Raised on radicalism, we made the killers

This is what we reap when radicalization is all our kids know. We need to fix it.

Tyler Robinson was the kind of kid who gave his parents no problems, and his family was the white-bread, Republican, version of suburban normalcy. And yet this 22-year-old turned radical, to the point of committing a murder, a planned assassination so gruesome that I wish I could unsee the video of it I was too quick to click before the official announcement of Charlie Kirk’s death. Once I saw the video, I knew that Kirk was dead. That kind of catastrophic wound is not survivable, outside of a miracle.

Image: Grok

What drives someone to plan a rooftop sniper shot against a political speaker? We still don’t know what drove 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, another young man who registered as a Republican for the ballot, to nearly kill then-candidate Donald Trump. The two young men had some similarities, but different high school experiences. Robinson was a solid student, respected and generally liked by his classmates. Crooks was described as smart, but was bullied and “standoffish” according to other students.

Neither Robinson nor Crooks had a criminal record or history of violent behavior. While I haven’t seen any reports of how authorities believe Robinson obtained the Mauser bolt-action .30-06 hunting rifle that they say was the murder weapon, there is no reason to believe it wasn’t obtained legally. Robinson reportedly grew up around hunting and guns. With Crooks, his father purchased the AR-15 style rifle he used in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old accused (let’s be honest, he did it) cold-blooded murderer of Brian Thompson, a father of two and CEO of UnitedHealthcare, used 3D printing technology to build the pistol he used to assassinate his target. Mangione was said to be a very intelligent, well-educated young man. Robin Westman, 23, obsessed over his plans to murder as many children as possible at the Catholic church where his mother had retired only a few years ago. Westman, in his tortured and disjointed journal, apologized to his parents who he said raised him right.

Of course, not all mass shooters are young people. I can provide plenty of examples where they are not, including political shootings. It’s also fair to suggest a reason to believe that these killers have mental health problems. But the trend, which appears to be accelerating, points to a growing comfort level of Americans raised on radicalism to justify, defend, and for some, celebrate, those who kill others who represent a threat to their beliefs. Or people with whom they simply disagree, or who represent an ideal held by those who they believe represent harm to them.

If you search just a little, you’ll see too many examples of people with positions of trust or authority getting fired because they were a little too enthusiastic about Charlie Kirk’s murder, or a little unsympathetic to his grieving wife and fatherless kids. Reuters crossed that line with the headline, “Charlie Kirk's allies warn Americans: Mourn him properly or else.” Not only is that offensive, but it’s also totally untrue. Out of those who condemn people who celebrate Kirk’s death, at least half I’ve seen are not allies of Kirk. Many are political opponents, and some are just regular Americans who do not agree with Kirk’s politics, but value his humanity.

There is a warning here, however. Be a decent human being, not an online-addicted bot, or a troll, or a political shill talking head on television, and keep your politics out of something that shouldn’t even be arguable as a tragic death, or be fired.

It appears we’ve raised a whole generation on radicalism. This isn’t just a left-or-right thing. The killers I highlighted above were more or less from conservative families. They became radicalized against the Christ-centered message of people like Charlie Kirk, and against those who cruise in the orbit of President Donald Trump. They feel that there’s an inevitability to the ideals that drove Trump to power, and they’re reacting by radicalizing. And those who radicalize sometimes turn to violence, which leads to others who agree with the radicals (because they are also radicals) to take sides.

The biggest bump opponents can give to those who disagree with their politics is to go after their opponents’ lives. Besides President Joe Biden’s catastrophic performance in his 2024 debate, and subsequent bumbled handoff to Vice President Kamala Harris, the biggest boon to Donald Trump was the near-assassination in Butler, Pennsylvania. Whatever young Crooks was thinking when he took that shot, what happened was certainly not what he intended.

In C.S. Lewis’ book “The Abolition of Man,” chapter 1 is titled “Men Without Chests.” The basic setting of that chapter is Lewis’ critique of a book he called “The Green Book” on English for “boys and girls in the upper form of schools” by authors he called Gaius and Titius. His primary issue with this book is that the authors eliminate the actual reality of important experiences and events, and reduce them all to the feelings and opinions of those who experience them. If this is true, then nothing is contemptible, for example. It is only the contemptible feeling of those who believe it.

I think Gaius and Titius may have honestly misunderstood the pressing educational need of the moment. They see the world around them swayed by emotional propaganda—they have learned from tradition that youth is sentimental—and they conclude that the best thing they can do is to fortify the minds of young people against emotion. My own experience as a teacher tells an opposite tale. For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defence against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.

As America has become a less sensible nation, and our own hearts have been hardened into filters of emotional propaganda, since we are all immersed in it 24/7, we’ve, whether inadvertently or on purpose, turned our children into products of “The Green Book,” and having done so, bestowed upon them a hard heart, and a soft head.

