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.