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.

How the Left is getting Gen Z men and the “gender gap” wrong

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

Assassinations, unmentionable dead kids, and mass unpersoning

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

This isn’t going to be wimpy both-sidesism. The liberal-Left establishment has universally and vehemently grieved podcaster and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk’s horrifying assassination, even sanitizing Kirk’s hate-filled legacy while managing to ignore recent nuances.

The liberal-Left’s responses to Kirk’s shooting stand in glaring contrast to the Right’s furious attacks on “the radical Left” and dehumanizings toward Democratic victims. Examples of many: President Trump’s mocking of the near-fatal hammer attack on Democrat Nancy Pelosi’s husband (Kirk himself called for an “amazing patriot” to bail out the hammer-wielder), Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee’s and other right-wingers’ smirks (“Nightmare on Waltz [sic] Street,” ridiculing Minnesota Gov. Mike Walz) after the assassination of a Democratic legislator by a far-Right gunman. Beyond disgusting.

Mass unpersoning

The links between the mass dehumanization of children and teens whose deaths don’t served established interests that I covered (“the dead kids we don’t care about”) and this week’s larger political hatreds abound. Kirk himself was a gung-ho advocate for releasing the Epstein files documenting elites’ sex-trafficking of children… until Trump’s White House ordered: back off. Then Kirk abruptly went silent. Political exploitation, not young rape victims, took priority. (After lambasting by his fans, Kirk reversed again…sort of.)

Before a shooting suspect had even been identified and motive established, President Trump, in a nationwide address on Thursday, angrily blamed the “radical left” for Kirk’s killing while listing only those few political shootings that victimized Republicans or CEOs and omitting the much longer list of right-wing shooters victimizing Democrats, minorities, and liberals.

Likewise, Fox News host Jesse Watters and dozens of other prominent conservatives declared the right wing is now “at war” with the “radical Left.” Only conservatives are victimized in political violence and only by the Left, they chorused one after another, lies so outrageous on their face they can only signify indifference to liberal and Democrats being injured and killed. “Charlie was one of us,” Watters snarled, the only demographic his brand of Rightist sees as real people.

Trump’s and right-wing pundits’ glaring omission was not because of dementia, ignorance, or even cynical calculation. Take what they said at face value. The president and minions simply don’t see people who hold liberal-Left views as real human beings; therefore, their victimizations by right-wing assailants deserve no notice. Trump said he wouldn’t “waste time” expressing condolences after a Minnesota Democratic leader was assassinated and other Democrats injured by a right-wing killer – nor did any other Republican I’m aware of.

I’m looking for similar statements of indifference or urgings of violence by prominent liberal or left-wing leaders and will publicize if found. One moderate commentator who said Kirk’s “awful words” incite “awful actions,” mild stuff, was summarily fired by MSNBC as “insensitive.” We’ll see if Fox fires Watters and other right-wing regulars like Mark Levin for unhinged ragings and ominous incitements to “avenge” Kirk.

Making dead kids unpersons

However, in the area I write about, the liberal-Left also stands shamefully derelict along with centrists and rightists in their selectively-valued versus who-cares?-unperson status accorded children and teenagers deemed unworthy as political commodities.

Over the past 5 years, the FBI reports, 260 people (overwhelmingly children and teenagers) were murdered at school. Allegations in attorneys general’s court filings indicate a half-dozen more died in suicides plaintiffs blame on cyberbullying and homicides by predators they met online. Given that 35 to 40 million teenagers each average 40 hours at school and 25-30 hours using social media every week – and given that they live in the violence-happy United States of America – schools and social media account for astoundingly tiny fractions of the violent deaths of children and teens, confirmed by multiple analyses as statistically negligible.

Their rarity, of course, doesn’t mean these deaths don’t merit grief and media coverage. Rather, our society’s deep shame is on the opposite side of the issue – the wholesale silence, denial, and even dismissal of American children and teens who died in 8,500 suicides and 11,200 homicides (including at least 4,000 substantiated murders in violence by parents and caretakers) over the last 5 years.

Those kids’ briefly-and-barely-newsworthy deaths failed to serve the immediate, bottom-line agendas of important interests. None even cite the vital context that a child or youth heads into vastly greater odds of violence and shootings when they leave school and go home. Unpersons are unworthy of individual status, collective innocence, and careful analysis.

Official and media indifference to these deaths of young people is not just explained by their commonality, nor their (usually) non-public nature, not even officials’ ignorance and incompetence. Rather, it reflects real societal cruelty. Americans, sociologist John Demos concluded, emotionally invoke the young but in reality don’t care about “other people’s children.” Children and youth become newsworthy only when their suffering and deaths buttress some powerful interest-group’s political and funding needs.

Larger unpersoning trends

Whether expressed against young people by established officials or against liberals and besieged people by right-wing demagogues, several interrelated trends have led to the climate of widespread unpersoning.

One is the large share of Americans who feel personally threatened by America’s increasing racial, cultural, and technological diversification, manifest most visibly in children and youth. In Culture and Commitment (1970, 1978), her career summation, anthropologist-emeritus Margaret Mead warned of the increasingly dangerous “alienation of the elders” whom social change had rendered “immigrants in time” in their own homelands. Aging traditionalists were becoming more hostile against multiracial, technologically savvy young people they saw as “strangers.” “Teen-agers gathered at a street corner are feared like the advance guard of an invading army,” Mead wrote 55 years ago; today, she would add, “teen-agers at keyboards.”

The second, related development is the bizarre extremism fostered by debate over Israel. The daily video onslaught of atrocities in Gaza creates horror in increasing majorities of Americans alongside jarringly contradictory indifference among large majorities of political leaders who continue arming Israel to carry them out. We hear supporters of Palestine condemn hundreds of times the barbaric killings by Hamas of 29 Israeli children and several hundred civilians on October 7, 2023, yet there is no similar outrage by Israel’s supporters against the Israeli Defense Force’s ongoing massacre of tens of thousands of Palestinian children and civilians beginning long before October 2023 and now rising in terrifying intensity.

Modern media independence means today’s public sees American leaders arming an Israel whose leadership openly celebrates the targeted killing of children. Past atrocities such as the Holocaust occurred in appalling volume, but never before has the public been forced to see them graphically unfold in real time.

