{"id":161221,"date":"2025-10-21T11:49:17","date_gmt":"2025-10-21T18:49:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/?p=161221"},"modified":"2025-10-30T22:16:27","modified_gmt":"2025-10-31T05:16:27","slug":"young-men-and-violence-are-generating-double-the-lies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/?p=161221","title":{"rendered":"Young men and violence are generating double the lies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Young men and violence are generating double the lies<\/h1>\n

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| October 2025<\/strong><\/p>\n

Why are progressives who champion diversity and multiculturalism sabotaging multiracial Gen Z when they should be touting young people’s stunningly positive trends?<\/h5>\n
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In half a century of advocacy, I have been appalled again and again by the self-destructive compulsion of progressive interests that boast of adherence to science, fact, and diversity but vent the most primitive culture-war foolishness vilifying their most diverse allies \u2013 young people.<\/p>\n

Demagogues Right, Center, and Left \u2013 political leaders, cops, interest lobbies, academics, podcasters, and media sensationalists alike \u2013 inflame endless panics over unheard-of \u201cyouth violence\u201d driven by gangs and social media (the latest: \u201cdark-websites\u201d supposedly fueling new waves of young-age killing). When rare dissent against anti-youth demagoguery is voiced, the concern is not over how coded racism and anti-youth animus damage young people, but the effect on interest groups\u2019\u00a0money<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s all a lie<\/strong><\/p>\n

I use California as the index, because it is the only state that has kept consistent, near-complete statistics by race, Hispanic ethnicity, and age going back half a century (in\u00a01975,<\/a>\u00a0the quaint categories were \u201cWhite,\u201d \u201cMexican,\u201d \u201cNegro,\u201d and \u201cOther\u201d).<\/p>\n

Further, no state can top California in racially diverse, social-media-using, alienated youth. If there\u2019s a violent young-man crisis, it\u2019s here.<\/p>\n

Except, it ain\u2019t. Just the opposite is occurring \u2013 big time, one of the most cataclysmic trends in American social history.<\/p>\n

Readers have already seen my graphing of the 50-year plummet among young White men in homicide (top figure), along with violence, property, drug, and public order offenses to record low levels even as\u00a0leftists irresponsibly bellow<\/a>\u00a0that \u201cnihilist\u201d and \u201cmanosphere\u201d sites are \u201cradicalizing\u201d young White men to unheard-of mayhem.<\/p>\n

Similar trends also prevail among other races \u2013 ones with very different economic, population change, and cultural evolutions \u2013 a youth revolution so discombobulating to standard interest-group discussion that authorities protecting their sinecures uniformly pretend it isn\u2019t happening.<\/p>\n

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Sources for figures: California Department of Justice,\u00a0Crime & Delinquency in California<\/a>,\u00a01975<\/a>-2024;\u00a0Homicide in California<\/a>, 1992-2024. Murder tables for 1975-1977 have small adjustments for incomplete population coverage; 1978-2024 reports are 99%-100% complete.<\/h5>\n

Note that for young men of all races, murder offenses peaked in the early 1980s and again in the early 1990s, then embarked on astounding plunges through the mid-2020s.<\/p>\n

So, Lie No. 1: No one, including on the progressive side, acknowledges the OBVIOUS fact that today\u2019s boys and young men of all races are far LESS likely than previous generations to murder anyone.<\/p>\n

Lie No. 2: Instead, demagogues declare that young men are more murderous because of (a) immigrants and transgenders, according to the Right, or (b) dark-web and online \u201ccultural\u201d radicalization, the Left declares.<\/p>\n

What really happened during this half-century of major changes?<\/strong><\/p>\n

First, immigration and racial diversification. In 1975, California\u2019s young male population was 67% non-Hispanic White. In 2024, in a young-male population 870,000 larger, just 27%. Large increases in immigrant-dominated Hispanic and Asian populations accompanied decreases in native-born White and Black populations.<\/p>\n

Criminologists issued dire predictions of new epidemics of dark-skinned \u201cadolescent superpredators<\/a>.\u201d Just the opposite occurred \u2013 which you\u2019d think would give pause to the panicky race-coded \u201cexperts,\u201d but hasn\u2019t. California\u2019s young-male homicides fell by 750 in annual numbers and by 72% in rate during the 1975-2024 period.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s HUGE.<\/p>\n

Second, from 1990 on, screen culture embraced carnage. Video games morphed from cartoonish Super Mario Brothers to violent, first-person, M-rated shooter games. Rap music was increasingly dominated by violent \u201cgangsta\u201d videos. Cable TV and ultra-violent films proliferated, sporting ever-rising riddled-body counts.<\/p>\n

