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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah. Real new. Never seen the like.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Commentaries that omit these crucial trends are fraudulent

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

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

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

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