While growing majorities of Americans recoil in horror at what they see, a significant fraction of Americans react in the opposite way: visuals of Gaza and Middle East slaughter seem to organize and whet their racialized hatreds, building for decades, into an intractable wall of separation.

To Zionists, Palestinians are not real people, and their extermination is acceptable. To President Trump, Watters, and like-minded right-wingers, liberal, minority, and Democratic victims of right-wing assailants are not real people and their murders aren’t worth the breath to mention. To established interests and media, the thousands of children and teens whose deaths from family violence inconveniently hinder powerful interests’ popularity-driven exploitations are not real people deserving of notice or even citation for context.

Today isn’t worse, but… changed

That official, mainstream America foments and prospers from unpersoning does not mean today represents a deteriorated age. In fact, even amid mass shootings and political assassinations, America’s gun murder rate today (5.5 per 100,000 people) is an impressive 23% LOWER in 2023 than at its peak in 1993 (7.1) and looks to fall another 13% in 2024. Americans, especially school-age children and teenagers, are safer from being gunned down now than in the 1990s, 1980s, or 1970s.

As for unpersoning, the pre-1970s Jim Crow era was extraordinarily ugly in its open dehumanization of entire races. The difference is that then, Whites were the large majority everywhere, and so established dominance was assured even amid challenges.

Not so today. In 2025, aging Americans see the young under age 25 as the first generation ever that has no racial majority. It’s not just cities or states like California in which Whites have been a racial minority for years; it is now the country as a whole. As Mead worried, the elders (especially Whites and the fraction of Nonwhites who benefit from right-wing governance) are increasingly radicalized by the increasingly organized belief that the liberal-Left facilitated this viscerally threatening racial diversification purposefully to eradicate Whiteness and traditionalism.

Elders’ hardening attitudes toward the young rooted in fear of the racial change they represent has built as minority populations increased and became more visible, even in rural areas, and now drives today’s harshly indifferent, repressive attitudes. Their multiracialism helps explain why American young people are unprecedentedly attuned to the Palestinian cause while older conservatives and leaders who emerged from the selection process that awards power are so extraordinarily bonded to Israel and frantic to suppress dissent.

Charlie Kirk, though young himself, was at the forefront of the Right’s organized terror crusade against diversity. Gay people should be stoned to death, he said; women should submit to men, transgender people are murderers, Palestine doesn’t exist, Black women lack brains, Muslims and minorities are existential threats, empathy is woke sniveling; all the litany of hate. Still, Kirk was visibly sobered by the surprising opposition to Israel’s atrocities voiced by his own young, conservative supporters (which should give pause to liberal-Left snob-elitists who sniff that young people slavishly ape Kirk and “manosphere” influencers). Kirk should have been allowed to live to rethink his dogmas.

Kirk, who once said “unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year” (“some” = 45,000) are “worth it” to “have a Second Amendment,” was shot to death at a college forum while espousing on gun violence. Conservatives urge prayer as the balm for Minnesota children shot to death while praying. Families, where thousands of American children are murdered, are praised as safe while schools, our safest havens from violence, are vilified as terrifying. We are a country bullet-riddled with irony.

The “teen suicides” and tragedies we don’t care about, Part 2

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

First: the never-mentioned context

Popular discussion of what we call “teenage suicide” and drug overdose is so horrendously messed up that we have to begin with basic context. Below is the CDC’s latest tabulation of suicides and overdose deaths by age group for 2024 and around one-fourth into 2025:

Source: CDC 2025. Overdoses refers to illicit, non-prescribed drugs.

The population sizes from 10-14 through 60-64 are similar, so these numbers indicate relative odds of suicide and overdose by age.

These are tragic numbers, much worse in the United States than in other nations. I would not argue for a second that 4,300 teen age 10-19 deaths from suicides and overdoses in approximately 15 months aren’t heartbreaking, both for the youths and those who cared about them.

Having said that, I will never understand the relentlessly destructive crusade by authorities and media to convince teenagers that suicide and drug abuse are normative to adolescence. In fact, teenagers are substantially less likely to commit suicide or overdose than adults are, a fact that should top all analyses.

In that respect, wouldn’t the 44,500 deaths from suicides and fatal overdoses among 40-49-year-olds – the average ages of teens’ parents, relatives, and nearby adults – also be terrible tragedies occurring at a level 10 times higher?

Deaths are just the iceberg tip of much larger abuse, mental health, addiction, absence, and violence issues that afflict troubled families in which millions of teenagers are growing up.

Have media-featured psychologists Jonathan Haidt, Jean Twenge, other popular commentators, political leaders, health professionals, and news reports shown any sensitivity or caring toward children and teens suffering parents’ and nearby adults’ suicide and drug abuse? Have any reported CDC survey findings that teens with troubled parents are much more likely to be troubled themselves? Somewhere between rarely and never.

Second: Teens have told us what drives suicide – we just don’t like their answers

The “teen suicide” discussion veers farther off the rails when we examine authorities’ rampant distortions of causal factors.

As I point out regularly (because no one else is), thousands of America’s teenagers told our largest, most definitive CDC adolescent health survey in no uncertain terms – twice – what the biggest factors contributing to their suicidal feelings and attempts are.

Teenagers’ answers on the massive 2021 and 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Surveys were so consistent and compelling that CDC analysts concluded in the in-house Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report that three major childhood experiences – parents’ and household grownups’ “emotional abuse”, “physical abuse”, and “poor mental health” – were the driving factors in teenagers’ “suicide attempts (89.4%), seriously considering attempting suicide (85.4%), and prescription opioid misuse (84.3%).”

That is, for the factors we know about, nearly all teenage suicide and opiate abuse are associated with parents’ and household adults’ abuse, violence, and troubles. Virtually none are driven by social media.

So, how do authorities (mis)characterize these cold numbers?

Again, let’s look at all the things public commentators and authorities leave out. The 2023 CDC survey finds, not shockingly, that teens who are abused by parents and household adults and have violent homes are far more likely to suffer poor mental health, make suicide attempts, and harm themselves.

Sources for tables: CDC, 2023.

No ambiguity there. Before skeptics shrug that teens always think their parents are crazy and abusive, consider that these are the same teens on the same survey whose answers authorities incessantly cite as proving the teenage “mental health crisis.”

The CDC survey contains another never-mentioned bombshell: abused teens from abusive and violent families, particularly girls, use social media considerably more than teens from healthy families.

