded" (non-advertising) ringleader to boot, after looking a while in the right places back in my market-man days. I entered that world (along with education, marriage, and career) in my early twenties, left a madman in my late thirties, now decades ago. In ways that matter, I am certainly much saner today.
So I can only break out the popcorn in amazed entertainment when Freddie writes a really, um... frustrated column like this one. I think I'll leave it at that.
So which is it?
1. The kids are responsible for regulating their political media consumption so they don't go insane and commit political violence?
2. The media and its content providers are responsible for the constant bombardment of hate and fear political content that makes media consumers insane enough to commit political violence?
Because I don't think you are credible bouncing back and forth with preference over one or the other depending on the day and the topic.
My perspective is that the most educated adults among us are clearly brainwashed and ideologically captured from their media consumption... and given that evidence, it is idiotic to expect that the kids will just be able to power through it all and come to rational and objective perspectives about what is right and wrong.
I purposely post on Facebook and Twitter fake Trump hate comments and searches so I can see what the algorithms will do. It is more than alarming the firehose of propaganda that attempts to convince me that Trump and MAGA are worse that Nazis and life as we know it will be destroyed and replaced with some authoritarian hunger games nightmare. The fantastic hyperbole and fatalism is repeated over and over and over again... and consumers of this messaging just wake up believing it.
Then get some of them together to form another group or page where they postulate taking action.
I cannot help but see the Democrat machine as having taken up the same strategy as terrorists. They inject fear and anger into the population and then call them to action.
This 20 year old shooter might just be some insane loner, but more likely he was made violent by his media feeds.
And what would be your solution? The "firehose of propaganda that attempts to convince me that Trump and MAGA are worse that Nazis" is largely russian and chinese bots and other subversive trolls. I have not seen the "Democratic Machine" doing this (and I'm on all their lists). Warning people that Trump has vowed to be a dictator on day one, to use the justice department to go after his enemies, to contravene the law, to send troops into the street to round up undocumenteds, and to take our country to an authoritarian place it's never been is not fantastic hyperbole -- it's what he says he will do.
Chinese maybe (Trump didn't get on too well with them last time) but Russian? I thought Trump and Putin were friends and one of the first acts of Trump 2.0 would be to make Ukraine accept partition, and then talk about leaving NATO?
disinformation that sows chaos and conflict in US is good for russia even if they like trump, for which, of course, they have good reason.
Some of the most widely circulated fake accounts, confirmed as Russian, pretended to be from Black people and progressives.
Right... and Democrats would never do the same. Right.
The original question was why Russia, which favored Trump, would disseminate negative disinformation about Trump. Not whether Democrats or the Chinese or anyone else has ever done it.
The Chinese government had fake accounts posting BLM memes and telling people to go out into the streets.
Which doesn't speak to whether Russia ever used fake accounts with negative disinformation about Trump disseminated to create chaos and distrust, as M.R. Cohen asserted.
So are you ant-globalism? Because you are suggesting US Internet nationalism. If you are a globalist then how do you keep other countries off your platforms?
Putin was only seeking to sow discord. Given we’re still talking about the Russia hoax shows what $100,000 in facebook posts hardly anyone saw could do.
Most of what you just wrote about Trump is the same media fatalism and hyperbole. I hope you are calm and do not own guns. Republicans are wired to treat the sanctity of law as one of their key moral filters. Democrats see the law as just a tool to their political end. There is no worry about Trump authoritarianism anything close to what the Democrats have reigned down on the people. The pandemic was proof that the Democrat collectivist authoritarian agenda is not only real, it is worse that we could have imagined.
This sort of nonsensical diatribe is why I've never engaged on social media before. And I won't again.
Bye bye!
Read Haidt. And MSNBC isn't any better than social media.
I'd bet my life he doesn't watch MSNBC. The facf you even bring that up is funny.
I was with you right up until you started doing the exact same thing as the person you're responding to. There are people from every political party who see the law as nothing more than a weapon they can use against their enemies.
Liberals and conservatives operate with a different set of moral filters.
Maybe the good ones do, but not the ones who get elected.
"Republicans are wired to treat the sanctity of law as one of their key moral filters."
This is incredibly laughable in the year 2024. What partisanship does to one's brain is something to behold.
While I disagree strongly that there are no good ideas left as to why these young losers are like this, or what can be done about it (perhaps that's not what you meant), I have to say -- this is an excellent piece and is exactly why I subscribe.
"...relentlessly analyzed in political terms, but politically inert as a human soul."
The language crackles.
I feel a little called out. I was definitely one of those guys that never felt young or manly, and I did have a lot of anger growing up. One time, instead of the doing the assigned essay, I instead submitted something on my desire to shoot up the school. And what can I say really, it's only natural to be this way when people treat like you like you're some kind of second-class citizen. At least for some of us. I think I have to back up the guy in this thread who said it was Christianity that got him out of it, as my solution was also spiritual, though not that specific one: only way out is to have a principle that is bigger than your emotions. But of course, our society teaches that nothing is bigger than your desire.
