If we really want to deter suicide and self-harm, we should prescribe social media to teenagers, not ban it

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| November 2025

The anti-teen-social-media case keeps falling apart even as it peaks politically.

Girls report feeling more “sad or hopeless” (53%) than boys (28%) do, the 2021 and 2023 Centers for Disease Control surveys show. Authorities and media commentators, in psychologist Jean Twenge’s typical claim, declare girls’ rising depression, suicides, and self-harm are just because…

“…social media provides an endless way for other kids to be cruel, they can never achieve the perfect bodies they see on Instagram, they are constantly judged for their appearance in the endless selfies they are compelled to post, unknown adults can sexualize them, they are continually stressed about how many likes they’re going to get, and some social media accounts glorify (and even instruct about) self-harm.”

We get it. Twenge thinks teenage girls are stupid, vain, mean, and shallow. That is not at all my experience working with teenagers for 30 years in family, community, and wilderness programs and school/university settings, but Twenge’s stereotype is common. Her rant offers zero evidence, which seems to enhance, not dampen, the media’s adoration.

Let’s consider its basic statistical case:

· 59% of girls who use social media frequently daily or more report chronic sadness, compared to 49% of those who use social media less often (boys’ comparable figures are 31% and 27%).

· Of the 22% of girls who are bullied online, 77% report persistent sadness, 29% report a suicide attempt, and 13% report self-harming, much higher percentages of mental distress than reported by the unbullied.

Twenge and others insist that mere “positive correlation” no matter how limited, selective, and “small” is all that’s required; social media must be the problem. Don’t look any further. What else could girls possibly be sad about?

The huge factor Twenge leaves out

Here’s one hint from the same girls on the same survey. Of the 22% of girls who report being bullied online (cyberbullied):

· 84% ALSO report being bullied (emotionally abused) at home by parents and household grownups,

· 59% have parents with “severe” mental health problems,

· 50% have parents who abuse drugs/alcohol, and

· 48% have violent parents who hit, beat, slapped, kicked, etc., their kids and/or each other.

Of the 12% of boys who report being cyberbullied:

· 78% ALSO report being emotionally abused at home by parents and household grownups,

· 45% have parents with “severe” mental health problems,

· 42% have parents who abuse drugs/alcohol, and

· 46% have violent parents.

Funny, Twenge and others who incessantly deplore social media, cyberbullying, and girls’ mental troubles never mention these crucial contexts.

This dereliction is unconscionable, since the 22% of girls who are bullied online who also are among the 70% who are abused by grownups at home suffer the most severe mental health problems themselves (84% of these multi-bullied girls report chronic sadness, one-third have attempted suicide, 14% self-harm… can you blame them?). How can authorities simply dismiss this multiple tragedy?

I keep talking about this because others won’t

As dissected repeatedly on this substack, the statistical flaws in social-media-blamers’ simple “correlation equals causation” argument are threefold: (a) their correlations of social media use and mental health are woefully weak, barely “small” in effect; (b) it is confounded by a reverse correlation; that is, depressed teens use social media more; and, worst of all, (c) it suppresses far more important factors in teens’ lives that cause sadness.

Twenge and others’ negligible social-media effect sizes result from their exclusion of a broad set of factors – parents’ and adults’ abuses, violence, drug/alcohol problems, poor mental health, and jailing – the 2023 CDC survey shows are absolutely critical to those seeking a true teen mental health picture.

My last few postings analyze the effects of parents’ drug/alcohol abuse, which multiple measures show has soared over the last 15 years to a staggering 5.5 million hospital overdose emergencies and deaths among parent-aged adults in 2024. The CDC’s survey found 34% of girls and 25% of boys reported drug/alcohol abusing parents.

Suddenly, the whole perspective shifts

Tables 1-6 do something no other analysis does: they divide the effects of teens’ social media use (as defined by the CDC) into two categories: those with parents who abuse drugs and/or alcohol, and those whose parents don’t. The first 3 tables show raw percentages.

Source: CDC 2024.

Three-fourths of girls and nearly half of boys whose parents abuse drugs/alcohol suffer serious sadness, compared to fewer than half of girls and one-fourth of boys whose parents don’t abuse drugs/alcohol (Table 1). Sadness is somewhat more prevalent among teens who use social media more.

Complications follow. When it comes to suicide attempts and self-harm requiring medical attention – much worse than simply being sad – parents’ drug/alcohol abuse is a major associate. Girls who use social media often are at much LESS risk than girls who rarely use social media. Boys and teens whose parents don’t abuse drugs/alcohol show more ambiguous results for suicide attempt, but the self-harm pattern is clear: both sexes show substantially LESS risk the MORE teens use social media, regardless of whether their parents abuse drug/alcohol (Tables 2, 3).

That’s startling

Both girls and boys who use social media more are somewhat sadder. Yet, these sadder, social-media-frequenting girls are much less likely to attempt suicide and to harm themselves than social-media-avoiding girls. A similar, weaker pattern is found for boys.

You can do the math from the table. Among sadness-prone girls with drug/alcohol abusing parents and who rarely use social media, 45% go on to attempt suicide and 1 in 6 self-harm. Among corresponding girls who often use social media, just 29% go on to attempt suicide and 8% self-harm. Boys and teens whose parents don’t abuse drugs/alcohol show a similar progression – more social media use seems to deter really bad outcomes.

You’d think authorities would be falling over themselves to understand what mechanism connected to social media use is associated with deterring girls in particular from going on to rash acts. We want to prevent suicide and self-destructive behaviors, right? (…right?)

That not one major authority mentions this startling fact shown their own official CDC survey documents tells us how dishonest the entire teens-and-social-media discussion has become.

How important are these factors?

It isn’t just raw percentages or “statistical significance” that matter; far more important is how much relative influence different factors have on teens’ mental health.

Tables 4-6 show the odds ratios (which compare the odds of an event happening to the odds of that event not happening) for 3 outcomes – teens’ sadness, suicidality, and self-harm – and 2 potential causes: social media use, and parents’ drug/alcohol abuse.

Source: CDC 2024.

An odds ratio of 1 denotes no effect; below 1, a reverse effect. For most social science work, weaker odds ratios of 0.7 to 1.4 shouldn’t be taken seriously.

Even odds ratios of 1.4 up to 2.5, or 0.7 down to 0.4, indicate only small effects. That smallness, not the mere fact of statistical significance (that is, the 95% confidence intervals in parentheses are both higher or both lower than 1.00), ethically should be reported as the main finding.

At odds ratios of 2.5, and especially 4.0 or higher (or below 0.4, and especially 0.25), we sit up and take notice. These are medium and strong effects. You can start to claim a real finding (always couched as, “merits further investigation…”).

Odds ratios can be used to calculate Cohen’s d, the standard statistic of “effect size.” It has its own distribution. Let me speak plainly:

· d below 0.20, you got nothin’, shut the hell up;

· d = 0.20 to 0.50, small, you ain’t found much;

· d = 0.50 to 0.80, medium, use your indoor voice;

· d = 0.80 or above, start shouting.