I wish I was making this next part up…

… because I can’t believe it, either. The pretzel-twisted consensus of leading officials and commentators from this compelling information seems to be:

· Teens are being truthful when they report their levels of depression and social media use; therefore, social media is causing their depression.

· However, those same exact teens on the same surveys are not being truthful when they report widespread abuse and violence by parents and household grownups; therefore, those survey answers can just be ignored.

Are top health, political, interest-group, and media-quotable authorities like Haidt and Twenge simply incompetent charlatans ignorant of the basic data shown on major health surveys, or dishonest distorters of crucial facts? We can certainly see the mentality that enables the Jeffrey Epstein perfidy.

Now it gets really bad

The CDC survey further shows that for abused teens, more social media use may be associated with less suicide and self harm.

At first glance, this table would seem to validate concerns about social media. Looking only at the top three lines, abused teens who seldom use social media (less than daily) are considerably LESS likely to report frequently poor mental health (48.4%) than abused teens who use social media several times a day (62.4%).

Officials and popular commentators abruptly stop there: look, social media use and the cyberbullying it fosters makes teens more depressed. Don’t go any further!

Of course, that could be a reverse correlation: perhaps depression makes teens use social media more. What evidence suggests this is the more likely scenario?

Look at the next 6 lines. Abused teens who seldom use social media report being LESS depressed but MORE likely to attempt suicide (16.6%) and harm themselves (5.7%) than abused teens who use social media often every day (14.4% and 3.1%, respectively).

Presented more starkly and singling out teenage girls about whom authorities vent so much concern: 40% of abused girls who seldom use social media attempt suicide and 14% harm themselves, compared to 25% and 6%, respectively, of abused girls who use social media several times a day. Those are large differences reported by the most troubled population.

Talk about turning discussion on its head. We’re constantly hammered with zero-evidence emotionalities that more social media use drives more teens to suicide and self-harm when the best evidence indicates the opposite is more likely.

Again, though, we have to be wary of which way associations and correlations (especially ones that conveniently seem to validate our pet theories) really go. Perhaps teens who use social media more are simply more social, more inclined to seek help from others, in the first place. That would make social media less a savior of troubled teens and more just one of their self-help tools.

In any case, I can’t be the only one who looked at the CDC’s 2021 and 2023 surveys who noticed this obvious but fascinating pattern. So, wouldn’t you think these intriguing numbers from our largest, best surveys of teenagers would give authorities pause – at least provoke calls for further investigation – before rushing to demand wholesale bans and restrictions on teens’ cellphone and social media use?

If so, please send me your bank account passwords

I credit authorities, politicians, and media-beloved figures like psychologists Haidt and Twenge with scholarly awareness of teens’ complicated answers. It doesn’t take a post-doctorate stat-phenom to do cross-tabulation and regression analyses.

The CDC even tried to help them by issuing a colorful public report weakly blaming social media, cyberbullying, and peer bullying for teen troubles. Unfortunately for that cause, the report’s own numbers showed that even assuming social media and peer bullying are the only factors in teens’ lives, they are still associated with only trivial fractions of teens’ poor mental health and not at all with teens’ suicides… nothing like the 84%-89% associations the CDC found for parents’ abuses and afflictions.

Then, former Surgeon General Vivek Murtha issued a generally informative report on parents’ disturbingly widespread, rising mental health, drug/alcohol, and abusiveness that, well, just might, sort of, maybe, in the nicest wording possible, help explain teens’ mental health problems. That report, like the CDC’s survey analysis, was largely ignored by popular authorities and commentators.

Bummer

Even if science decidedly is not on their side, political leaders, pop-commentators, and media reporters can still invoke the old fallback: wildly hyping rare anecdotes in which a teen’s suicide or overdose possibly could be blamed on social media, peer bullying, and/or Artificial Intelligence (AI) and embellished as a “wake-up call!” revealing a heretofore hidden teen crisis.

The New York Times and dozens of popular media recently featured a teenager who committed suicide after receiving bad advice from an AI robot. The New Yorker ran a lengthy article on a teen who committed suicide after encountering bullying on social media, also a media theme when a case can be found.

Their stories deserve coverage (which they get) – and, even more, their full stories and context (which they never get).

The best evidence suggests small fractions of teens and adults have prior troubles that make them vulnerable to exacerbation by social media and AI technology, just as to family abuses, religion, harsh schooling, and other aspects of life. (For example, 82% of teens who tell CDC surveys they’ve been cyberbullied also report being emotionally abused by parents and household adults, yet another never-mentioned fact.)

If we only consider externally-driven destroyers of young lives, why aren’t stories like the mentally disturbed mother who hounded her severely troubled husband and young son into killing themselves – exactly what the NYT feature accused one teen’s AI robot of doing – as well as more parent-inflicted murders and suicides victimizing children featured just the week this is written, far more prevalent “wake-up calls”?

Because we care only about child and teen deaths that buttress profitable political agendas. “We are rushing into the same mistakes we made with social media,” declares a prominent commentator regarding AI and youth. I agree – for exactly the opposite reasons he cites.

We are allowing rampant misinformation and extremely rare, sensational cases (including those in which key facts have to be suppressed) to throttle discussion and policy that vitally affects children and teenagers. This isn’t caring about young people. It’s betrayal and cruelty.

The murdered kids we don’t care about, Part 1

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

The nation remains fixated on last week’s shooting at a Minneapolis school, in which 2 children were killed and 17 children and 1 adult injured. Mass shootings deserve the anguish they engender and the vital context they rarely get.

Around 25 to 30 American children and youths are killed in mass shootings every year, including in school shootings. If we take the worst recent year on record, 35 children and teens died in homicides at school, including both mass shootings and individual murders.

School shootings garner massive press, politician, and public attention, each fostering emotional declarations that schools are so drastically dangerous compared to the presumed safety of homes that parents must fear sending their kids to school, along with demands that parents monitor their “children’s” internet behaviors (the Minneapolis shooter was 23).

Survivors and parents victimized by school shootings understandably focus on these tragedies. But health officials (especially the Surgeon General), medical and mental health professionals, academic “experts,” and political leaders owe a larger duty to young people to advance sound policy that prioritizes dangers.