I think you're being too hard on the true weirdos/loners: most of us don't become violent towards others, but a significant contingent will kill themselves over this. I did end up in a psych ward once, suicidally depressed because I couldn't talk to women even if they smiled at me.
"But of course, our society teaches that nothing is bigger than your desire."
^^^
But, you see, by definition I am not calling out lonely young men who have not killed anyone.
I feel it's a very thin line between me and the typical school shooter. Like I'm much closer to them than to the normies. Same species really.
you and "the normies" both haven't killed anyone...i'd say that makes you closer to the normies by a mile!
I've been violent though, but not against people. OWS really fired me up back in the day and I hurled a big rock at a bank's glass pane. Police nearly got me too. Quite the adrenaline rush. But that was more thrill-seeking than anything else.
I genuinly hope you are in a better place now.
I am really, just processing a lot of emotions I have been suppressing. Thanks for your support.
"[The] only way out is to have a principle that is bigger than your emotions. But of course, our society teaches that nothing is bigger than your desire."
I grew up like you in the 70s, and what saved me then was high culture. But people don't believe in or even approve of high culture these days; I don't know what I would do if I were a teenager now. Ever since 1980, society has been busily dismantling the pretensions of culture and science alike while making sure that honest work of any kind is rendered as meaningless as possible. Nowadays, it is universally acknowledged that in the age of AI the only honorable occupations for a human being are childrearing and punditry, and the only alternative to subjecting everything to your desire is to subject your desire to some totalizing political ideology thst controls your every move. I can't live in such a world.
What? What about being an electrician, or a plumber. What about landscaping, painting houses or roofing? Teaching school, a career in medical...there are lots of worthwhile jobs.
What is high culture anyway? When did childrearing become honorable? It always seemed to me to be synonymous with low skilled work.
Why couldn't you talk to women, even if they smiled at you? Did you have sisters? Friends who were girls? I don't understand what's going on. I've got a 20 year old daughter who's never been on a date. She's got friends, including a mixed friend group.
No sisters and no female friends no (am nerd, nearly all nerds are men). I never got the impression that it's ok to talk to strangers, which may be a cultural thing. This particular incident happened in the gym 9 years ago, and I definitely was not in the habit of talking to people there. Still kind of aren't, but I do it occasionally, even told a couple girls that I thought they were cute.
As for your daughter, yeah, I get the impression a lot of guys these days don't get the memo that they're supposed to show initiative. I have a cousin that is a very social guy, but pretty useless with girls. His friends can't help him much, because they happen to be the sort of guys for whom these things just work themselves out naturally. It is interesting to me, why these mechanisms have at least partially broken down.
Thank you for answering me. This is all very interesting. I was terrible at flirting. The whole making eye contact and significant looks totally evaded me when I was young. I was better at talking to men in my 30s but I was still awful at the pick up game. I like real conversations and want to connect on a person to person level before anything else. But that's me.
I wonder how the mechanisms of boy meets girl have gotten so broken. When you talk to girls/women do you see them as just another person or does the sex aspect get in the way? Things definitely seem different from how they were 50 or even 30 years ago.
I can talk to other women, even ones I'm attracted to, as just people, but if she's really beautiful, it can be intimidating. I think the main barrier is that I'm not used to talking to strangers in general. I can do better in a bar, where it's more expected (and provided they're not in a group), but I don't find it particularly enjoyable being in a bar. Hobbies I've picked up have been pretty male skewed, with the exception of volunteer work I do, but that only happens once a month.
I can sympathize with that. When I found myself single in my thirties with two teen age kids after being married for 18 years, it was daunting. I was an elementary school teacher and my main hobbies were horses, hiking, reading and gardening. Not exactly the kinds of places you meet men.
I did go to bars with single friends, but the music was too loud for anything but the most superficial conversation.
There was more success doing contra dancing and a writing based dating service called Science Connection. This was before e-mail was widespread and smart phones were decades away. I liked it because it was interests based. You didn't even have photos of each other. I like to say my husband was mail order.
I'm curious about dating apps. One of my daughters had some success there and one of my sons met his girlfriend on Tinder. My niece met her husband on Match.com and a friend of mine just got married to a guy she met through Harmony.
One of my kids said there was a competitiveness on dating apps, like how many responses have you had. That would be horrible.
Do you think there is a separation in people's minds between just people/just friends and romantic partner? It always seemed logical to me that the best beginning was as friends, people who like each other and then it becomes more.
I should get into hiking, that's something that I enjoy, but I don't do it a lot. I don't know about competitiveness in dating apps, I haven't got into discussions like that with men (actually, what I've heard from all guys is that they suck, which jives with my own experience. I think the workability of dating apps is heavily dependent on location.)
I think there isn't a separation in people's minds between friends/romantic partner, since I know of at least 2 couples that started out as friends, but I think I don't like it as a strategy, as I feel I would be being very dishonest if I'm befriending a woman, but in reality, I'm romantically interested in her and keeping that secret. I think I could befriend a woman that has already shot me down though, since I wouldn't be pretending (I'm currently in this situation with a woman, where I'm interested in developing a friendship even though she rejected me romantically). Basically, if I'm going to be friends with a woman, I can't do it with some kind of hope or expectation that it will develop into something more, I prefer taking the shot directly and seeing what happens.