In the upper lefthand corner of Table 4, girls who use social media frequently are 1.56 times more likely to suffer serious sadness compared to girls who use social media less. The odds that the true proportion falls between 1.35 and 1.81 are 95%, which is “significant.” However, this translates into a d value of 0.25, barely above “small.”

You’ve just seen the entire statistical case that social media harms teens’ mental health; in fact, my numbers are more generous than most studies find.

It’s downhill from here

The blame-social-media mob might be able to whisper that social media might be weakly associated with more sadness in some girls, pending investigation into multiple factors, but is far below the level needed to recommend policy.

Otherwise, the blame-social-media endeavor is a hoax – especially when we get to the important stuff like suicide and self-harm. Social media use has no effect on suicide attempt and actually appears to help deter self-harm.

However… parents’ drug/alcohol abuse? Consistently, the negative effects on teenagers’ mental health are worth talking, and sometimes shouting, about.

Usually, a regression analysis just confirms odds-ratio findings. Here, stepwise regression comparing the effects of two independent causes (social media use and parents’ drug/alcohol abuse) on three dependent outcomes (teens’ sadness, suicide attempt, and self-harm) rejects social media use as a significant factor in all 3 cases and leaves only parents’ drug/alcohol abuse (p=0.000 for all outcomes).

It’s no contest

The CDC’s results, and mine here using the CDC’s definition of social media use, are very similar. Parents’ drug-alcohol abuse is so dramatically more important in influencing teens’ sadness, suicide attempt, and self-harm that blaming social media is a waste of time.

It’s important to recognize the CDC survey further shows the teens most at risk of poor mental health suffer not just one family issue, but an average of 2-3 serious parental and family risks, which diminishes social media below “nothing” as a cause of poor mental health.

The only way to elevate social media use even to minimal importance as a factor in teens’ mental health is by arbitrarily excluding parents’ troubles from analysis. Even then, social-media-blamers typically produce anemic d values of around 0.20 at best, which they wildly ballyhoo to permissive journal editors and gullible politicians and media editors as apocalyptic proof that “social media is destroying a generation.” Except for a few media-vulnerable teens and adults who do need help, the social-media panic is descending into destructive fraud.

Why do teenaged girls have such low rates of suicide and drug death?

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| November 2025

Teenaged girls report much more sadness than boys or grownups. Yet girls are vastly safer from suicide and self-inflicted death. What are we missing here?

Thirty years ago, sociologist Meda Chesney-Lind deplored the “criminalization of girls’ survival strategies” by authorities who callously ignored violent and sexual abuses inflicted on girls, then forcefully stepped in to arrest and confine girls who ran away or “incorrigibly” defied their abusers.

Today’s bizarrely contradictory numbers warn that authorities who ignore widespread abuses and family troubles girls’ suffer are similarly “pathologizing girls’ survival strategies” by mischaracterizing girls’ understandable depression as a teenage “mental health crisis” justifying severe restrictions on teens, including bans and parental controls on vital social media use.

I’ve detailed Centers for Disease Control survey numbers showing how depressed girls from troubled families use social media to reduce their suicide attempts and self-harm. Independent numbers also indicate more serious survival strategies girls – and some boys as well – in difficult circumstances ignored by authorities use to avoid deadly outcomes. Of course, authorities and commentators then pathologize girls’ strategies rather than the conditions that caused them.

We’re getting the teenage “mental health crisis” all wrong – perhaps deliberately so

Among commentators’ many grotesque misrepresentations of suicide and drug overdose is their universal refusal to acknowledge and incorporate the vital fact that teens’ rates, especially for girls, are far below rates of supposedly stable grownups.

The following tables show the CDC’s latest, 2023, estimates of hospital emergency (ER) cases for self-inflicted injuries (self-harm and overdose overlap), along with tabulations of deaths in society from corresponding causes. Teen and parent ages of nearly equal population size are depicted so the numbers can be directly compared:

Female age 10-19

Hospital ER visits: 134,500 for self-harm, 114,300 for overdoses

Actual deaths in society: 724 suicides, 646 fatal drug overdoses

Male age 10-19

Hospital ER visits: 35,900 for self-harm, 66,300 for overdoses

Actual deaths in society: 1,913 suicides, 1,057 fatal drug overdoses

Female age 40-49

Hospital ER visits: 21,800 for self-harm, 114,700 for overdoses

Actual deaths in society: 1,787 suicides, 7,152 fatal drug overdoses

Male age 40-49

Hospital ER visits: 20,800 for self-harm, 240,600 for overdoses

Actual deaths in society: 6,156 suicides, 17,085 fatal drug overdoses

The ratio of self-harm hospital cases to deaths:

Girls age 10-19: 185 to 1

Boys age 10-19: 19 to 1

Women age 40-49: 12 to 1

Men age 40-49: 3 to 1

That is, girls give plenty of warning of distress before killing themselves. In contrast, boys and adult women provide little advance warning. Adult men? practically none.

The overdose ER-to-death pattern is also intriguing:

Girls age 10-19: 175 to 1

Boys age 10-19: 60 to 1

Women age 40-49: 16 to 1

Men age 40-49: 14 to 1

Girls have as many overdose ER cases as adult women, while boys have fewer and adult men the most. Yet, teens register very few deaths from overdoses in society. The adult ER pattern appears to reflect real trends toward more deadly drug abuse, while the teen pattern, especially for girls, reflects more of a warning flag.

One could argue that girls, like Suicidal Tendencies’ inept “Suicidal Failure,” are inclined to dramatic gestures but just aren’t good at killing themselves. However, the opposite is more plausible. We would expect that as inexperienced drug users, teenagers would be more likely than adults to lack physiological tolerance for drugs and to make fatal overdose mistakes.

This may be why supposedly “volatile” teen girls have few suicides and o.d. deaths

It seems likely that girls are far less likely to commit self-inflicted fatality because they are far more likely to seek help, both via greater social media connections and by more dramatic self-harm gestures to get attention and time to deal with their distress. The overdose and cutting harms girls choose are much more forgiving and treatable attention-getters than self-inflicted gunshots, hangings, or jumping off the Golden Gate that tend to win attention posthumously.

The “survival strategy” interpretation helps explain the apparent puzzle that social media use is connected with more depression and sadness among girls, and also with less suicide attempt and self-harm.

Naturally, top authorities and commentators simply fixate obsessively on social media use, exclude all factors related to parental abuses and family problems no matter how compelling, ban all mention of girls’ unexpectedly low rates of suicide and overdose death… and then complete their circular feedback loop by concluding that girls’ own social media use must be what causes their “mental illness” and ER cases.

This GIGO approach results in the pathologizing of girls’ survival strategies. I apologize in advance for the next posting, which will detail the mathematics of social-media versus parent-addiction causalities of both girls’ and boys’ mental health issues.

Ill-considered social-media bans endanger millions of teenage girls whose online connections help them deal with parents’ skyrocketing addictions

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| November 2025

Surprising Centers for Disease Control numbers show teenage girls, especially those with drug/alcohol abusing parents, have LOWER rates of suicide and self-harm the MORE they use social media.