Even if we consider only mass shootings, one 64-year-old shot more people in Las Vegas in 15 minutes than are shot in all 130,000 U.S. schools in four years.

Very few provide crucial contexts – and they’re ignored

One rare exception is the Giffords Law Center: “Schools are generally safe havens from the gun violence that is so prevalent elsewhere… at least 50 times as many murders of young people ages 5–18 occurred away from school than at school.”

“Mass shootings account for less than 1% of all firearms deaths in the United States,” adds Dr. Los Lee, Harvard Pediatrics and Emergency Medicine professor. “For children, it’s also less than 1%… a very small number.”

No one touches that reality – and it gets worse.

The Centers for Disease Control reports that 1,996 children and youths under age 18 were victims of homicides in 2024, 1,355, or two-thirds, by guns. The United States’ child homicide rate is 10 times that of Canada, 15 times that of France, 20 times that of the UK, Italy, Germany, Spain, and Australia; and 60 times that of Japan.

Where, then, are most children murdered?

While 25 to 30 children and youth are killed in mass shootings (including at school) every year, 850 to 900 are murdered in substantiated cases of violence at home. Another 1,000-plus children, nearly all infants, die from criminal neglect every year, often the result of parents’ poverty, mental illness, addiction, jailing, and/or absence.

“When American parents are surveyed about their concerns, everyone is worried about school shootings,” a JAMA Pediatrics study author said. “The message from our data is really simple: Our fears are incorrectly placed. Our homes may, in fact, be more dangerous than schools.”

May be? Thirty times more children and teens are murdered, and 8 times more school-age kids are shot to death, at home by grownups than at school.

Nine in 10 of the killers are parents, parents’ partners, or other legal caretakers. In fact, 6 in 10 children killed in mass shootings (the ones you don’t hear about) are murdered by parents, not by school shooters, gangs, other kids. FBI cross-tabulations show 85% of child victims are murdered by adults; half of the murderers of children are 25 and older.

We see fleeting mentions of their deaths: “Father admits lining up 3 young sons, shooting them;” “Father in custody after 3 boys, mother shot to death… 8 year-old girl also shot, in serious condition;” “Father who murdered daughter shot son in head;” “Stepdad in custody after boy, 9, is shot dead;” “Stepdad fatally shoots 15-year-old stepson over unfinished chores” … the devastating headlines just from recent months march on and on, quickly shrugged off.

No agonized commentaries, zero official attention, in contrast to the avalanche that followed the Minnesota and every other school shooting. Mass shootings that get intense attention are rare, sensational, devastating, and public, the definition of “news.” That doesn’t excuse the fact that few care enough about “the children!” to talk honestly about the most fundamental issue: who is murdering them, and where.

Instead of acknowledging the harsh truth that the biggest single reason guns are “the leading cause of external death for America’s children and adolescents” is because American adults are shooting them, officials and commentators indulge pleasing pretenses. 99% of the official/media discussion fixates on children killed by other children, teens, or “young men” – powerless groups at whom it is easy to point accusing fingers.

Confronting the enormous toll household grownups take on children and youth raises questions no politically-attuned entity would ever raise: are American grownups responsible enough to keep guns, especially in homes?

The result is that decade after decade, thousands of murdered American kids remain unrecognized, uncared-about, too inconvenient for America’s fragile politics to acknowledge.

The same rush to exploit the tiny number of youths’ suicides that anti-youth and anti-online critics believe they can blame on social-media or Artificial Intelligence versus the vastly larger numbers connected to abusive and severely troubled parents and families will be the subject of Part 2.

Breaking Points’ co-host Saagar Enjeti parrots the right wing’s wrong, dangerous crime myths

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

Crime (both violent and all offenses) stands at 55-year lows, driven by huge drops in cities and among increasingly diverse youth – exactly the opposite of Saager’s panic mode. (This article originally appeared in LA Progressive).

Saager Enjeti, self-described conservative co-anchor on the leftist Breaking Points (1.4 million subscribers), prides himself as the meticulous, well-read realist reining in liberal-left excesses.

On crime and youth issues, however, he’s wildly wrong, venting incessant alarmism that can do real damage to reasoned policy.

Saager (Breaking Points hosts seem to prefer first names) contradicts himself in such rapid-fire delivery it’s hard to sift out a coherent argument beyond rage at Black Lives Matter (BLM) and “liberal… soft on crime do-gooder policies like oh, these poor little juveniles” whose “leniency” has “led to an explosion in carjackings” and kids “wreak(ing) havoc.”

Washington DC’s “two huge problems” are “juvenile offenders” and youthful “carjackings,” he declares, tossing in “quality of life” affronts, a codeword for annoyance at homelessness and drug addiction (just as “youth” is the codeword for “Black”).

Saager constantly shifts on exactly when DC and other cities “went to shit” and what exactly the shit is. He variously lauds 2000 as the year when crime, particularly violence by youth, “wasn’t happening” due to tough policing. Then, 2010 was when the pro-criminal-coddlers took over. Then it was 2014. Then “the last five years,” following BLM.

Cherry-picking years to compare is proof of deception. Re-cherry-picking different years multiplies the sins. Getting crime trends wrong is the final crusher.

Nothing Saager says on crime and youth is even remotely true

…as he’d know if he glanced at readily available FBI, Centers for Disease Control, and DC Metropolitan Police numbers instead of rehashing media and right-wing quips.

In fact, crime and violence rates now stand at half-century lows, both in Washington DC and San Francisco, two “unlivable” cities he singles out for “soft-on-crime” lambasting, and nationwide. These improvements are driven by youth, who have shown by far the biggest, 80% to 90% drops over the last 30 years in violence and crime, including homicide.

Some areas of both cities and rural America remain dangerous, but general “feelings” of endangerment are driven by media histrionics like Saager’s. The charts below summarize the real crime trends.

Figure 1. Major violent and property offenses reported per 100,000 population, 1970-2024 

Source: FBI, 1970–2024.

By the best of flawed measures, national and Washington DC crime has not risen since 2010, or 2014 or 2019 or whatever year Saager randomly miscites to mis-blame “Ferguson and BLM [Black Lives Matter] anti-police policies” for whatever made crime “skyrocket,” whenever it skyrocketed.

