Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| October 2025<\/strong><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Liberal-left podcasters are rushing to cite the New Jersey tragedy as an example of a MAGA-influenced teen boy corrupted by \u201cblack-pill\u201d social media, specifically assassinated conservative commentator Charlie Kirk and misogynist \u201cmanosphere\u201d influencer Andrew Tate.<\/p>\n That could be, or maybe not. So far, the evidence \u2013 mainly an initial\u00a0investigation by NJ.com<\/a>\u00a0(quoted below) \u2013 suggesting why he did it remains complicated.<\/p>\n I single out this tragedy because the only way to analyze an issue is to explore cases that challenge points I make \u2013 unlike social-media blamers, who dodge compelling evidence that doesn\u2019t fit their narrow agendas.<\/p>\n The alleged killer was far from a \u201ctypical teenaged boy\u201d (a meaningless stereotype in any case). His avid-gamer YouTube and TikTok sites had 40,000 viewers. His \u201csocial media presence seemed to revolve around professional baseball and \u2018MLB: The Show,\u2019 a baseball video game.\u201d<\/p>\n In a 22-minute video (since taken down) the day of the killing, he claimed a \u201cgood family by my side\u201d and complained he had been \u201cbullied, ridiculed\u201d and suffered a school suspension for \u201cridiculous allegations\u201d (spread, he said, by one of the girls and her mother) of \u201cdistributing \u2018child porn.\u2019\u201d He \u201ccompared himself to former Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Trevor Bauer, who was suspended over sexual assault allegations in 2021 but never criminally charged.\u201d He apparently was served a restraining order for stalking one of the girls, who he previously dated. His uncle was a police chief.<\/p>\n The alleged killer also resented one of the girls because she \u201cmade fun of Charlie Kirk\u2019s death<\/a>.\u201d In the past, he had \u201cexpressed admiration in his livestreams for Andrew Tate, a polarizing influencer who is accused of running a criminal sex trafficking ring in Romania\u201d but had not posted anything recent on Tate. He once \u201cplayed the violent video game \u2018Grand Theft Auto,\u2019\u201d though he mainly \u201cchattered about baseball and simulated MLB gameplay.\u201d<\/p>\n So, pick your motivator. Normally loud right-wing pundits shrank flaccidly. A White possible-Charlie-Kirk-fan murderer? Not interested. Unless the victimized\u00a0girl is blond<\/a>\u00a0and the killer can be demonized as transgender, gay, leftist, immigrant, Black, Hispanic, Muslim, Democrat and\/or woke, the Right doesn\u2019t care about dead girls.<\/p>\n Leftist \u201cSecular Talk\u201d podcaster\u00a0Kyle Kuliniski<\/a>\u00a0did care \u2014 for ideological reasons. He leaped on the alleged killer\u2019s 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 \u2013 at least, the fraction perpetrated by young men \u2013 are the violence that should most worry us, he added.<\/p>\n That depends on whether you prioritize ideology or bodies. Mass shootings (711 victims<\/a>\u00a0in 2024, including 18 in or around schools) and hate-killings (104 victims<\/a>\u00a0in 2024) indeed are American tragedies. But put together, they account for fewer than 4% of the\u00a021,014 U.S. homicides<\/a>\u00a0the CDC so far has tabulated in 2024.<\/p>\n The other 96% of America\u2019s murders, we ignore<\/strong><\/p>\n 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 \u2013 including killing children and youth.<\/p>\n So, who murders American girls? You\u2019d think that would be a pressing question. It isn\u2019t. We\u2019ll soon see why.<\/p>\n Three-fourths of the murderers of teen girls are of the same race (in this case, White), and 90% are male. The most recent\u00a0FBI tabulations<\/a>\u00a0of murder victim and murderer characteristics show the killers are not peer teens.<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 35% are ages 18-24, and 45% are 25 and older.<\/p>\n FBI tabulations<\/a>\u00a0show 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%.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cradicalized\u201d by some malign social-media influence, to be the problem.<\/p>\n Now, let\u2019s consider the thousands of murder victims they ignore.<\/p>\n Consider\u00a0just a few<\/em>\u00a0of the girls murdered\u00a0just in the week<\/em>\u00a0of the New Jersey tragedy. You heard of\u00a0Travis Decker<\/a>? Father, age 32, gunned down his 3 daughters last week.\u00a0Darnell Jones<\/a>? Age 33, raped, decapitated, and cut off the hands of his 13-year-old daughter.\u00a0Edwin Cruz Gomez<\/a>? 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\u00a0Texas truck stop<\/a>, allegedly by their 31-year-old mother. A teenage boy, 18, and girl, 17, shot to death at an\u00a0Arizona campground<\/a>; a 31-year-old man has been charged.<\/p>\n No theories, no commentaries on those murders, which are so common they are barely even newsworthy.<\/p>\n News flash, Gen Z:<\/strong><\/p>\n NO ONE IMPORTANT IN 2025 AMERICA CARES ENOUGH TO ACKNOWLEDGE MURDERED GIRLS\u2026 unless their deaths serve an ideological agenda.<\/p>\n NO ONE IMPORTANT CARES WHO IS MURDERING THEM\u2026 unless their killer\u2019s characteristics suit the commentator\u2019s personal prejudices.<\/p>\n NO ONE IMPORTANT CARES WHAT THE REAL CONTEXTS OR TRENDS ARE\u2026 why should anyone care when they can just make them up?<\/p>\n I\u2019ll follow up to see if in this one case, social media indeed proves the culprit. So far, I\u2019m surprised no one has mentioned the standard American-style remedy: us this tragedy to ban teen girls from riding e-bikes.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Here\u2019s 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 \u201ccritical thinking”… in theory. We almost never practice it \u2013 and never on youth and social media issues. Union County, New Jersey, prosecutors accuse a 17-year-old boy of first-degree murder […]<\/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-161223","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161223","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=161223"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161223\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":161229,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161223\/revisions\/161229"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=161223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=161223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=161223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}We all love love love \u201ccritical thinking”… in theory. We almost never practice it \u2013 and never on youth and social media issues.<\/h5>\n