The fervent concern over girls’ mental health mysteriously vanishes when shocking realities – including from the Centers for Disease Control – challenge official dogmas.

The CDC’s massive 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey of 20,000 high schoolers (the gold standard of the teenage “mental health crisis” and the only comprehensive survey available) found a disturbing 34% of girls ages 13-18 are growing up with parents and guardians who abuse drugs and/or alcohol.

Confirming girls’ survey answers is the soaring body count, as pointed out previously. Parent-aged (26-64) adults’ suffered a record 230,000 deaths and 10.7 million hospital emergency cases from drug/alcohol overdoses in 2023 and so far tabulated in 2024, with annual tolls more than doubling in the last 15 years as today’s Gen Z teens grew up.

Despite powerful and blatantly obvious associations of parents’ drug/alcohol abuse and teens’ mental health, suicide attempts, and self-harm, comfortable political, health, and media authorities refuse to engage this disturbing reality that millions of teens cope with in their homes every day.

Instead, authorities shut down all discussion of parental issues and simply blame girls themselves for their mental health troubles. Girls, the popular narrative goes, are just helpless, self-abusing “victims” who make themselves depressed and suicidal by using social media and smartphones.

As a result of self-imposed ignorance and denial, authorities are implementing restrictions and bans that endanger millions of girls whose daily use social media is associated with significant reductions in their risks of suicide and self-harm amid widespread grownup drug and alcohol abuse.

The surprising – and completely ignored – patterns

The CDC survey shows girls age 13-18 are considerably more likely to grow up in homes where parents and grownups abuse drugs and alcohol (34%, versus 25% for boys), suffer severe mental health problems (41% vs. 25%), are violently abusive (35% vs. 30%), are emotionally abusive (70% vs 53%), and have been jailed (19% vs. 16%). It is not clear why girls suffer unhealthier households; perhaps girls take on caretaker roles in troubled families that keep them tied to home more than boys.

Completely ignoring girls’ family conditions, authorities then express shock and dismay that girls also suffer poorer mental health (41% vs 20% for boys), suicide attempt (14% vs. 7%), and self-harm (3.9% vs. 1.4%). It must be that girls use social media more (88% daily, vs. 81% for boys), luminaries puzzle; can’t think of anything else that might be bothering them.

Let’s help the authorities out. The tables below show the progression from being depressed to suicide attempt and self-harm along with girls’ social media use, a point I’ve explored before but now in the context of parents’ rising drug/alcohol abuse.

Table 1 shows the case that social media use causes girls’ poor mental health. Daily social media use is associated with more depression regardless of whether parents abuse drugs/alcohol. Many in the social-media debate don’t seem to realize how superficial the argument for blaming social media for girls’ depression is: simple “correlation equals causation.” The universal approach is simply to stop there: more social media use, more depression, go no further.

Tables 2 and 3 show why it’s crucial that analysts dig deeper.

Source: CDC 2024.

Parental abuse of drugs/alcohol is associated with considerably worse mental health among girls, regardless of girls’ social media use. Further, girls whose parents abuse drugs/alcohol use social media more (47.6% several times an hour) than girls of non-drug/alcohol abusing parents (39.5%).

Now, the unexpected results. Table 2 shows that girls whose parents abuse drugs and/or alcohol have SIGNIFICANTLY LOWER rates of suicide attempt the MORE thsee girls use social media, while girls whose parents don’t abuse drugs/alcohol show NON-SIGNIFICANTLY LOWER suicide attempt levels with more social media use.

For the most injurious mental health outcome the CDC surveyed, self-harm serious enough to require medical treatment, Table 3 likewise shows that in families in which parents abuse drugs and/or alcohol, girls who FREQUENTLY use social media are much LESS at risk of harming themselves than girls who RARELY use social media. Girls in non-addicted families show non-significant results.

Bottom line: girls with drug/alcohol abusing parents and household adults are many times more likely to attempt suicide and/or harm themselves – and frequent social media use is associated with reducing those risks.

These are clear patterns. Why can’t authorities see them?

These results don’t require a lawyer and FOIA petition to unearth. They are directly from the CDC’s official survey, the one that defines the “teenage mental health crisis,” the one everyone uses. Two possibilities emerge, neither edifying.

EITHER major health officials, politicians, and leading social-media authorities are:

– Ignorant of fundamental realities young people face, which means they are not experts at all and are not worthy of the attention they’re getting;

OR they are:

– Aware of but unwilling to face these realities, which means they are appallingly callous, self-serving, and lack normal concern for young people’s well-being.

The next post will further refine CDC survey data that cast authorities, interest groups, and pop-media “experts” in an even worse light.

Generation Z is not bringing some “new” terror of social-media-driven “nihilistic violent extremism”

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| November 2025

Today’s much rarer young killers are scarier than yesterday’s larger numbers? You’ve got to be joking.

Back in my Sixties Boomer teenhood, Charles Manson and his Beatles-worshipping creepy-crawlies embarked on blood-drenched massacres to ignite a “race war.” They schemed to hide out in a fantastic chocolate-fountained hole in the desert where Satan would anoint Charlie Lord of the Pit. Scores followed Manson, acided, naked, sunburned, searching for the holy pit. Manson was a child of brutal imprisonment, but his followers were White middle-class. “I’m the devil,” Manson-blessed assassin Tex Watson, 23, told his celebrity victims before butchering them (1969).

Charles Joseph Whitman, 25, the Eagle Scout ex-Marine who shot 46 from the University of Texas tower (1966), was “oozing with hostility” and “self-loathing,” his campus psychiatrist said. Anthony Barbaro, 17, honor student, shot 14 at his rural New York high school (1974) “to kill the person I hate most – myself.” Brenda Ann Spencer, 16, shot 9 children at a San Diego elementary school (1979); why? “I don’t like Mondays. This livens up the day.” (“You’re looking for reasons? There are no reasons.” – Boomtown Rats.) Patrick Purdy, 24, shot 35 and himself at a Stockton grade school (1989) to make his “end dramatic and cause people to remember.” Evan Ramsey, 16, shot 4 at his Bethel, Alaska, high school (1997) for “infamy” as 15 tipped-off students lined up to watch. Luke Woodham,16, shot 9 at Pearl (Mississippi) High School (1997) because “I was ridiculed, always beaten, always hated.” Michael Adam Carneal, 14, shot 9 at his West Paducah, Kentucky, middle school (1997), saying only, “I can’t believe I did that.” Mitchell Johnson, 13, and Andrew Golden, 11, shot 15 at their Jonesboro, Arkansas, middle school (1998); “I had a lot of killing to do,” Johnson said.

When it comes to self-hatred, victimism, nihilism, dark rage, name your evil, Gen Z gun-killers can’t top this sampling of just some pre-Columbine White youngsters gone horribly wrong, the age-mates of today’s our-generation-never-did-that grayhairs. Lesser school shootings were considered just local news back then.