Saager focuses vitriol on Washington and San Francisco, which he accuses of becoming “unlivable” due to “soft on crime” policies. Figures 2 and 3 show these cities’ crime trends per 100,000 population over the last 25 years:

Figure 2. Washington DC crime rates, 2000-2024

Source: MetropolitanPolice, 2025

Figure 3. San Francisco crime rates, 2000-2024

Source: California Open Justice (2025).

Saager alternatingly complains about violent crime (which stands at near-record lows), then, when challenged, insists he’s really talking about “quality of life” (which means encountering unpleasant things). I’m guessing Saager has never been victimized by an assault or armed robbery, as I have, or he’d appreciate that violence diminishes “quality of life” infinitely more than seeing a homeless addict.

Crime statistics are eminently criticizable. But to refute them, critics have to show they have better sources of information than FBI, state, local, National Crime Victimization, and CDC tabulations that consistently show crime, violence, and youthful offending all are down big time, everywhere. to paraphrase, the plurals of “my feelings” and “what happened to me” are not “data.”

That said, even in the two cities he singles out, both violent and total crimes are down, often substantially, compared to all the previous, pre-soft-on-crime years when he insists police were tough and unhampered by BLM. San Francisco’s mid-2010s spike in property crime was due entirely to the temporary presence of roving “smash and grab” car burglary rings, not policy.

Contrary to Saager’s claim, the “Ferguson effect” of police being too “scared” by “anti-police” BLM rhetoric to enforce laws is not “proven fact;” not even nearly. It is highly disputed, solidly refuted, and not confirmed by trends – unless he wants to admit less harsh policing yields less crime.

Nor are carjackings DC’s biggest crime problem. All robberies, of which carjackings (robbery of a vehicle) are just one part, comprise less than 12% of the city’s Part I violence and property felonies.

What, then, is Washington DC’s real “crime problem”?

Imagine how radically different Saager’s “crime is bad!” rants would be if he admitted his own 30-agers (he’s 33) – not easily scapegoated “youths” – were by far Washington DC’s and the nation’s the most serious crime, violence, murder, disorderly conduct, and drug abuse problem.

Not only are youth (mobbers, carjackers and all) NOT DC’s, the nation’s, or any city’s worst crime problem; they are lesser and declining contributors far down the list.

Figure 4. U.S. violent offenses per 100,000 population, youths versus 30-agers, 2000-2024. 

Source: FBI, Crime Data Explorer, 2025; Crime in the United States, 1995-2019.

Figure 4. U.S., all criminal offenses per 100,000 population, youths versus 30-agers, 2000-2024. 

Source: FBI, Crime Data Explorer, 2025; Crime in the United States, 1995-2019.

Criminal behavior by Saager’s age cohort, 30-34, makes the city’s juveniles look tame. In 2024, DC police reports show:

• All ages under 18: 967 violent crimes, 2,250 total criminal offenses
• Age 30-34: 1,502 violent crimes, 7,102 total criminal offenses

• DC juveniles account for 9.8% of violent and 5.3% of total crime (you’d think it was 95% or 98% by politician and press bellowings).
• Meanwhile, 30-39-agers account for 26.6% of violent crime and 25.9% of all crime – 2 to 3 times more than teenaged youths do.

Go back to 2010, which Saager seems to regard as some nirvana when tough, pre-BLM policing prevailed resulting in low crime and youth offending, Metro police stats show that juveniles accounted for 9.7% of DC’s crime (1.8 TIMES MORE than today’s youthful crime), while 30-agers accounted for 12.4% (just HALF of today’s 30-age crime toll).

That is, DC’s juvenile crime volume has fallen during the supposed “lenient” era, while 30-age crime has skyrocketed.

Today, juvenile crime today is less of a problem than crime by ages 30-34, 25-29, 35-39, 18-24, and 40-44. This isn’t a fluke. Figures for 2023, 2022, and other recent years and cities are similar.

Notice that little post-2020 blip at the far righthand sides of Figures 2 and 3, in which crime increased for all ages as the country re-opened after the record lows coinciding with the COVID lockdowns? That’s what all the media ranters mean when they talk about crime “skyrocketing”!

No matter. Police, politicians like President Trump, and the press eagerly seize on any juvenile offense (such as the alleged youthful assault on Trump-Musk minion “Big Balls”) as “illustrating” some scourge of “youth violence!” and “juveniles out of control!” – a perpetual mantra they regularly bray year after year, decade after decade.

For example, sensational reports of “unruly mobs” of youths have grabbed headlines when a small number in a group of hundreds are disorderly. Teenagers (especially Black ones, who comprise 90% of DC’s youth arrests) are politically powerless, easy for armchair pundits to scapegoat.

Yet, when grownups go to bars weekend after weekend and collectively cause more crimes, no one blames all adults. No bad press or curfew demands afflict older ages, not even when police numbers show that Saager’s own age causes far more disorderly conduct, drunkenness, and assault offenses than teenaged youths do.

Good for them! United Kingdom teenagers are easily defying the dumb, dangerous “Online Safety Act”

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

Teenagers are mass-defying UK leaders’ dangerous, ill-motivated crusade to restrict and ban young people from social media and expose them to dangerous “age verification” privacy violations, global tech analyst The Register reports:

“With the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) now in effect, it was only a matter of time before tech-savvy under-18s figured out how to bypass the rules and regain access to adult content.… the more obvious workaround was to simply install a VPN [Virtual Private Network] and browse the web as if from another country where such age verification laws don’t apply… some VPN companies reported a 1,400 percent increase in sign-ups since the OSA came into force.”

Another global web monitor quipped of youths’ ease in getting around censorship schemes: “An authoritarian legal apparatus that all understood would never accomplish its stated aims, implemented by lowest-bidding private companies while imposing vast regulatory costs, casually defeated instantly by any kid with an IQ above room temperature. But don’t worry, taxpayer: more can always be spent on being seen to do something.”

Some dodges are hilariously easy. The “Use-Their-ID” campaign has already generated 100,000 imposter drivers’ licenses (hijacking Prime Minister Kier Starmer’s own ID is a fave) to get around the OSA, UK Metro reports. Evasion strategies, wildly diverse, are rapidly evolving.

What can official nannies endangering the kids they pretend to protect do about it? Not much, Register experts say: “Banning VPNs to protect kids? Good luck with that.” Grownups, international corporations, and governments find VPNs highly useful. Adult interests and pleasures are at stake, so restrictions are “not gonna happen.” Shutting down VPN and fake-ID and -facial recognition sites is like Whac-A-Mole.