Your perspective is interesting though, I feel like if a woman wanted to take it that slow I would assume she's uninterested. Certainly, if I keep talking to her, I would be pursuing other prospects simultaneously.
Yeah, probably just a sad kid with a huge case of "I'll show you" and access to a high powered rifle.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/igorwo/einherjar/
I wrote this years ago
He absolutely changed the course of politics - just wait and see how the FBI responds.
I mean, the most immediate consequence is probably giving Trump the presidency.
I *think* you mean increasing the probability of Trump being inaugurated from the (? 60%?) it was a few days ago to (?? 80%? 90%?), yes? If not, please clarify.
Not _quite_ giving Trump the presidency, but a gift nonetheless.
The models are going to lag because their inputs are primarily public polling, and obviously the polls haven't yet captured the impact of the assassination attempt.
My strong suspicion is that it's essentially over. The underlying terrain is that Biden was trailing (simple average of existing polls) and he needed to catch up. Even before the shooting I think that would have been almost impossible due to the controversy regarding his age. In the aftermath of the shooting it's an even more daunting task.
Agreed with models lagging and race over barring extraneous events. I think it was more likely than not (hence my 60%, probably conservative) before and without the shooting; I don't think you were disagreeing.
Yeah, Trump was winning before. The shooting just enhanced his front runner status.
I think that iconic photo of Trump will win him a lot of votes from the subset of voters who don't watch much political coverage, because everyone not living in a cave will see that image.
“Round up all the usual suspects”
Honestly, I think one of the big, BIG issues is that young people—particularly young men—don't have hobbies anymore. Something that captures their interest apart from the Internet, video games, & their peers.
EXCEPTIONALLY well-written piece, this. "...there’s my ineradicable feeling that many millions of people live lives exsanguinated of meaning." That "exsanguinated"—_perfectly_ used though I've never _seen_ it used that way before—gave me goosebumps.
I have to disagree. What young men need is a cause, by which I mean something larger than themselves where they can work with others to advance towards a common goal and, along the way, reap the benefits of community. And it helps if the other members of that group are also men.
And how do you think people find causes where they "work with others to advance towards a common goal..."?
Generally, through shared interests. Which often begin as hobbies. 😀
I was thinking more of the Elks Club, or the Boy Scouts. If you like pipe smoking, fine, but I'm not sure how that translates into group action. Trying to get more people interested in smoking perhaps?
Pipe-smoking? That's yr idea of a hobby? Really? 😀
I was thinking astronomy. Or rock-collecting. Or fishing. Or playing a musical instrument.
At best you get to congregate with fellow enthusiasts. But real community isn't about sitting around together and knitting--it's about sitting around together and knitting sweaters for the homeless and then passing them out with free lunches.
I can't stress this enough: guys needs a cause that is bigger than themselves. Like a militia.
Uh—the FIRST step to sitting around & knitting sweaters for the homeless is developing an enthusiasm for knitting.
But I can't imagine that many boys will be saved from anomie by knitting, so I can only imagine yr bizarre interjection here is some dis on what you imagine female hobbies to be.
What sorts of things are you thinking of? I can't think of a lot of things. I wonder if that's one of the reasons gun culture and survivalism is so popular.
It's really hard to find causes that are bigger than yourself, but I agree they are needed. Parenting used to be the biggest one.
It worked for Timothy McVeigh!
cough cough communism cough cough ;)
(not necessarily of course, but I'm inclined to be in favour of community works projects)
Could be anything.
One of my sons is doing that with wildland firefighting. There's a real sense of common purpose and comradery. Extreme physical labor too.
All stuff that is extremely appealing to guys.
There's nothing wrong with being a woman, but men and women are different. And a society that ignores what makes for healthy males gets unhealthy ones.
Too true. I'm an assertive woman who walks in no man's shadow, but I absolutely agree that men and women are different. We need to start coming up with positive ways for masculinity to be expressed and channeled.
They also aren’t allowed in groups without adult supervision. And many times that adult supervision comes bearing medication.
Purple prose Freddie is my favorite Freddie.
This is a horrifying universal human problem when you have a bunch of hopeless, directionless young men. Whenever something like this happens and people jump on how it was the unique evil of whatever belief systems the gunman followed that really pulled the trigger, I think about Juramentado.
In the Philippines under Spanish and American (and Japanese) occupation, young men would make elaborate preparations to attack military and police targets with blade weapons, tourniqueting their limbs at each joint so they could keep fighting even after having a limb shot or disabled.
It was sort of a predecessor to suicide bombing, before that was technologically feasible. It relied on institutions of men who created a permission structure for violence and made the kids who went off to die feel like heroes.
Now people can cobble together permission structures from all the various disparate arguments for violence from Fanon to Evola to create their own bespoke justifications for murder. But it's not the existence of those arguments that made the person murder - they're looking for any justification for what they already emotionally want to do. Blaming the words instead of the person who decided to arrange them into a permission slip for murder seems really short sighted.