Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| November 2025<\/strong><\/p>\n Back in my Sixties Boomer teenhood, Charles Manson and his Beatles-worshipping creepy-crawlies embarked on blood-drenched massacres to ignite a \u201crace war.\u201d 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. \u201cI\u2019m the devil,\u201d Manson-blessed assassin Tex Watson, 23, told his celebrity victims before butchering them (1969).<\/p>\n Charles Joseph Whitman, 25, the Eagle Scout ex-Marine who shot 46 from the University of Texas tower (1966), was \u201coozing with hostility\u201d and \u201cself-loathing,\u201d his campus psychiatrist said. Anthony Barbaro, 17, honor student, shot 14 at his rural New York high school (1974) \u201cto kill the person I hate most \u2013 myself.\u201d Brenda Ann Spencer, 16, shot 9 children at a San Diego elementary school (1979); why? \u201cI don\u2019t like Mondays. This livens up the day.\u201d (\u201cYou\u2019re looking for reasons? There are no reasons.\u201d \u2013\u00a0Boomtown Rats<\/a>.) Patrick Purdy, 24, shot 35 and himself at a Stockton grade school (1989) to make his \u201cend dramatic and cause people to remember.\u201d Evan Ramsey, 16, shot 4 at his Bethel, Alaska, high school (1997) for \u201cinfamy\u201d as 15 tipped-off students lined up to watch. Luke Woodham,16, shot 9 at Pearl (Mississippi) High School (1997) because \u201cI was ridiculed, always beaten, always hated.\u201d Michael Adam Carneal, 14, shot 9 at his West Paducah, Kentucky, middle school (1997), saying only, \u201cI can\u2019t believe I did that.\u201d Mitchell Johnson, 13, and Andrew Golden, 11, shot 15 at their Jonesboro, Arkansas, middle school (1998); \u201cI had a lot of killing to do,\u201d Johnson said.<\/p>\n When it comes to self-hatred, victimism, nihilism, dark rage, name your evil, Gen Z gun-killers can\u2019t top this sampling of just some pre-Columbine White youngsters gone horribly wrong, the age-mates of today\u2019s our-generation-never-did-that grayhairs. Lesser school shootings were considered just local news back then.<\/p>\n Freed by ignorance of history, today\u2019s left-to-right crusaders aping Netflix\u2019s idiotic \u201cAdolescence\u201d 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\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n Yeah. Real new. Never seen the like.<\/strong><\/p>\n As amusing as leftist\u00a0Francesca Fiorentini\u2019s<\/a>\u00a0memefest is pretending that alienated going-nowhere young men radicalized into Nihilistic Violent Extremists is some frightening new social media brain rot \u2013 a nihilistic meme of its own she weirdly helps far-right FBI director Kash Patel push \u2013 just imagine if today\u2019s bellowers had some school shooters\u2019 Discord or TikTok postings that sported anything remotely resembling Manson-minion derangements. You could hear them on Mars.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t blame privileged grownups for our peers\u2019 far more common mass violence.<\/p>\n This is crude bigotry. Do leftist podcasters in particular think it\u2019s just good fun to endlessly demonize Generation Z, as if that has no consequences?<\/p>\n Truth is an illusion; 2025 truth doubly so (apologies, Douglas Adams)<\/strong><\/p>\n We must prefer our misinformation swamps \u2026 Artificial Intelligence slop, photoshopping, grammar-challenged anonymities, propaganda machines, anti-scientism, corporate shillings, rampant mainstream-media distortions and all \u2026 to factual evidence whose clarity batters cherished loathings.<\/p>\n I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve previously reported young men\u2019s (age under 25) trends. Trends for youths under age 18 are even more compelling. The\u00a0California Department of Justice<\/a>\u00a0documents the following numbers of under-18 murderers by race for key years below; using other years yields similar results:<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 in fact, laws have expanded, especially in policing domestic violence, and reporting has become more rigorous. The state\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019 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:<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 still a gigantic drop. Offsetting medical improvements is the proliferation of more lethal firearms capable of killing dozens or even hundreds in minutes.<\/p>\n Was the plunge in violence by youth due to increasing immigrant populations?<\/strong><\/p>\n Part of it, good evidence suggests. During the 1975-2024 murder and violence plummet, California\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n If the right wing wants more safety from violence, they should be cheering more young immigrants.<\/p>\n Commentaries that omit these crucial trends are fraudulent<\/strong><\/p>\n 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\u2019s handful of middle-class social-media-era killers more coldly sane, perhaps, or more nihilistically deranged (minting \u201cnew horrors\u201d doesn\u2019t require consistency) than those of the pre-internet past?<\/p>\n On their face, real trends make today\u2019s zero-context claptrap laughable. It\u2019s hard to imagine colder evils than the many more pre-social-media pre-manosphere killers.<\/p>\n 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-\u2018em-ups, horror comic villainy, Superman roof jumps, noir detectives\u2019 handgunnings, sci-fi\/urban bloodwars, subway surfing, the cultural gamut, who then become anecdotal fodder for panic narratives.<\/p>\nToday\u2019s much rarer young killers are scarier than yesterday\u2019s larger numbers? You\u2019ve got to be joking.<\/h5>\n
In\u00a01975<\/a>: White 142, Hispanic 99, Black 121, Asian 4<\/h5>\n
In\u00a01994<\/a>: White 60, Hispanic 237, Black 163, Asian 82<\/h5>\n
In\u00a02024<\/a>: White 12, Hispanic 84, Black 24, Asian 4<\/h5>\n
In 1974: White 6,003, Hispanic 4,035, Black 7,072, Asian 466<\/h5>\n
In 1994: White 4,856, Hispanic 8,960, Black 6,763, Asian 1,750<\/h5>\n
In 2024: White 946, Hispanic 3,545, Black 1,706, Asian 418<\/h5>\n