Former FBI agent James Fitzgerald was recently on Laura Ingraham’s show discussing the Charlie Kirk assassination after the shooter was taken into custody. In response to the question we all have—namely, how does a 22 year old straight-A student with an impressive college scholarship, from an intact and, by all appearances, a “normal” religious, conservative family, wind up one of the most notorious American assassins of this century—Fitzgerald stated that, while he didn’t want to blame the parents, something went wrong in the family structure at home to have caused such a change in their son.
Were it only that simple.
Image created using AI.
We do sense that something is profoundly wrong in America. Something is profoundly wrong with Gen Z. Something is profoundly wrong with young males.
Given that reality, I’m not disputing that, in searching for a motive, law enforcement must investigate a perp’s home life before exploring other avenues—like investigating a husband when the wife goes missing.
While parents can play a pivotal role, it doesn’t appear that negligent parenting or a dysfunctional home is to blame for the Charlie Kirk assassination.
The next line of investigation would be friends and social groups, but it’s still not clear how the killer got radicalized. Did his current cohort radicalize him, or did he find them because he was already a radical?
When looking at schools, it’s not clear if he changed during high school or during the semester he attended college. His unhinged behavior could result from years of liberal educators microdosing hate for conservatives.
After all, there’s nothing a teen likes more than to hear that his parents are the worst.
Developing teen boys (especially white ones) can only hear so many times that they are toxic and responsible for the world’s ills and that conservatives are haters and Christians are nutjobs before they internalize that message. The resulting self-loathing becomes so noxious that destruction is the only recourse.
Maybe he was radicalized at school, but we might get more mileage from the fact that he is yet another smart, quiet male who spent a lot of time on the computer and suddenly—drastically—his politics and possibly his sexuality changed.
But social media, gaming, and the internet are not solely to blame, either. Millions of males participate in those online worlds and are fine.
Something happens online that radicalizes a subset of teen boys and young men who may be quiet or introverted, gender confused, or taking powerful meds for mental illness or hormones for gender transitions—medications that make them more susceptible to the haranguing voices on the internet, the brainwashing from educators, even the direction a therapist pushes a patient.
When young assassins and school shooters come from “normal” functional homes, their parents are just as shocked and devastated to learn they were the masterminds behind these unthinkable murders as any of us would be.
But, again, I can see why an investigation into explaining the inexplicable would default to the parents. Before America started to unravel, in rare cases when a teen or adult child murdered his family or committed mass murder, an inquiry into what went wrong at home was a logical starting point before looking to other factors like traumatic military service or insanity. It made sense to connect the dysfunction to a motive and the creation of a murderer.
But when there is no dysfunction explaining the murderous rampages, attention must turn to other factors.
I’m not saying anything most of you aren’t acutely aware of. It’s likely many of you have a child who despises you, considers your stances on LGBTQ+, guns, and Israel to be a form of violence, and has cancelled you.
Whether called cancelling or estrangement, there’s a movement where adult children ghost the families they can no longer tolerate because debate with them is toxic, alternate viewpoints are triggering, and the “home” where they were raised by loving parents who kept them safe and sound is no longer a safe space. They cobble together ersatz families in the echo chambers of like-minded friends and online forums where they find validation.
In some ways, there’s nothing new here. Devastating squabbles have always divided families. Look at the Royals! Remember the Prodigal Son! Cold comfort, though, for the heartache of being estranged from a child you nurtured and adored.
There are no real warning signs from the assassin’s upbringing or his time in school. Millions of boys are quiet, a bit nerdy, and spend a lot of time online.
Research must unearth what the trigger is that turns some quiet boys from good families who spend considerable time on the internet, into mass murderers.
Another data point to explore, given the rise in transtifa-related violence, is the revelation that he was possibly romantically involved with his roommate, a transitioning male.
More than the parents, it’s friends, teachers, and, especially, the internet that can breed these killers.
The online world recruits our children, combing the internet for quiet kids who feel lonely or confused, angry or invisible.
The online world amplifies the issues that interest them—gender, guns, G-d, Gaza—with algorithms that barrage them with relevant images, articles, and commentary, ramping up their sense of urgency to attend to these concerns.
The online world lures them in with these algorithms and reconfigures their thinking—sometimes in a very short of time—negating years of quality child rearing. Like an alien parasite, it takes possession of their frontal lobes, which aren’t fully formed in boys until their mid-20s, and takes control of their ability to reason.
The online world sympathizes with them, offers them friendship, validates their feelings, and reinforces their political views.
The online world nurtures their potential for psychoses, then grooms them to be violent killers—doing its bidding like a diabolus ex machina (devil in the machine).
In the end, the online world weaponizes them like jihadis wearing a suicide vest.
Sigh.
I’m tired of conservative pundits like Laura Ingraham and Clay Travis bragging about their kids and their level of involvement, claiming this would never happen in their homes.
I’m sure the parents of Charlie’s assassin, Trump’s attempted assassins, and the Minnesota Catholic School mass murderer felt the same way until they saw their sons’ images plastered all over the news.
These crimes are no longer relegated to individuals from broken homes, with long histories of criminal behavior, or who are wildly psychotic. Charlie’s killer could have been your son, your neighbor’s son, or anyone else’s son. Coming from a “good” family with stellar parenting no longer insulates anyone.
Parents can be ever vigilant and still miss the signals, if there are any -- kids are adept liars and good at hiding things, presenting happy faces even when miserable.
Investigators will always default to the home life, but we cannot ignore this pattern involving young men if we want to root out the potential for this behavior and excise it before it metastasizes into murder.
Cries to get rid of computers are not realistic; the internet genie is out of the bottle, and fixing this will involve a combination of efforts.
But I wonder if part of the fix might lie in the very machine that foments this aberrant behavior. If so, that will engender a host of other issues with which we must contend.