After a white conservative was shot, many eminent whites in politics and the media rushed to blame a variety of excuses when they discovered that the shooter was a young white man from a republican family.
Utah’s Republican Governor Spencer Cox, where Kirk has been killed, thinks the problem is social media.
Cox has become a media darling by criticizing the platform that made the traditional media increasingly out of words.
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Governor Cox said on Sunday:
I believe that social media has played a direct role in every attempt at assassination and assassination that we have seen in the past five years. There is no doubt in my mind – “cancer” is probably not a fairly strong word. What we did, especially for our children, it took decades to realize how bad these algorithms are.
Cox is not completely false. Studies have shown that social media is bad for mental health and that the mental health of individuals is improving when they stop consuming social media.
The problem with Cox’s theory is that social media existed long before the current climate of political violence. Cox cites the last five or six years of attacks, but social media is over 20 years old, so it cannot be social media.
Pete Buttigieg think that the problem is white solitary men:
I think that a broader societal disease than, frankly, I think you could see and feel in the number of people in America, normal people, not dangerous people, were at a time when we would have all had to pray for the victim and his family, were occupied online praying for proof that the shooter would prove to be the other political team.
It is not healthy and it is not a way to follow. But that’s exactly what algorithm pushes us to do. And it seems to be particularly sharp for young men. Young men at the moment, statistically, are the group most likely to spend most of their time alone. It is a prescription for a deeper level of pain and societal detangling that we must turn around. We cannot continue like this. And I think it is particularly important to remember that some of the same people who are in these online conversations will be perfectly normal offline. This is why we just have to put the phone, put the computer, go out and talk to each other in the environments where our humanity passes.
Buttigieg talks about how loneliness and spending too much time online can lead to dehumanizing others, and how people become courageous and say things online that they would never say in the face of someone, but loneliness is a condition as old as humanity itself, and keyboard warriors have since existed the Internet dialogue.
None of them really provide a satisfactory explanation.
A CNN analysis In 2023 out of 500, threats to the federal government against elected officials concluded:
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At least 41% of all cases during the decade were politically motivated.
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Almost 95% of people prosecuted for threatening civil servants are men; The median age is 37 years.
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Politically motivated threats against civil servants increased 178% during Trump’s presidency.
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Threats linked to hot political subjects such as abortion or police brutality also skyrocketed during the Trump years, increasing by more than 300% of Obama’s second term.
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As a ruling party, 16 democrats received threats during Obama’s second term. This increased by 169% with 43 GOP legislators threatened by Trump.
None of this means that Donald Trump provokes political violence.
It is impossible to ignore that Trump has embraced violent political rhetoric and attacked his perceived enemies, both republican and democratic, in such a threatening way that he has created a cultural political language which lends itself to dehumanize people who do not agree with you, and to label opponents or criticisms like the enemy.
Trump’s rise in power on Twitter, where he has published many of his threats, and the problematic nature of social media go hand in hand.
America often takes the personality of its presidents. A president has an impact on the country’s culture.
All discussions on solitary white men and algorithms seem to be a dodge.
Until America better demands the person in the White House, the partisan broken political culture will continue to be pumped in our collective atmosphere such as the pollution of a fireplace.
As long as we continue to ignore the real problem, we must not be surprised if the problem continues or aggravates.
What do you think is the cause of the current environment of political violence? Share your reflections in the comments below.