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After a white conservative was shot, many of the prominent white people in politics and media rushed to blame a variety of excuses when they found out that the shooter was a white young man from a Republican family.
Republican Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah, where Kirk was killed, thinks that the problem is social media.
Cox has become a media darling by criticizing the platform that made traditional media increasingly irrelevant.
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Gov. Cox said on Sunday:
I believe that social media has played a direct role in every single assassination and assassination attempt that we have seen over the last five, six years. There is no question in my mind — ‘cancer’ probably isn’t a strong enough word. What we have done, especially to our kids, it took us decades to realize how evil these algorithms are.
Cox isn’t totally wrong. Studies have shown that social media is bad for mental health and that the mental health of individuals improves 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 more than 20 years old, so it can’t be social media by itself.
Pete Buttigieg thinks the problem is lonely white men:
I think a broader societal sickness that frankly I think you could see and feel in how many people around America, normal people, not dangerous people, were at a moment when we all should have still been praying for the victim and his family, were busy online praying for some shred of evidence that the shooter would turn out to be from the other political team.
That is not healthy and that is not a way forward. But that is exactly what the algorithm pushes us to do. And this does seem to be especially acute for young men. Young men right now, statistically, are the group most likely to spend most of their time alone. That is a prescription for a deeper societal level of pain and unraveling that we have got to turn around. We can't go on like this. And I think it's especially important to remember that some of the very same people who are in these conversations online will be perfectly normal offline. That's why we do need to just put down the phone, put down the computer, step out and talk to each other in environments where our humanity comes through.
Buttigieg is talking about how loneliness and spending too much time online can lead to dehumanizing other people, and how people get brave and say things online that they would never say to someone’s face, but loneliness is a condition as old as humanity itself, and keyboard warriors have existed since dial-up internet.
None of them really provides a satisfying explanation.
A CNN analysis in 2023 of 500 federally prosecuted threats against elected officials found:
At least 41% of all the cases across the decade were politically motivated.
Nearly 95% of people prosecuted for making threats to public officials are male; the median age is 37.
Politically motivated threats to public officials increased 178% during Trump’s presidency.
Threats related to hot political topics like abortion or police brutality also skyrocketed during the Trump years, increasing by more than 300% from Obama’s second term.
As the party in power, 16 Democrats received threats during Obama’s second term. This increased 169% with 43 GOP lawmakers threatened under Trump.
None of this is to say that Donald Trump causes 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 created a cultural political language that lends itself to dehumanizing people who disagree with you, and labeling opponents or critics as the enemy.
The rise of Trump on Twitter, where he issued many of his threats, and the problematic nature of social media go hand-in-hand.
America often takes on the personality of its presidents. A president impacts the culture of the country.
All of the talk about lonely white men and algorithms seems like a dodge.
Until America demands better from the person in the White House, the broken partisan political culture will continue to get pumped into our collective atmosphere like pollution from a smokestack.
As long as we continue to ignore the real problem, we should not be surprised if the problem continues or grows worse.
What do you think is the cause of the current environment of political violence? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
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