Freed by ignorance of history, today’s left-to-right crusaders aping Netflix’s idiotic “Adolescence” series cobble vague, contradictory, often made-up info scraps into hard narratives branding school shooters and assassins (and maybe the 29-year-old accused of setting Los Angeles’s Palisades fire) as some new, horrifying breed of anti-social, self-hating young White nihilists driven to motiveless violence by whatever online malevolence the crusader most hates. Misogynist Andrew Tate? Nazi-Groyper Nick Fuentes? Amorphous Antifas? Soros, anyone?

Yeah. Real new. Never seen the like.

As amusing as leftist Francesca Fiorentini’s memefest is pretending that alienated going-nowhere young men radicalized into Nihilistic Violent Extremists is some frightening new social media brain rot – a nihilistic meme of its own she weirdly helps far-right FBI director Kash Patel push – just imagine if today’s bellowers had some school shooters’ Discord or TikTok postings that sported anything remotely resembling Manson-minion derangements. You could hear them on Mars.

Culture-war commentators do obey a rigid, unspoken rule: when the assailant is young, they generalize him to all of Gen Z. But when the shooter is 30s, 40s, or older, their own peer ages, they abruptly reverse themselves. Blame all young men for the crimes a few of their peers commit, commentators chorus, but don’t blame privileged grownups for our peers’ far more common mass violence.

This is crude bigotry. Do leftist podcasters in particular think it’s just good fun to endlessly demonize Generation Z, as if that has no consequences?

Truth is an illusion; 2025 truth doubly so (apologies, Douglas Adams)

We must prefer our misinformation swamps … Artificial Intelligence slop, photoshopping, grammar-challenged anonymities, propaganda machines, anti-scientism, corporate shillings, rampant mainstream-media distortions and all … to factual evidence whose clarity batters cherished loathings.

I’m talking about factual 80% to 90% declines in crime, violence, gun killings, homicide, and dropout by American and other Western youths over the last 30 to 50 years as young people became more racially diverse. America has never seen a social shocker like this, starkly documented in FBI and CDC statistics, that so powerfully demolishes popular assumptions around which entire discourses are fabricated.

No other explanation beckons for why we almost never see real youth trends mentioned by right-to-left media or political leaders. Their culture-war inflammations depend on an endless barrage of youth-are-bad-and-getting-worse disinformation.

California, in addition to being an epicenter and harbinger of national trends, maintains more complete and consistent statistics than other states. If any place suffers a social-media-corrupted scourge of Gen Z killer-nihilists, it would be California.

I’ve previously reported young men’s (age under 25) trends. Trends for youths under age 18 are even more compelling. The California Department of Justice documents the following numbers of under-18 murderers by race for key years below; using other years yields similar results:

In 1975: White 142, Hispanic 99, Black 121, Asian 4

In 1994: White 60, Hispanic 237, Black 163, Asian 82

In 2024: White 12, Hispanic 84, Black 24, Asian 4

These numbers may look unbelievable, but they are not statistical shenanigans. Yes, Fox News, California still arrests murderers and violent criminals under the same laws and reports their numbers under the same standards it always did – in fact, laws have expanded, especially in policing domestic violence, and reporting has become more rigorous. The state’s 1975 pioneering crime report provided race and age breakdowns for 73% of law enforcement agencies, requiring minor statistical adjustment, while later reports covered 99%-plus.

Another caveat: Is the stunning reduction in youthful homicide crimes from the 1970s (the television/radio era) to the 2020s (the internet/social-media era) simply due to better medical science saving more victims’ lives? Maybe a few, but the numbers of violent-felony assaults, robberies, rapes, and kidnappings perpetrated by California youth ALSO plummeted in the internet era:

In 1974: White 6,003, Hispanic 4,035, Black 7,072, Asian 466

In 1994: White 4,856, Hispanic 8,960, Black 6,763, Asian 1,750

In 2024: White 946, Hispanic 3,545, Black 1,706, Asian 418

Had assault/rape/robbery victims been saved from dying in 2024 at the same rate as 1974, for example, there might have been 20 White-youth violent crimes whose victims died in 2024 instead of 12 – still a gigantic drop. Offsetting medical improvements is the proliferation of more lethal firearms capable of killing dozens or even hundreds in minutes.

Was the plunge in violence by youth due to increasing immigrant populations?

Part of it, good evidence suggests. During the 1975-2024 murder and violence plummet, California’s teenaged youth populations grew by 800,000 and evolved from 33% to 73% of Color, with Hispanic and Asian populations rising and White and Black numbers falling.

If the right wing wants more safety from violence, they should be cheering more young immigrants.

Commentaries that omit these crucial trends are fraudulent

So, we return to the question: should we be more afraid of the small number of White-youth murderers today than five-fold more White-youth murderers in the pre-internet 1990s or 12 times more a half-century ago? Are today’s handful of middle-class social-media-era killers more coldly sane, perhaps, or more nihilistically deranged (minting “new horrors” doesn’t require consistency) than those of the pre-internet past?

On their face, real trends make today’s zero-context claptrap laughable. It’s hard to imagine colder evils than the many more pre-social-media pre-manosphere killers.

But culture warriors on all sides fail or refuse to incorporate positive, real trends into their fear mongerings; young people must always be the vanguard of ever-new, ever-more frightening armageddons. And unfortunately, every era seems to host a tiny number who do emulate celluloid Western shoot-‘em-ups, horror comic villainy, Superman roof jumps, noir detectives’ handgunnings, sci-fi/urban bloodwars, subway surfing, the cultural gamut, who then become anecdotal fodder for panic narratives.

But the real drivers of violence, particularly among youth, are not internal demons, but external oppressors like family abuses, poverty, and neurotoxins. Reducing poverty and lead exposure, as occurred from the early 1990s to the early 2020s, accompanied massive declines in young people’s crime and violence, all to the silence of apparently disappointed culture warriors.

Which murders matter?

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| October 2025

Mass and celebrity shootings become even more tragic when authorities and commentators exploit them to inflame vicious campaigns targeting powerless groups.

Should policy makers value only those lives and dangers the public is most concerned about and focus attention and policies on addressing those concerns?

That might seem understandable at first glance. The public is infinitely more upset at school shootings, mass shootings, and hate killings by disturbed/diabolical murderers, especially when the victim is a well-known celebrity like Charlie Kirk.

Media reporters, agencies, and political leaders prioritize assuaging an inflamed public. President Barack Obama ordered flags flown at half mast to mourn the 20 children and 6 adults murdered in 2012’s horrendous Sandy Hook school shooting. President Trump ordered flags lowered to eulogize assassinated right-wing luminary Kirk. Although Obama’s action was less crassly political, the motives of both presidents are understandable. Large swaths of the public upset at the killings demanded action.

But there’s a sinister side to the obsessive media and authoritative fixation on rare mass and celebrity killings: they invite malice while suppressing discussion of mammoth, real, and uncomfortable dangers, especially to American children and youth. Spectacular and emotional tragedies are exploited by unscrupulous leaders to drive unreasoning, bigoted policies like harshly policing feared groups and banning youths from social media.

That exploitation is a grotesque misuse of the responsibility of experts, policy makers, and conscientious media to provide the context and perspective that foster effective measures – which is why America never seems to solve its grossly outsized problems.