Meanwhile, The Register reports, “a digital petition to repeal the OSA has now reached north of 423,000 e-signatures at the time of writing, a figure well beyond the threshold triggering a Parliamentary debate on the matter.”

Some of the OSA’s privacy provisions benefit all users, but its youth restrictions, if not repealed, should just be disobeyed. UK, Australian, US, and other Western lawmakers, under the scam of “protecting children,” are implementing “age verification” measures so slipshod one would suspect their purpose must be to expose young people to identity and information intrusions by corporate marketers, government spies, and predatory criminals.

“The most widely adopted methods of digital age verification involve users sharing sensitive information such as facial scans, official ID cards or banking particulars with third-party companies—details which, in the process, inevitably get linked to individual data on pornography consumption,” Scientific American warns.

So, UK kids and grownups – just hold your government ID, picture, home address, phone number, email, webpages, identifying numbers, credit card, bank credentials, and facial, retinal, and/or fingerprint images up to the screen for permanent digital recording by random website and wink-wink “third party verifier”! Trust us! They would never exploit your info!

What could possibly go wrong?

“The UK’s censorship catastrophe is just the beginning,” warned Power User’s Taylor Lorenz. “Entire forums, websites, communities, and essential journalism is being censored.” Platforms are “classifying nearly all breaking news footage, war coverage, investigative journalism, political protest material, and information about reproductive and public health as ‘explicit’ or ‘harmful’ content, thus blocking anyone under 18 from accessing it.”

Already, Reddit and other sites are classifying information about Israeli war crimes, protests, and any potential “violence” as “explicit content” under-18s are forbidden to access. That broad-based censorship is exactly what officials intend by rushing ahead with vigorous enforcement. The government is “working with regulator Ofcom to implement the act as quickly as possible… those who wanted to overturn it were ‘on the side of predators,’ Technology Secretary Peter Kyle said.”

What a grotesque, upside-down lie. The real reason government regulators like Kyle are negotiating the OSA with government, tech giant, and corporate overlords is to help all gain easier access to millions of teens’ personal information.

Authorities are panicking over teens and social media… why?

Teens provably face far more dangers to their physical and mental health in the real world than online. In the UK, Australia, and especially, the U.S., severe drug abuse and family abuses inflicted by grownups are widespread and soaring. The leading U.S. health agency, the Centers for Disease Control, reports that parents’ abuses and troubles underlie two-thirds to 90% of teens’ mental health, drug abuse, and suicide problems; social media, just about none.

What, then, is driving exploding official panic over the trivial issue of teens and screens? It’s not teen safety or mental health.

Rather, during the U.S. Congress’s TikTok-divestment debate, lawmakers’ fury fixated on young people’s audacity to access information questioning official pro-Israel and climate-change-denial dogmas drove the censorship crusade.

“British support for Palestine is at an all-time high since October 7, particularly among the younger demographic,” the July 27 Sunday Times poll reports. U.S. polls show similar results. Young people’s anti-Israel views in particular seem to have triggered visceral, gut-level rage in Western officials.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt, a vocal supporter of Israel who sees young people’s pro-Palestine views as driven by social media, has been hardening his stance against any online access by teenagers. In the past, Haidt acknowledged the internet has many benefits for teens. Lately, coincidentally or not, Haidt is demanding sweeping bans on under-16s (and soon, under-18s) ever going online for any reason. Haidt has ginned up anti-social-media “porn” hysteria and the very “stranger danger” paranoia he shrugs off in public life to decree that “children have no need to connect with strangers” or access disapproved-of information.

Defying and repealing “kids’ online safety” censorship is essential not just to teenagers’ safety and well-being, but democracy’s survival

The biggest dangers by far to children and teens are not online or public strangers, but nearby adults and family members. There’s no argument here.

No matter. U.S., U.K., Australian, and other Western authorities have made it clear: they will not even acknowledge, let alone redress, the family abuses that are the real drivers of many teenagers’ poor mental health. Yet, policy makers tirelessly strive to ban teens from online communities, education, and health resources by which young people help themselves.

Teenagers can handle online predators, bullies, Nazis, misogynists, and porn; what teens need protection from is grandstanding officials’ ignorant, malicious endangerments. Sadly, there’s no <delete> button for a youth to block legislative, attorneys general, prime minister, psychologist, and agency charlatans.

Thus, it’s heartening to see teenagers so easily getting around officially-forced censorship and privacy hazards. Teens should understand that authorities’ sanctimonious clownishness is not to “protect” youth from seeing a boob or untoward message, but to control and repress young people.

Young people, like adults, have non-negotiable rights to information, privacy, resources, communication, and expression. Civil disobedience is in the best tradition of democracy, but now it is also proving crucial to younger generations’ and their societies’ survival.

Given the broad censorship and vastly expanded surveillance state the OSA and similar “child safety” policies are forcing across all platforms, teens’ defiance of the OSA is essential to maintaining the UK’s, US’s, and West’s threatened democratic traditions.

Despite teens’ currently successful defiance, this isn’t over. The history of repression indicates the UK and other governments will respond to failure with ever-more draconian crackdowns, asserting power while proving futility with schemes to punish, perhaps even criminalize, young people who go online. Cataloguing individuals by the sites they visit, as Scientific American warned, is a necessary step. Orwell’s panoptic telescreen is the prototypical surveillance-state dream.

The UK’s useless school cellphone ban instigated by official panic combined with “weak” evidence is the political model: if an official crusade enables authorities to deride a young population they clearly despise, who cares if it works?

Hopefully, young people’s resistance savvy will keep evolving faster than government repressions. Freedom of the press, thought, association, and expression now depends on sabotaging official authoritarianism.

Ban smartphones from schools? If we’re truly concerned about safety, we’d ban kids from schools and let them keep their phones.

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

OMG! Have you seen the FBI’s latest Crime in Schools report? “From 2020 to 2024, agencies reported 1,299,063 criminal incidents occurring at school locations… There were 1,504,310 offenses; 1,539,149 victims; and 1,250,077 known offenders associated with those incidents.”

And those are just the school crimes reported to law enforcement agencies, including for pandemic months in which many schools were shut down! Obviously, major media panics and draconian legislated bans are demanded.

