Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| September 2025<\/strong><\/p>\n This isn\u2019t going to be wimpy both-sidesism. The liberal-Left establishment has universally and vehemently grieved podcaster and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk\u2019s horrifying assassination, even\u00a0sanitizing<\/a>\u00a0Kirk\u2019s hate-filled legacy while managing to ignore recent nuances.<\/p>\n The liberal-Left\u2019s responses to Kirk\u2019s shooting stand in glaring contrast to the Right\u2019s furious attacks on \u201cthe radical Left\u201d and dehumanizings toward Democratic victims. Examples of many: President Trump\u2019s mocking of the near-fatal hammer attack on Democrat Nancy Pelosi\u2019s husband (Kirk himself called for an \u201camazing patriot\u201d to bail out the hammer-wielder), Utah Republican\u00a0Sen. Mike Lee<\/a>\u2019s and other right-wingers\u2019 smirks (\u201cNightmare on Waltz [sic] Street,\u201d ridiculing Minnesota Gov. Mike Walz) after the assassination of a Democratic legislator by a far-Right gunman. Beyond disgusting.<\/p>\n Mass unpersoning<\/strong><\/p>\n The links between the mass dehumanization of children and teens whose deaths don\u2019t served established interests that I covered (\u201cthe dead kids we don\u2019t care about<\/a>\u201d) and this week\u2019s larger political hatreds abound. Kirk himself was a gung-ho advocate for releasing the Epstein files documenting elites\u2019 sex-trafficking of children\u2026 until Trump\u2019s White House ordered: back off. Then\u00a0Kirk abruptly went silent<\/a>. Political exploitation, not young rape victims, took priority. (After lambasting by his fans, Kirk reversed again\u2026sort of.)<\/p>\n Before a shooting suspect had even been identified and motive established, President Trump, in a nationwide address on Thursday, angrily blamed the \u201cradical left\u201d for Kirk\u2019s killing while listing\u00a0only those few political shootings that victimized Republicans or CEOs<\/em>\u00a0and omitting the much longer list of right-wing shooters victimizing Democrats, minorities, and liberals.<\/p>\n Likewise,\u00a0Fox News<\/em>\u00a0host Jesse Watters and dozens of other\u00a0prominent conservatives<\/a>\u00a0declared the right wing is now \u201cat war\u201d with the \u201cradical Left.\u201d\u00a0Only<\/em>\u00a0conservatives are victimized in political violence and\u00a0only<\/em>\u00a0by 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. \u201cCharlie was one of us,\u201d Watters snarled, the only demographic his brand of Rightist sees as real people.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s and right-wing pundits\u2019 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\u2019t 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\u2019t \u201cwaste time\u201d expressing condolences after a Minnesota Democratic leader was assassinated and other Democrats injured by a right-wing killer \u2013 nor did any other Republican I\u2019m aware of.<\/p>\n I\u2019m looking for similar statements of indifference or urgings of violence by prominent liberal or left-wing leaders and will publicize if found. One moderate\u00a0commentator<\/a>\u00a0who said Kirk\u2019s \u201cawful words\u201d incite \u201cawful actions,\u201d mild stuff, was summarily fired by\u00a0MSNBC<\/em>\u00a0as \u201cinsensitive.\u201d We\u2019ll see if\u00a0Fox<\/em>\u00a0fires Watters and other right-wing regulars like\u00a0Mark Levin<\/a>\u00a0for unhinged ragings and ominous incitements to \u201cavenge\u201d Kirk.<\/p>\n Making dead kids unpersons<\/strong><\/p>\n 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<\/a>\u00a0accorded children and teenagers deemed unworthy as political commodities.<\/p>\n Over the past 5 years, the\u00a0FBI reports<\/a>, 260 people (overwhelmingly children and teenagers) were murdered at school. Allegations in\u00a0attorneys general\u2019s court filings<\/a>\u00a0indicate 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 \u2013 and given that they live in the violence-happy United States of America \u2013 schools and social media account for astoundingly tiny fractions of the violent deaths of children and teens, confirmed by multiple analyses as\u00a0statistically negligible<\/a>.<\/p>\n Their rarity, of course, doesn\u2019t mean these deaths don\u2019t merit grief and media coverage. Rather, our society\u2019s deep shame is on the\u00a0opposite side of the issue<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 the wholesale\u00a0silence, denial, and even dismissal<\/a>\u00a0of American children and teens who\u00a0died<\/a>\u00a0in 8,500 suicides and 11,200 homicides (including at least 4,000 substantiated\u00a0murders in violence by parents and caretakers<\/a>) over the last 5 years.