My interests are real dangers and policy

Sensational crimes are very hard to prevent precisely because of their rarity and wide range of motivations. Policy becomes distractive and destructive when it exploits rare tragedies to manufacture generalized claims vilifying entire outgroups and punishments designed to satisfy fearful popular clamor to “do something!” (just not anything that bothers anyone important).

If we’re interested in formulating effective policy to prevent violence, then the scientific index is not rare events, but real and common dangers, especially those unpopular to talk about.

For one difficult example, if the Sandy Hook and Kirk shootings occurred in a typical American week, they accompanied 20 children and teenagers murdered by grownups in domestic violence, 350 Americans (including 30 kids) murdered by guns, all part of the 450 Americans (including 45 kids) murdered overall that same week.

We should just keep the flag at half mast

The harsh reality is that we ignore the day-to-day tragedies because they don’t threaten “us” (until they do), and/or because psychologically, they’re an endemic crisis too big to face.

But we ignore them at our peril in policy discussion. For another difficult example, consider how what seems like an encouraging reality is so devastating to media and political needs it is simply suppressed.

Here’s another un-faceable truth: amid the grim headlines, schools remain among America’s safest places from gun violence, with levels on par with Berlin.

In the worst year, 2023, in the 143,000 primary, secondary, trade, and higher-education schools in the United States, there were 350 incidents in which “a gun (was) fired, brandished, or a bullet hit school property”. That is, a child or teen would have to attend school daily for 400 years to risk any kind of gun incident and 1,700 years to risk being killed by gunfire at a school.

Europeans and Japanese would not find even that level acceptable for their schools, but in the American context, it’s a stellar achievement. If the rest of American society were as safe as the schools and colleges attended by 70 million people daily, the United States would have 90% fewer gun deaths and injuries.

But all sides, far left to far right, have whipped up such a frenzy demonizing schools as bullet-riddled hells that the utterly crazed right-wing cure-all for school shootings is gaining traction in terrified district after district: arming school personnel and officers to patrol hallways.

If leaders succumb to popular fear and anger by arming more adults at school, we will have more school shootings, more dead kids, and more dead grownups – a fact that has already unfolded. Locales with more guns (i.e., Republican counties compared to Democratic ones, Texas compared to New York, etc., cold Centers for Disease Control numbers show) suffer vastly higher rates of gun killings than locales with fewer guns.

Those who advocate arming school personnel – and those who inflame fears leading to drastic anti-remedies – should be honest: “Let’s satisfy our egos by making relatively safe schools as dangerous from gunfire as the rest of American society.”

That’s just one reason that from the endangerment and policy contexts I address in this substack, we should prioritize real, common, everyday dangers, not what upsets the public the most.

There are more reasons. The next substack will deal with the historical trends those left to middle to right ignore and distort in dangerously appalling ways to keep their emotional bigotries afloat.

Here’s a case that might counter my arguments about youth and social media

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| October 2025

We all love love love “critical thinking”… in theory. We almost never practice it – and never on youth and social media issues.

Union County, New Jersey, prosecutors accuse a 17-year-old boy of first-degree murder for allegedly crashing his Jeep at 70 miles per hour into two teenaged girls riding e-bikes on September 29, killing both.

Liberal-left podcasters are rushing to cite the New Jersey tragedy as an example of a MAGA-influenced teen boy corrupted by “black-pill” social media, specifically assassinated conservative commentator Charlie Kirk and misogynist “manosphere” influencer Andrew Tate.

That could be, or maybe not. So far, the evidence – mainly an initial investigation by NJ.com (quoted below) – suggesting why he did it remains complicated.

I single out this tragedy because the only way to analyze an issue is to explore cases that challenge points I make – unlike social-media blamers, who dodge compelling evidence that doesn’t fit their narrow agendas.

The alleged killer was far from a “typical teenaged boy” (a meaningless stereotype in any case). His avid-gamer YouTube and TikTok sites had 40,000 viewers. His “social media presence seemed to revolve around professional baseball and ‘MLB: The Show,’ a baseball video game.”

In a 22-minute video (since taken down) the day of the killing, he claimed a “good family by my side” and complained he had been “bullied, ridiculed” and suffered a school suspension for “ridiculous allegations” (spread, he said, by one of the girls and her mother) of “distributing ‘child porn.’” He “compared himself to former Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Trevor Bauer, who was suspended over sexual assault allegations in 2021 but never criminally charged.” He apparently was served a restraining order for stalking one of the girls, who he previously dated. His uncle was a police chief.

The alleged killer also resented one of the girls because she “made fun of Charlie Kirk’s death.” In the past, he had “expressed admiration in his livestreams for Andrew Tate, a polarizing influencer who is accused of running a criminal sex trafficking ring in Romania” but had not posted anything recent on Tate. He once “played the violent video game ‘Grand Theft Auto,’” though he mainly “chattered about baseball and simulated MLB gameplay.”

So, pick your motivator. Normally loud right-wing pundits shrank flaccidly. A White possible-Charlie-Kirk-fan murderer? Not interested. Unless the victimized girl is blond and the killer can be demonized as transgender, gay, leftist, immigrant, Black, Hispanic, Muslim, Democrat and/or woke, the Right doesn’t care about dead girls.

Leftist “Secular Talk” podcaster Kyle Kuliniski did care — for ideological reasons. He leaped on the alleged killer’s present Kirk and past Tate admiration to the exclusion of everything else. Just a normal baseball-loving kid driven to murder by MAGA-fueled hatreds and a criminal online misogynist, Kulinski declared. These kinds of hate-driven killings, mass shootings, and political assassinations – at least, the fraction perpetrated by young men – are the violence that should most worry us, he added.

That depends on whether you prioritize ideology or bodies. Mass shootings (711 victims in 2024, including 18 in or around schools) and hate-killings (104 victims in 2024) indeed are American tragedies. But put together, they account for fewer than 4% of the 21,014 U.S. homicides the CDC so far has tabulated in 2024.

The other 96% of America’s murders, we ignore

Every year in the 2020s United States, the CDC reports, around 200 girls ages 12-17 are murdered, down sharply from the 300 or so murdered every year 35 years ago. Disgraceful then, disgraceful now. No other Western culture (and even most second-world countries) kills at the levels Americans do – including killing children and youth.

So, who murders American girls? You’d think that would be a pressing question. It isn’t. We’ll soon see why.

Three-fourths of the murderers of teen girls are of the same race (in this case, White), and 90% are male. The most recent FBI tabulations of murder victim and murderer characteristics show the killers are not peer teens.

Just 20% of the murderers of girls age 12-17 are boys and 1% are girls under age 18. In a reality no one admits, four-fifths of the murderers of teen girls are adults – 35% are ages 18-24, and 45% are 25 and older.

FBI tabulations show the proportion of murdered teen girls killed by assailants age 25 and older has skyrocketed from 31% in the 1990s to 45% today. Meanwhile, the proportion murdered by peer youths has fallen from 28% to 21% and the proportion murdered by young adults ages 18-24 has fallen from 42% to 35%.

