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.