The FBI report finds 652,000 kids victimized by assaults, 54,000 by sex offenses, over half a million by property crimes, and 300,000 by social crimes like drugs, porn, and weapons at school. School-associated violent death reports find some 150 children and teens were murdered at school during the period.

Predators? Some 188,000 children and teens were victimized by grownup criminals at school during 2020-2024. That’s one every 2 minutes! A child or teen is twice as likely to be victimized by an adult offender age 19 and older than by a young peer compared to the proportions of over-19 versus school-age youths at school.

And here’s one for anti-social-media crusader Jonathan Haidt, whose substack has been obsessed with pornography amid supposedly terrible “dangers” kids face online: 19,000 kids are exposed to porn at school, along with 244,000 to drugs and 50,000 to knives and guns. And these alarming numbers are certainly underreported.

A day spent on social media versus a day at an American school is like comparing a Sunday school picnic or Boy Scout campout to the Battle of Verdun. (A bad analogy, I admit; churches and Scouts have proven bad at protecting kids from predators.)

But you get the point. Teens spend relatively equivalent time on social media as at school, but nothing – nothing – bad happening on social media even remotely approaches the cataclysmic victimization toll on our kids of going to school.

State attorneys general’s court filings hyped by Haidt struggled to produce a half-dozen cases in which damage to children and teenagers was even arguably caused by social media. They had to dredge up a case of grownups well past teen ages buying bullets online later used to kill a couple of youths as somehow proving teens should be banned from social media.

Anti-social-media crusaders truly concerned about youth safety and mental health should reverse their campaigns to ban smartphones from schools. Let students keep their phones but ban kids from schools!

Removing tongue from cheek…

Okay, enough of my anti-school rant, largely senseless when put in perspective but still a thousand times more sensible than anti-social-media junk. Let us remember two things:

(a) This is the United States of America. We’ve got big problems – all ages, everywhere. In fact, kids are far, far safer in school than in any other venue to which anti-social-media crusaders would send them, such as streets, churches, youth programs, and especially, homes.

(b) Over 50 million children and teens and 3 million teachers and personnel attend 131,000 primary and secondary schools every weekday for 180 days a year. That’s well over 30 billion child-school-days during 2020-2024 even if we assume in-school attendance was partly shut down in 2020-21.

That is, according to the FBI’s figures, a student would have to attend school for 20,000 days, or over 50 years, before having even odds of being victimized by a crime of any kind; over a century before being victimized by violence; 300 years before being injured by violence at school; and 3,000 years before being at a school where any kind of shooting takes place.

During those same 5 years, over half a million children and youths were substantiated – not just reported, but substantiated – victims of physical and/or sexual violence inflicted by grownups in their homes. Some 2,000 school-agers age 5-17 were murdered at home during 2020-2024, a dozen times more than the 150 murdered at school. Of course, crime in both places is grossly underreported, so these are relative odds.

Overall, a child or youth is many times safer from gunfire, violence, and crime surrounded by peers at school than at home with adult family members, even after adjusting for the hours spent in each locale. And social media is by far the safest place of all.

Finally, is physical “safety” (especially when very low risks are hyped to promote panics) always paramount? Living a full life entails risks. That’s why I argue for full access by all ages to both outdoors and social media spaces.

Trashing youth, part zillion

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

To those who seek accuracy: believe nothing – nothing – cops, politicians, “experts,” and media splashes say about youth. Better yet, assume the opposite of what they say.

In an honest society that cared about facts, fairness, and young people, Gloucester Township, New Jersey, Police Chief David Harkins, township officials, and sycophant reporters would be facing disciplinary proceedings following stories such as the Daily Mail’s grotesque, “The town rocked by youth violence where parents face jail time if their kids commit crime.”

Gloucester Township leaders won fawning national and international attention for mass-trashing their 6,500 teenaged youth for the behaviors of 10 “unruly juveniles” arrested with 2 adults for disruptions at last year’s Community Day and ongoing “threats of violence.”

“Speaking on ‘youth violence,’” Harkins declared of those he accused of spitting on, cursing, and assaulting officers: “I’ve never experienced anything like it in 30 years as a police officer the disrespect, the violent behavior that ruined a family event.”

Black youth and adults comprise just 18% of Gloucester Township’s population. Harkins’ police department reports that Black people comprised 15 of the 16 arrested for disorderly conduct in June 2024. That fact was not mentioned in any news story or commentary I could find.

Overall in 2024, Blacks comprised nearly 60% of those arrested by Township police for violence, 80% of those arrested for disorderly conduct, and nearly half of all people arrested. Black and Hispanic populations have risen 5-fold in Gloucester Township since 1990 as the White population, still a large majority, fell.

Could there be something more to this issue than just inexplicable “youth violence”? Hidden racial dimension and potential conflicts leading up to the June 2024 disturbance were buried by the color-coded euphemism, “youth violence.” Only the police and official view was allowed, and they weren’t talking about race. So, neither did the press.

If police and commentators ever wonder why teenagers, especially Black teens, might hate cops and show “disrespect,” consider Chief Harkins’ gratuitously nasty, racially-coded disrespect toward his town’s entire young population.

Regardless of how offended Harkins feels, his implication that youths today are more violent and disruptive can be tested numerically. Lazy, pliant reporters never make authorities who claim youth behaviors are rising, out of control, worse than ever, etc., produce a shred of factual justification for their alarmist quips, or take 5 minutes to look up the numbers themselves before rushing to publish.

That’s journalistic malpractice. Law enforcement consistently proves shockingly ignorant and/or dishonest about their own data.

Investigating real statistical trends reveals the same amazing, never-mentioned – and clearly threatening – reality found nationwide, from Gloucester Township to Washington DC, Los Angeles and New York City.

What do Gloucester’s own police numbers show?

Had Chief Harkins so much as glanced at his own department’s statistics compiled at taxpayer expense – or had reporters bothered to check – for literally any year prior to COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns, all would know the festival-disrupting year, 2024, was among the lowest on record for violence and crime of every type by local youth.

Although just about any years would yield the same result, let’s use Harkins’ own “30 years” comparison by going back to 1995, and further randomize by including the mid-year, 2010:

Source: Gloucester Township Police Department (2025). *2024 is the most recent year, which includes the June 2024 festival disruption arrests.