These facts are terrible news for pop-talkers left to right who need youth, preferably the very few rightly or wrongly depicted as having been “radicalized” by some malign social-media influence, to be the problem.

Now, let’s consider the thousands of murder victims they ignore.

Consider just a few of the girls murdered just in the week of the New Jersey tragedy. You heard of Travis Decker? Father, age 32, gunned down his 3 daughters last week. Darnell Jones? Age 33, raped, decapitated, and cut off the hands of his 13-year-old daughter. Edwin Cruz Gomez? Age 38, plowed his car into 4 people just like the New Jersey teen, killing a 16-year-old girl. Three children and one teen girl shot, 2 dead including the teen, at a Texas truck stop, allegedly by their 31-year-old mother. A teenage boy, 18, and girl, 17, shot to death at an Arizona campground; a 31-year-old man has been charged.

No theories, no commentaries on those murders, which are so common they are barely even newsworthy.

News flash, Gen Z:

NO ONE IMPORTANT IN 2025 AMERICA CARES ENOUGH TO ACKNOWLEDGE MURDERED GIRLS… unless their deaths serve an ideological agenda.

NO ONE IMPORTANT CARES WHO IS MURDERING THEM… unless their killer’s characteristics suit the commentator’s personal prejudices.

NO ONE IMPORTANT CARES WHAT THE REAL CONTEXTS OR TRENDS ARE… why should anyone care when they can just make them up?

I’ll follow up to see if in this one case, social media indeed proves the culprit. So far, I’m surprised no one has mentioned the standard American-style remedy: us this tragedy to ban teen girls from riding e-bikes.

We know only one certainty in the era of the internet: teenage murderers and violent offenders have plummeted to record low levels compared to pre-internet eras going back 50 years. However, some readers question whether there might be major qualitative differences in murder today, and whether all murders are created equal. I hope to get to those questions this week.

Young men and violence are generating double the lies

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| October 2025

Why are progressives who champion diversity and multiculturalism sabotaging multiracial Gen Z when they should be touting young people’s stunningly positive trends?

Progressives indulge irrational hostility to sabotage young people’s rights and any hope of a future

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| October 2025

Right-wingers don’t care what I say. So, I direct my ineffectual rage at progressives: WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?

Those who harbor liberal-left values have ONE remaining hope: that Gen Z dramatically turns America, the West, and the world around before mounting political, social, and environmental disasters become irreversible.

Older generations (a few forward-thinking individuals excepted) have proven incapable of leading the transition to a multicultural, global, environmentally sustainable culture human survival requires.

The old order has given up, which is why we see today’s extreme politics of resignation and division sabotaging positive action. Whether younger generations (allied with older individuals who get it) will step up remains the question.

But the fact is: If Gen Z doesn’t save us, no one will. And to have any chance of doing that, they need full access to global information, communication, and expression – yes, social media in all forms – beginning at young ages.

Given that reality, I humbly ask progressives, WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?

Progressives’ crude hostility against young people and eagerness to suppress their internet access at every turn is among the most baffling, self-destroying bigotries of our time.

It would be one thing if Gen Z really were as hopelessly MAGA-reactionary, dark-web corrupted, inexplicably mentally ill, and nihilistically murderous as progressive podcasters depict them. In that case, criticize away.

But what makes progressive trashings and repressions against the young doubly crazed is that they have to indulge grotesque ignorance, primitive double standards, and even outright lies to justify their anti-Z rhetoric.

The endless hate/sarcasm vilifying Gen Z teens and young adults gushing from the liberal-left is so brainless, easy to refute, and destructive that a whole new term begs coinage. Now that zoologists have shown that lemmings don’t actually dash en masse off cliffs, I propose a new term for hypothalamic self-destruction: “they stampeded off that cliff like a herd of progressive podcasters.”

Umbraged chatters might insist, how dare you, we love our teenagers. Unfortunately, liking one’s kids (even that’s not always clear, given commentators’ on-air disparagements of their own teens) and a few favored activists can accompany hating the rest of the younger generation. We all love Greta, Malala, and the campus activists – amid daily demeaning of the other 60 million young people branded as brainless 4chan addicts.

The latest double standard at this writing: three mass-shooting suspects, ages 40, 40, and 42, the first two of whom allegedly killed 8 and injured 16 at a Michigan church and North Carolina bar and the third threatened a gay pride parade, are briefly deplored by progressives. One can add a 44-year-old Michigan man who shot his three children, killing one and leaving two near death, should progressives decide to care about the hundreds of domestic shootings killing children and teenagers at home every year.

For 40-aged shooters, liberal-left commentators do not indulge generalized vilifications of the kind they regularly hurl at young men. You will not hear any say, “this country has a problem with 40-aged men.”

The self-destructiveness of this vitriol toward the young is appalling. Progressives are so insistent that young men must be mass-classed as dumb, manosphere-poisoned “conservatives” that they must want them to be. This recalls ex-president Obama’s insanity – the same Obama who owes his two elections to young voters – that American crime, drug, sexual violence, and poverty are all the fault of the young and school shootings reflect “poisoning the minds of young people.”

After all, if the Left despises the right wing, shootings, misogyny, and young men, why not lump them all together?

Progressives fabricate myths to hate Gen Z

Supposedly fact-respecting liberal-left podcasters ignore the most recent surveys showing men age 18-29 rejecting Trump and MAGA by 25 points, along with FBI tabulations showing 2024’s mass shooters averaged 39 years old and exit polls showing men ages 30-64 12 points more likely than Gen Z men to support Trump even at the peak of Trump’s 2024 popularity.

One could cite structural reasons explaining why all sides indulge hatred toward Gen Z: (a) the young are America’s leading edges of widely-feared racial diversity and technological acumen, (b) the young, our poorest age, don’t have billion-dollar K-Street lobbyists and bribing super-PACs to ward off scapegoaters, etc.

But progressives, normally acute at seeing beyond structural confounds, ignore them in young people’s case and instead fixate on social-media and pop-culture distractions.

The baffling reality is that Gen Z’s stunningly positive trends make them both natural allies and living manifestations of dynamic, hopeful progressive arguments affirming future-facing benefits, safety, and health of diversity and multiculture.

So, why do I get the feeling that Gen Z’s improvements are another reason for progressives to hate them? Progressives refuse to mention Gen Z’s amazingly positive trends and even deny them with a barrage of derisive negativism.

The next substack will present crucial examples from our largest, most progressive, most diverse state’s young people to ask leftist podcasters and commentators again: WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?

Psychology professor Chris Ferguson demolishes the media’s latest “ringing endorsement” of school cellphone bans

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| October 2025

We get it. Politicians and school principals, teachers, and media reporters are flooding news reports with wild enthusiasm about bans on cellphones in schools.

Just as their forebears wildly lauded students lined up in school uniforms, middle-schoolers forced to pee in front of drug testers, violent prison convicts screaming and threatening teenagers in “Scared Straight!” scams, youths expelled for bringing aspirin to school or having a water pistol in their car trunk, and now, the students compelled to surrender their cellphones to confiscation… it all brings quotable joy.