Third, social media ballooned, beginning with SixDegrees (1997), LiveJournal (1999), Friendster (2002), MySpace (2003), and Facebook (2004). In 1990, only a handful of teens were online; in 2002, 62%; by 2007, 93%. Porn? The dark web? They existed from the\u00a0dawn of online culture<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Superficially, social media both has been anecdotally blamed for\u00a0inciting violence<\/a>\u00a0and credited with\u00a0reducing violence<\/a>. More likely, the internet is just a tool, as most teens surveyed by\u00a0Pew Research<\/a>\u00a0shrugged, no more to blame for how users use\/misuse it for \u201cconnection, creativity, and drama\u201d than telephones, note passing, and gossiping are to blame for 1960s riots and 1990s gang wars.<\/p>\n

Whatever the claims, cold numbers talk louder. As internet use proliferated, murder among young people kept plummeting. By 2024, two decades into the mass-internet era, it stood at record low levels among all races.<\/p>\n

So, if culture warriors \u2013 based on their bad zero-or-tiny-correlation-equals-mass-causation non-science \u2013 are going to blame social media for everything from teens\u2019 depression to \u201crevenge violence\u201d and \u201cradicalization,\u201d shouldn\u2019t they also credit social media for mammoth, far more widespread plunges in teens\u2019 murder, violence, and crime?<\/p>\n

Of course they don\u2019t<\/strong><\/p>\n

Culture-warring, most recently manifest in social-media-blaming \u2013 whether by left-wing podcaster Krystal Ball, centrists like columnist Ezra Klein, rightists like psychologist Jonathan Haidt, or media-hungry politicians across the spectrum \u2013 is not factual, analytical, or reasoned.<\/p>\n

Whether progressives blame far-Right manosphere, Nazi, and \u201cnihilist\u201d dark-web networks or right-wingers blame left-wing teachers, immigrants, transgender ideology, and George Soros, they all resurrect the same primitive panic that drove the Salem Witch trials.<\/p>\n

What lost opportunity<\/strong><\/p>\n

Returning to California, our biggest, most diverse, leading-edge state, gigantic youth trends away from crime, violence, unplanned pregnancy, and school failure and dropout strikingly confirm progressive ideals affirming diversity and multiculturalism.<\/p>\n

Big-dollar proof: in a teenaged youth population 73% of Color,\u00a0serious and minor youth crime<\/a>\u00a0both fell to such low levels by the 2020s that mammoth California closed its entire state youth detention system along with dozens of county juvenile halls and camps, saving\u00a0$10 billion in state and many billions in local budgeted costs<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I did a similar report in 2019 on Oklahoma\u2019s plummet in juvenile crime (curiously, the report itself can no longer be found, only the\u00a0policy recommendations<\/a>\u00a0from it). Bottom line: as Oklahoma\u2019s youth population approached 50% of Color,\u00a0youth crime plunged to record lows<\/a>, as in California and other states.<\/p>\n

Yet, bizarrely \u2013 pathologically \u2013 today\u2019s leftists\/progressives not only refuse to cite these astonishingly affirming trends, they seem to actively resent them. No, no, a host of podcasters led by Ball and others insist, young men radicalized by black-pill online cabals are alarmingly more dangerous and murderous today than ever before.<\/p>\n

That implies that California\u2019s 300-plus White young-man murderers every year in the 1970s must have been reasoned lads with understandable motives. However, California\u2019s 45 or so White young-male murderers every year in the 2020s \u2013 DOWN 77% by rate \u2013 must be nihilist dark-web demons incomprehensible in their evil.<\/p>\n

True, Ball and other progressives, at the end of 20-minute rants on young men and the dark web, sometimes tack on a sentence or two on social inequality. Skilled readers of the figures above will see from the left-hand vertical axes that the murder rate among Black young-male Californians, even after mammoth declines, remains 5 times higher than the Hispanic rate, 17 times the White rate, and 25 times the Asian rate.<\/p>\n

Socioeconomic divergences so vastly dwarf anything attributable to culture or social media that it\u2019s silly even to mention the latter. But issues like poverty and domestic violence are unpopular, no fun to talk about when it comes to a powerless entity like young people.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a lot more enjoyable to berate \u201cisn\u2019t it awful!\u201d Andrew Tate misogynies and nihilist sites that young men in question can\u2019t even be shown to have visited than to delve into distressing, real issues affecting young people. In just today\u2019s anti-youth nastiness, the liberal-left\u00a0Salon<\/a>\u00a0declared that Trump\u2019s racist hate speech \u201coperates on the level of a median racist adolescent\u201d and \u201cmight well have killed in the classroom of a suburban high school.\u201d Why is this youth-trashing necessary?<\/p>\n

The result is that progressives themselves are helping the Right to sabotage young people\u2019s vital access to social media and online information, connections, and expression at the very time Gen Z\u2019s positive trends and adaptive political attitudes are most needed to reverse crushing global crises.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Young men and violence are generating double the lies Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| October 2025 Why are progressives who champion diversity and multiculturalism sabotaging multiracial Gen Z when they should be touting young people’s stunningly positive trends? In half a century of advocacy, I have been appalled again and again by the self-destructive compulsion […]<\/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-161221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161221","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=161221"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161221\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":161230,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161221\/revisions\/161230"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=161221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=161221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=161221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}