As Gloucester Township’s Black, Hispanic, and other Nonwhite youth population leaped 5-fold since 1990 to become 40% of all teens by 2024, the township’s teenaged total crime and serious violence volume plunged by 75%, and lesser violence and disorderliness fell by 34% — with massive drops since 2010 alone.

This may sound radical, but…

… the following approximates what a police chief who actually respected facts, fairness, professionalism, young people, and his community’s intelligence would have said:

“Crime and violence by our young people is down dramatically today compared to past generations as our youth population became more racially diverse, and youths now have lower crime rates than most adults. Our department’s policy, regardless of age or race, will be to proactively address the few who cause problems, leave the large majority who are not causing problems alone, and not manufacture artificial ways to criminalize more people.”

Further, Chief Harkins could have pointed out that his own police statistics show that in 2024, the worst levels of violence and crime “rocking” Gloucester Township and other communities were not by youths, but by adults ages 30-34, followed by 25-29 and 35-39. One in three violent offenses and total crimes are by persons in their 30s. This pattern also holds nationwide.

Is citing the facts shown in one’s own statistics so hard? Apparently. Youth, especially Black youth, make handy scapegoats – even if it takes deception.

The coded racist euphemism, “youth violence”

Gloucester Township youth (like youth across the country) have changed dramatically for the better over the last 30 years as the young population became more racially diverse. You’d think progressives would be loudly celebrating that trend for affirming their core belief that a multicultural society can be a safer one, a powerful counter argument against today’s growing racial fear and xenophobia.

Unfortunately, the irrational hostility by authorities Left to Right toward young people keeps poisoning their attitudes, which is why we keep getting scapegoating, alarmism, and useless crackdowns.

Does reality even matter? Traditional commentators insist that how people “feel” about crime is more important than what is actually happening, because feelings drive perception and perception drives policy.

How, then, does the public form its “feelings” about crime? Research consistently finds the public, overwhelmingly, gets its feelings about whether crime is up or down, low or alarming, from news reports. That is why cops, leaders, “experts,” and reporters should respect their professions enough to stop aping alarmist, bigoted propaganda and instead respect fairness and accuracy – yes, even toward teenagers.

How to go viral with dire-sounding – but phony – “statistical trends”

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

“Breaking Points” August 11, 2025, alarmingly headlined: “Viral Chart EXPOSES Internet Fueled Personality Destruction,” with blaring subheads: “Studies show internet is ruining our cognitive abilities.” “Especially for young people,” podcast hosts Saager Enjeti and Krystal Ball warned, reeling off terrifying claim after claim about online perils (but somehow failing to foreswear that personality-destroying cognition-ruining internet themselves).

The evidence? Statistician John Burn-Murdoch of The Financial Times created charts from the Understanding America survey, which “Breaking Points” uncritically featured. Popular media presentations of the 2016-2025 trends, shown in the following charts for two key measures, certainly look frightening, illustrating a society in calamitous decline:

However, those who look closely for even a few seconds – certainly not Saager, Krystal, or other media sources I found – will notice two severe problems. First, the vertical axis showing averaged responses to questions on a scale of 1 to 5 is severely truncated in order to grossly exaggerate age differences and trends. Differences and trends are further embellished by presenting them in tall, narrow charts.

In contrast, below is a presentation of the same numbers in honest fashion, using the full 1 to 5 scale in figures that have equal vertical and horizontal dimensions:

Presented accurately, these statistics and trends would never have gone “viral.” They look like the near-nothings they are.

Psychologist and statistician Christopher Ferguson takes a deeper look at the Understanding America and Financial Times data and concludes: “No, conscientiousness hasn’t collapsed among young people in recent years.”

Further, neither media commentators nor the study in question even tries to show that “the internet” (as opposed to, say, reasoned assessments of real-world developments) is to blame for these minimal trends. Like social-media panickers, they just assume it must be – a highly arguable assumption, given that internet and social media use was well established back in 2016 when things were supposedly rosy.

Nor do they show whether, to cite the most salient trend, people of all ages (especially younger ones) might be acting rationally to be somewhat less trusting today than in 2016.

An individual, especially a younger one, might see our leading institutions are acquiescing and even backing genocidal foreign policy, doing nothing about climate change, widening economic inequality, financing more sumptuous lives for the privileged by dumping massive debt on young and future generations, and retreating back into openly Jim Crow racism, among other evils only barely anticipated back in 2016. That could be seen as untrustworthy and depressing, depending on one’s politics.

My humble assessment is that anyone who feels “trusting” today – along with anyone who is not getting more depressed at leaders’ rising brutalities and betrayals – is either not paying attention or brainlessly delusional.

But the point here is that even by the Understanding America data, the most salient decline in the averaged trust score, from around 4.1 in 2016 to 3.8 in 2025 on a scale of 1.0 (totally untrusting) to 5.0 (totally trusting) among ages 16-39, is hardly unexpected or catastrophic. The age 16-39 score in 2025 still approaches “strongly trusting,” well above the scale median of 3.0.

I don’t know how Burn-Murdoch characterized these data, and I’m not about to pay the firewall fee to find out. I’m more interested in how the “viral” media communicates them to the public. To listen to Saager and Krystal (and others) rant, we should immediately shut down the internet entirely, confiscate everyone’s cell phone, computer, laptop, and tablet, and mandate daily in-person coffee klatches and beer-bowling.

Either that, or inaugurate authorities’ and media’s critical responsibility on youth and culture-war issues, an American first, to replace the endless shrieking.

As I’ve documented repeatedly, young people were not better behaved, less troubled, thriving educationally, or more pro-social in pre-internet decades. In fact, they acted much worse than Gen Z does today.

Our top officials have refused – flatly – to pay any attention to what teenagers tell us on leading surveys is causing their depression and anxiety. Teens overwhelmingly cite household grownups’ abuses, violence, mental illness, and addiction – and self-aggrandizing authorities stubbornly refuse to listen. In this reality vacuum, demagogues blaming the internet and social media based on thin evidence have hijacked discussion, sabotaging badly needed confrontations toward real problems.

For the record: I am not affiliated in any way with social media, tech, or related interests, nor have I ever been paid by them. I despise Zuckerburg, Musk, Bezos, and the lot. Nothing here should be construed as approving of the way social media and tech moguls operate.