A bigger pique against “The Green Book” expressed by Lewis is the elimination of wonder, sublimity, reverence, approval, and disapproval as real levers of merit. These words, by Gaius and Titius’ reckoning, are only received by objects of people who opine or describe their own feelings. The objects or ideals themselves are not imbued with any merit to deserve such descriptions. So a wonderful sunset, or a cosmic display in the night sky, though they may evoke wonder, or be seen as sublime by those who experience them, are not, in the sterile rationalist view, worthy of those descriptions. In fact, nothing is. Everything is subjective to the viewer’s own authorial intent to paint his own truth.

To summarize Lewis, all of human history has discovered, and most philosophers who did, wrestled with these thoughts, and have found that virtue, beauty, and true reflection, should be taught to the youths of a generation. Quoting Plato’s The Republic, this is “in order that they become one ‘who would see most clearly whatever was amiss in ill-made works of man or ill-grown works of nature, and with a just distaste would blame and hate the ugly even from his earliest years and would give delighted praise to beauty, receiving it into his soul and being nourished by it, so that he becomes a man of gentle heart. All this before he is of an age to reason; so that when Reason at length comes to him, then, bred as he has been, he will hold out his hands in welcome and recognize her because of the affinity he bears to her.’”

The radical rejects the objective nature of good and bad works, in favor of a prescriptive debunking of that which has been found good by previous generations. Skeptics of science cite failures of those people who claim science to produce the utopias they promised. So we have produced those who also reject vaccines and other inventions that have immensely enhanced life for the whole world. When Reason comes without wonder, beauty, and ethical foundation, we get radicalization and nihilism.

On both ends of our political spectrum, we’ve slowly abandoned what makes a gentle heart, a beautiful face, or a just resolve important, and we’ve taught this to our kids. We’ve adopted the politics of power. We’ve made endless taxonomies of victimhood and reparations and who deserves what. We’ve held that political power is more important than the soul in our religion.

We have done what Lewis described as “the tragi-comedy of our situation,” to “clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible.”

In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

We have trained the next generation to value those things we ourselves celebrate: the wounding and demise of our political opponents, the ending of their power over our lives, the democratic process that makes compromise unavoidable, and the use of our own power to enforce our beliefs. We have done this without showing mercy, truth, beauty, wonder, and the intrinsic value of the soul, to them.

Whether we raise them in church, or register them as Republicans, or send them to college, they live in a society where it is writ large, “it’s only your feelings!” regardless of Ben Shapiro saying “facts don’t care about your feelings.” They’ve been taught that it’s “your facts” not mine, “your truth” and not reality. They’ve been bombarded by emotional propaganda, memes, and unreal political polemic, and desensitized to violence through movies, music and video games. They’ve been taught that war is justified, and at the same time war is the result of lying, conspiratorial, power-hungry politicians. They’ve been told to trust the government we have, but at the same time, shown that our government is untrustworthy and powered by unseen masters called “Them,” whose goal is to make “Us” into slaves.

They’ve been starved of Hayek, who wrote “The Road to Serfdom,” and been told that the real road to serfdom is to take centralized control away from those who promote actual democratic process (which is the opposite of what Hayek taught). They’ve had the organs of peaceful civilization removed and yet we demand of them to be peaceful citizens.

And when one of them, because they themselves are transgender, or someone they don’t like speaks against transgenderism, or is labeled as “hate speech” by organizations they follow, decides to take matters into their hands and murder, or to make an example of someone they believe represents evil, and gun them down in broad daylight, or shoots a kid playing “ding-dong-ditch” at the door, or a government rounds up kids in high school who came here as toddlers to deport them and their families, engages in throat-clearing, or “but” justifications for those actions, we teach our kids that radicalism in all its forms is what makes us Americans.

We remove the heart and demand blood be pumped. Those who say that it’s terrible that Charlie Kirk was murdered, his wife left a widow, his children left fatherless, “but” he should have known he would be targeted for his views on homosexuality and transgenderism, are heartless goons no better than the worst bad cop who crushes the life out of a mentally ill homeless person. Except many of those goons do it on television or social media where they think it’s just fine to express themselves.

It’s not cancel culture when such people lose their jobs, or their positions of influence. It’s humanity taking back what we so callously threw away. There are still people with hearts and minds and souls in America. It is time for these to rise up and end the tyranny of radicals. It is time to start teaching our children that what is beautiful and sublime and soul-nourishing are that way because those things merit the description in a very real way. That the lives of political opponents, or even criminals, are worth more than simply using them as bait or polemic invective.

Our kids need to have their hearts restored. It is time to restore them, and we need to start with ourselves. After the 1960s, you’d think we’d have learned the lesson the generation who fought WWII taught us. But we lost the plot. After all, it is we, the parents, who produced this generation of radicals, and killers. We have to start by looking in the mirror.