As the Left’s gaslighting campaign over what motivated Charlie Kirk’s murderer was still in full swing, yet another politically-motivated shooting shocked the country. It’s time we faced reality about how young men are being raised these days.

The latter incident is of course the Dallas ICE facility shooting on September 24. A 29-year-old man by the name of Joshua Jahn opened fire from a rooftop nearby this facility, killing one person and critically injuring two more. He then took his own life. It came on the heels of the Charlie Kirk murder at the hands of 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, a mere 14 days prior.

A lot has been said and written about the political motivations on the part of both young men. It’s evident at this point that (a section of) the Left cultivates such people at this time, and it needs to be called out as such. Progressive Froot Loops like Taylor Lorenz, who actively cheered on Luigi Mangione after that man-child assassinated United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in 2024 by shooting him three times from behind, need to be expunged from polite society altogether. If there are similar people on the Right engaging in this type of behavior, I’m unable to recall them. But you can be guaranteed they wouldn’t receive the same reception as Lorenz.

I suspect that the political motivations dovetail with other factors, though, and very few observers if any have been discussing this in the heat of the moment. Six years ago, I wrote a blog post about this very topic. The immediate reason for it was a pair of mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio, both politically motivated and occurring within 24 hours of each other. Coincidentally, the Left tried to lump the two together under the white supremacy banner, but it was later revealed that the Dayton shooter actually had close ties to Antifa; I didn’t know about this when I wrote my post in the aftermath of the shootings, but Andy Ngo reported about it in his excellent book about Antifa (reviewed here). As a result, the El Paso shooting is being commemorated yearly by our mainstream media while, in Ngo’s words, “the Dayton shooting went down the memory hole.”

In the aforementioned blog post I identified four risk factors which push young men over the edge: a problematic family history (mostly the separation of parents); social isolation exacerbated by technology (social media, gaming, etc.); the internet being an echo chamber for political extremism and conspiracy theories; and substance abuse.

Interestingly, on the face of it neither Tyler Robinson nor Joshua Jahn seems to have come from a particularly dysfunctional family, which makes their cases somewhat unusual. In this sense, they make for lousy arguments for my theory.

But there are some indicators that both men led an extremely online life. Tyler Robinson left messages etched on his bullet casings which, according to CNN, “included a mix of memes and allusions to video games, suggesting a deep immersion in an irony-soaked online world where meanings can be difficult to precisely decipher.” References were also made to the bizarre online phenomenon known as “furry culture”.

The Dallas Observer reports that Joshua Jahn similarly “had an extensive online profile” which, while revealing “little obvious interest in politics”, did include “two Reddit accounts, where he talked about video games, cars, ‘South Park’ and marijuana.”

(Jahn was also charged in 2015 with “delivering marijuana”, according to the USA Today. He was forced to pay a $500 fine and put on a five-year probation. In other words, there’s a very good chance he was an avid pot consumer too.)

None of this evidence is conclusive, but it does appear as if both men went down the online rabbit hole of gaming and social media, and lost touch with the real world along the way. The problem is not extensive use of the internet per se, but the total immersion in it and adopting its language, which in its peculiarities and esoteric style is all but incomprehensible to older people, yours truly included. An inevitable related problem is that every minute spent online precludes time spent socializing with real people.

One doesn’t need to look deeply into the issues plaguing our young today to understand a dynamic which wasn’t at play even twenty years ago. It’s been expertly documented by Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge among others.

The scourge of being perpetually online manifests itself differently between the sexes. Haidt writes in The Anxious Generation:

While girls’ social lives moved onto social media platforms, boys burrowed deeper into the virtual world as they engaged in a variety of digital activities, particularly immersive online multiplayer video games, YouTube, Reddit, and hardcore pornography—all of which became available anytime, anywhere, for free, right on their smartphones.

It should be noted, in addition, that men tend to resort to physical aggression faster than women. This is true in general, and presumably more true for young men who tumble down the online rabbit hole. The girls cry and scream on TikTok for all the world to see; The men go nihilist and in the most extreme cases start shooting.

Also worth noting is that Jahn looks obese in the photos posted online and didn’t seem to have a life partner. This is purely speculative, but is it possible that an inability to find a girlfriend and a resulting p0rn addiction might have played a role as well?

Prior to the rise of the internet, broken families were one of the biggest if not the biggest contributor to societal decay in the United States. It’s clear from the cases analyzed above that broken families are not a necessary cause of violence, political or otherwise. Nor are they a sufficient cause presumably. But they are clearly a big contributor to the nihilism taking over so many of our youth.

The rise of the internet subsequently added a whole new set of problems affecting a generation already bruised and battered from deep and swift societal changes. What the kids are looking for more than anything else is meaning: Stability at home, friends, a purposeful occupation, and, when they’re ready, a mate with whom to share life and produce a new generation — which then should become the grateful beneficiary of these same life assets. In other words, a cause higher than themselves.

We have broken this cycle to the detriment of us all. The kids are depressed and devoid of purpose in life. I would expect things to get worse before they get better.