But do any of these easy, one-size-fits-all panaceas that make certain authorities feel so good have any provable benefits? Researchers consistently say: NO. No improvements in mental health, attendance, drug use, academic achievement, crime, violence, dropout, disciplinary cases, or any other important index.

“We know that teachers and administrators are making wild claims of remarkable success for cellphone bans that aren’t supported by public records requests for data from their own schools,” Stetson University psychology professor Christopher Ferguson said.

The present study headlined by The Economist as a “ringing endorsement” of banning student cellphones in schools was a perverse interpretation of a trivial result, Ferguson’s analysis showed. The study of schools in India, an unreviewed “preprint version,” reported only one positive finding: the cellphone ban accompanied a negligible improvement in grades – a claim that carries its own lesson.

In studies with large samples and multiple variables, some irrelevant factors will inevitably prove “statistically significant” – that is, they meet the bare-minimum standard of 95% probability of not being random noise. Thus, we might hastily conclude from “statistically significant” findings from Centers for Disease Control surveys that eating vegetables and drinking milk makes students depressed.

Superficial variable significance can result from poor specification, reverse correlation, random interaction with other variables, and other problems. So, conscientious researchers then look at the most important value: effect size. Even if marginally “significant,” does the variable have any real impact on the issue in question? Here, the imposter variables recede. Eating vegetables and drinking milk has no real effect on depression.

That is how the bogus claim that social media causes student depression got started. The most plausible explanation for researchers’ significant-but-tiny-effect finding is that students who are abused by parents tend both to be more depressed and to use social media more. Popular researchers and authorities just leave out the abuse part and clarion that social media causes depression.

In the case of cellphone bans and school grades, testing for effect size yields a resounding “nothing.” Ferguson points out that the study’s negligible effect value (d=0.086) is so close to zero it amounts to random “noise.” “An effect so unreliably tiny should never have been interpreted as supporting cellphone bans,” Ferguson said. (For reference, a d-value has to reach 0.200 before it is considered even barely “small” and 0.500 to be moderately of interest.) The near-zero d-value of 0.086 actually confirms that “this study is better evidence against cellphone bans than for them,” Ferguson concluded.

As with previous panaceas, the research so far is finding that despite the huzzahs, there are no provable benefits from school cellphone bans. “We can now see that journalistic outlets like The Economist are willing to publish careless fluff, so long as it supports the moral panic narrative,” Ferguson said.

As with other useless one-size-fits-all edicts, whether imposed on youths or adults, there is a better, more effective approach: discipline those who are causing disruption, leave those who aren’t causing trouble alone. Weird idea, I know.

Leftist commentators: Stop your dangerous demagoguery demonizing “young White men”

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| October 2025

In the wake of the horrific assassination of rightist celebrity Charlie Kirk, I had hoped the liberal-Left would retain a healthy respect for facts, qualms about indulging in primitive culture-war scapegoating, and calming voices against right-wing lunacies.

Was I ever wrong

The derangements villainizing “young White men” as a generation vented by progressive podcasters I subscribe to and admired like Krystal Ball (Breaking Points), Kyle Kulinski (Secular Talk), Frances Fiorentini (Bitchuation Room), Jennifer Welch (I’ve Had It), et al, are as brainless and baseless as anything rightist-media dispense.

“Radicalized young men are combustible,” warns the leftist Daily Kos staff in an article thoroughly mischaracterizing the NBC Gen Z poll. “The manosphere and its influencers” are “feeding young men a steady diet of grievance,” creating a “toxic and dangerous” young-male culture of “online threats, mass shootings, and the growing overlap between misogynist and extremist communities.”

Check out my Daily Kos column re-analyzing the Gen Z “gender gap,” much more positive than typically depicted (readers of this substack can skip the last half of it!).

The Left’s crude culture-war scapegoating has not advanced a millimeter over Tipper Gore’s infamous 1980s’ crusade to vilify teenagers and metal, punk, and rap music.

Same old tune, 2025 verse: the 1980s teenage generation corrupted by Ozzy, gangsta, and video games, the armageddons of their day, now aging, insists that today’s apocalypse is young people corrupted by the “dark web.”

Imbecilic panics, shocking truths

America has a “problem” with “young White men,” Ball, Fiorentini, Owens, and leftist colleagues declare over and over since Kirk’s assassination.

No, America does not have a problem with young White men.

Krystal Ball, normally sane, hurls vilifications resembling Fox News’ at its rantiest. We don’t know the Kirk assassin’s motive, Ball admitted seconds before a 4 a.m.-vodka-rambling-mode of grotesque concoctions about his motive.

“We are witnessing the rise of the black-pill killers, predominantly young, White male misanthropes meming themselves into radicalism and violence,” Ball spat. “The all-consuming L-O-L L-O-L L-O-L of contemporary sad-young-man online culture, forum after forum dominated by an endless race to the bottom of nihilism and self-hatred” drives “a whole lot of young men. “The internet is acting as an accelerant” for shootings by “disconnecting us from real life, from real human beings,” a scary new scourge “unraveling” American society.

Aping MAGA illogic, Ball’s made-up speculations about the unknown motives of 5 shooters (who share little beyond young White male demographics) just happen, by merest coincidence, to fit her prejudices.

These speculations require ignoring a lot. Remember ultra-evil Adam Lanza, young White male slaughterer of 20 first-graders and 6 adults at Sandy Hook? Culture warriors broke eyeballs and minds ferreting dark influences. Bummer. Lanza’s online obsession turned out to be… Dance Dance Revolution.

Remember Charles Joseph Witman, the young White man who shot 42 people from the University of Texas tower in 1966, the worst school shooting ever? Eagle Scout, Marine, packing the Boy Scout Handbook. Be very afraid, alarumed singer-satirist Kinky Friedman, “there’s still a lot of Eagle Scouts around.”

Remember Patrick Purdy, young White male who committed California’s worst school shooting, gunning down 34 mostly Asian children at a Stockton’s Cleveland Elementary School in 1989? He might fit central-casting toxic; he raged against everything, long before the manosphere appeared. His was one of at least 5 big school shootings that year, back before Ball and others admit school shootings even happened.

Ball’s anti-factual, ahistorical rant is itself a sad descent into black-pill nihilism, in stark contrast to the healthy, compassionate messaging of young gamer men on the Kirk assassin’s own online Discord boards (see below).

Escapism – “it must be that horror comic, that tune, that TV show, that video game, that website” – goes on and on, newly perpetuated by the ever-self-destructive Left fabricating ever-new culture-war crap to demonize and demoralize its own young constituencies.

It’s all bullshit

Amid the lying, denial, and scapegoating on all sides, let us examine California, home to “a whole lot” of young White males, ground zero of online culture, and keeper of the country’s most complete statistics, the only ones to consistently record crime by detailed age, race, and ethnicity since 1975.

Homicide is by far the best-tabulated, then and now, combining police and medical examiner investigation. The numbers presented below surprise even me.

Ball says: “Rising nihilism” is driving “a whole lot of young men” to commit shootings. Bullshit.