<\/p>\n Those kids\u2019 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\u00a0leave<\/em>\u00a0school and go home.\u00a0Unpersons<\/a>\u00a0are unworthy of individual status, collective innocence, and careful analysis.<\/p>\n 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\u2019 ignorance and incompetence. Rather, it reflects real societal cruelty. Americans,\u00a0sociologist John Demos<\/a>\u00a0concluded, emotionally invoke the young but in reality don\u2019t care about \u201cother people\u2019s children.\u201d Children and youth become newsworthy only when their suffering and deaths buttress some powerful interest-group\u2019s political and funding needs.<\/p>\n Larger unpersoning trends<\/strong><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n One is the large share of Americans who feel personally threatened by America\u2019s increasing racial, cultural, and technological diversification, manifest most visibly in children and youth. In\u00a0Culture and Commitment<\/em>\u00a0(1970, 1978), her career summation, anthropologist-emeritus Margaret Mead warned of the increasingly dangerous \u201calienation of the elders\u201d whom social change had rendered \u201cimmigrants in time\u201d in their own homelands. Aging traditionalists were becoming more hostile against multiracial, technologically savvy young people they saw as \u201cstrangers.\u201d \u201cTeen-agers gathered at a street corner are feared like the advance guard of an invading army,\u201d Mead wrote 55 years ago; today, she would add, \u201cteen-agers at keyboards.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s supporters against the Israeli Defense Force\u2019s ongoing massacre of tens of thousands of Palestinian children and civilians beginning long before October 2023 and now rising in terrifying intensity.<\/p>\n Modern media independence means today\u2019s public sees American leaders arming an Israel whose\u00a0leadership openly celebrates<\/a>\u00a0the\u00a0targeted killing of children<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t 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\u2019 popularity-driven exploitations are not real people deserving of notice or even citation for context.<\/p>\n Today isn\u2019t worse, but\u2026 changed<\/strong><\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Not so today. In 2025, aging Americans see the young under age 25 as the first generation ever that has no racial majority. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Elders\u2019 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Charlie Kirk, though young himself, was at the forefront of the\u00a0Right\u2019s organized terror crusade against diversity<\/a>. Gay people should be stoned to death, he said; women should submit to men, transgender people are murderers, Palestine doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s atrocities voiced by\u00a0his own young, conservative supporters<\/a>\u00a0(which should give pause to liberal-Left snob-elitists who sniff that young people slavishly ape Kirk and \u201cmanosphere\u201d influencers). Kirk should have been allowed to live to rethink his dogmas.<\/p>\n Kirk, who once said \u201cunfortunately, some gun deaths every single year\u201d (\u201csome\u201d = 45,000) are \u201cworth it\u201d to \u201chave a Second Amendment,\u201d 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\u00a0while praying<\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Assassinations, unmentionable dead kids, and mass unpersoning Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| September 2025 This isn\u2019t going to be wimpy both-sidesism. The liberal-Left establishment has universally and vehemently grieved podcaster and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk\u2019s horrifying assassination, even\u00a0sanitizing\u00a0Kirk\u2019s hate-filled legacy while managing to ignore recent nuances. The liberal-Left\u2019s responses to Kirk\u2019s shooting stand […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-161207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=161207"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161207\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":161208,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161207\/revisions\/161208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=161207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=161207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=161207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}