The latest American gun horror - this time in Highland Park, IL - has produced another example of a very dangerous type: the Angry Online White Young Man. While there are pictures of the shooter at a Trump rally, he probably wasn't demonstrably political, or at least ideological. He was not likely advocating for lower marginal tax rates or reduced regulations on industry. What likely attracted him to Trump was Trump's own nihilistic disregard for norms. These are the young men who find Trump "funny" because he upsets their normie teachers or parents. For them, the long-established norms of society are bullshit (because that is true for young people in general) and Trump's wrecking ball was amusing.
We can trace Trump's disastrous policy legacy to the Supreme Court and the further breaking of the Senate, but there is also a way in which Trump - and the nasty, vile politics he unleashed - has created a new style of political engagement. While this culminated on January 6th, it did not start nor end there. One of the things fascists do is attack norms as "jokes" just to press against the boundaries. The "joke" allows them to retreat when they get push back (fascists, like all bullies, are fundamentally cowards).
However, in the dark corners of the internet, there is no one to pushback on those "jokes." So the darkness accelerates until it lands on a troubled soul like...well, pick your mass shooter.
Now, this sounds like a "mental health is the problem" NRA rant, but these Angry Online White Young Men are everywhere. Only here do we fetishize and facilitate the widespread owning of weapons of war. Reading through the GOP responses to any shooting is an exercise is willful ignorance masquerading as a bluff and boastful masculine caricature.
It's very difficult not to come to the conclusion that we are having a full blown mental health crisis in all corners of this country. The pandemic and Trump and a thousand other things have shattered our perception of what the world and our country truly are. Now, throw in military grade weaponry and you have not only a sick country but one that is uniquely primed for horrific events like yesterday.
We are all a little broken right now. Young men are naturally fragile for reasons that are too complicated to explain here. Fragile young men often overcompensate into these lethal parodies of masculinity. Then they go online and find "their people" who are just as angry, fragile and damaged as they are.
And so we get Highland Park and Uvalde and Buffalo and Kenosha and Parkland and Newtown and Columbine and on and on and on and on...
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