In 2024, a total of 39 of California’s 1 million young White men ages 10-24 murdered someone, just 3% of the state’s homicides. White men ages 25-34 and ages 35-44 each murdered more people, and White men ages 45-54 (the state’s richest demographic) murdered almost as many as all White male Californians under age 25 put together.

Ball says: “The internet is acting as an accelerant” for more murder. Utter bullshit.

Back in 2000, Krystal’s high school graduation year, California White males under age 25 murdered 92 people. In 1994, those halcyon days of warm human connection before the internet, California recorded 226 murders by White men under age 25 – nearly 6 times more. Back in Happy Days 1975, 332 – 8.5 times more.

Number of homicides by California’s young White men under age 25, from the first year tabulated, 1975, to the most recent year, 2024

Sources: California Department of Justice, Crime in California (1975, 1994), Homicide in California (1994-2024).

That is, California’s murder rate (adjusted for population changes) by young White men decades into the supposedly alienating, murder-accelerating online era is actually DOWN a staggering 75% to 80%. Other violent crimes have also fallen precipitously.

This is a shocking, revolutionary trend, paralleling the giant plunge in murder, violence, and crime by California’s increasingly diverse young people of all races over the last half-century.

Yet, the culture-war Left and Right STILL refuse to admit this fantastically positive trend happened alongside growing racial diversity. Their bleak, fictional agendas so desperately need young people always to be bad and getting worse that real trends are a threat that must be suppressed.

Are today’s far rarer Whiteboy murders different?

Culture warriors might respond that today’s young White male murders, though quantitatively far fewer, are qualitatively scarier and more nihilistic. Fair question, but… bullshit again.

It may be that more shootings take place at schools, though we don’t know. Small-casualty school shootings were considered local news prior to the Jonesboro and Columbine massacres in the late 1990s.

Young, White Manson Family’s creepy-crawlies who murdered celebrity “piggies” and dozens of others in the 1960s and ‘70s claimed inspiration from the Bible, Beatles lyrics, and acid. Young White teen Anthony Barbaro shot 14 people at Olean, NY, High School in 1974 in order to kill “himself.” Young White Barbara Ann Spencer shot 9 at San Diego’s Cleveland Elementary School in 1979 because “it was Monday.” You can pack a lot of scary nihilism into motives like that.

Well over 2,000 White males under age 25 were charged with murder in California alone during the 1970s. Maybe the much larger numbers of young White male murderers in the past were nobler, saner, warmer folks than today’s? Run that theory by survivors.

Glass houses

Ball and progressive colleagues, after banging on endlessly about nihilistic chats and toxic manospheres, sometimes tack on a laundry-list of other ills such as gun availability, lack of mental health care, income inequality, COVID isolation, etc.

Even that quick list leaves out the biggest factor – the deteriorating behaviors of Ball’s and colleagues’ own parent-age generation.

Most of the commentators on progressive shows are members of a parent generation that murders at least 900 children every year in substantiated domestic violence – 30 times more children than are murdered at school even in bad years.

Ball is 43. Co-host Saager Enjeti, who also demagogues on “juvenile crime,” is 33. Fiorentini is 38. Kulinski is 37. Do the parent podcasters take the same collective responsibility for their age-mates’ much larger body count that they would impose on young people?

Hell, no. Even when fixating on mass and school shootings, which account for fewer than 1% of American homicides, commentators lie like last year’s bathmat.

The FBI’s latest, 2024 report on mass shootings shows, “the 25-34 age category had the most shooters” and “the shooters’ average age was 39 years old.” It’s not just individual homicides; more children are murdered in mass shootings at home than at school, JAMA Pediatrics reports.

More murders, more mass shootings, more violence… what dark cultures are over-25 generations consuming?

Despite the fact that liberal-Left podcasters’ over-25 generation is better off economically, with higher incomes and lower poverty rates that traditionally protect against risks, America’s 25-44-year-olds are perpetrating more crime, more violence, more suicide, more drug and alcohol overdose, more abusive behaviors, more bullyings, beatings, and murders victimizing children and youths, more mass shootings, and more crazed politics wrecking the futures of young people and the planet, both in gross numbers and per-capita rates compared to younger ages.

Today’s parent generation violently abuses one-third of its kids, emotionally abuses 60%, and subjects one-third to 40% to parents’ and family grownups’ drug/alcohol abuse, criminality, and severe mental health problems in their homes, the 2023 Centers for Disease Control survey reports. Today’s 25-44-year-olds are the first reliably-documented parent generation that is more likely than their teenagers to be arrested, including for violent crimes, public disorder, and even dumbass stuff we used to think only teenagers committed like vandalism, arson, and shoplifting.

Gen Z’s one negative statistic is that they’re more anxious and depressed. They’d be crazy if they weren’t.

Am I being reverse ageist?

Not fair, the average parent might react, we don’t commit crimes, overdose, or (god forbid) abuse or murder our kids. We’re lovely individuals, stellar moms and dads. We don’t hate our teenagers.

True, and that’s the double standard. We grownups demand to be judged as individuals, not as a faceless mass collectively guilty for all the crimes and shootings our agemates do.

Remember the raging that elder America had gone off the rails after that 64-year-old shot more people in Las Vegas in 15 minutes than are shot in ALL 130,000 American schools in 4 years? Oh, wait, there wasn’t any anti-elder raging. Old people have power. Older people vote.

Then, we turn around and deny that same individuality to “young men,” glazing the demographic scapegoat as “young White men” to dodge media euphemists’ use of “young men” and “youth violence” as codewords for “Black.”

What monsters

Amid the crapshow, reporter Ken Klippenstein took a radical step: actually interviewing the assassin’s closest Discord platform friends and obtaining their messaging. What a letdown. Klippenstein found nothing that supported vivid official/media fantasies of godless dark-web manospheric Nihilist Violent Extremist cells slobbering for mayhem.

“The picture that emerges bears little resemblance to the media version,” Klippenstein wrote. He found friendly gamers chatting in Discord forums who were horrified to learn of one of their friend’s murderous deed. Close friends described the shooter as quiet, well-liked, and apolitical. “The friend group who he interacted with on Discord, far from some kind of militia camp or Antifa bunker it’s been portrayed as, represented a range of different political views but mostly talked video games.” Cats were a frequent topic as well.

One of the killer’s online friends led a prayer others joined for Kirk and his family. Far from inflaming murderous conspiracies, the young men online seem deserving of all sides’ praise for reactions far healthier than those of dominant Right-Left conspiratorial foamers.

Enough

To sum up what should be obvious ethics: no collective guilt, no mass generalizations from rare events, no wildly prejudicial assumptions and stereotyping, no scapegoating.

It’s not okay to vilify young people because they have no means of organized response to defamation. Indignance at cultural outrages – yes, there’s bad stuff online, and also in churches, schools, locker rooms, Sunday night poker, on and on – does not justify substituting grossly fabricated assumptions for diligent research.

Krystal Ball, Daily Kos, and other who demagogue this volatile issue owe young men an abject apology.