How to Break a Generation

By Abe Greenwald

The suspect in the killing of Charlie Kirk is 22 years old. The perpetrator of the Annunciation Church mass shooting was 23 years old. The alleged gunman in last December’s killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was 26 years old. The shooter who attempted to assassinate Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, was 20 years old. 

What happened to Gen Z?

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and College Pulse just released their sixth annual College Free Speech Rankings. The survey of 68,510 college students nationwide found: “34 percent now say using violence to stop someone from speaking on campus is acceptable, at least in rare cases. That is an increase of 10 percentage points over the last four years.”

So more than a third of college students believe in silencing political opponents with force. Left-wing academia deserves a good deal of blame for helping to shape America’s youth into revolution zombies. But there’s more to the story. 
 
A survey conducted last year by political science professor Kevin Wallsten found that Gen Z is far more accepting of political violence than any previous generation. But as he notes in the Wall Street Journal, “there’s no meaningful difference between the attitudes of 18- to 26-year-olds who are and who aren’t enrolled in college.”

Radical curricula alone are not enough to turn young Americans into armed Stasi. If that were the case, we’d have come to this terrible moment long ago. Up till now, generation after generation has passed through the leftist indoctrination of the university classroom, and, while they might have graduated with some silly ideas, they didn’t take up arms for the cause. 

To make a terrorist, you must first break the person. And that’s what we’ve done to so many in Gen Z. 

Raised half online, they never got the opportunity to become fully social beings. As multiple studies have shown, this equates with alarming deficits in empathy and self-confidence, and higher rates of depression and anxiety. And it’s only in recent years that anyone has gotten serious about trying to monitor what kids are exposed to online. 

In the real world, these kids were taught that they mattered more as representatives of some group identity than as individuals. If they thought they were thriving, they found out it’s only because they were in a privileged group. If they were having problems, it was because they were in a disadvantaged group, and that was their lot. In either case, there was little room for personal agency.

At the same time, their personal discomfort was considered an intolerable condition. Every challenge was a threat. Even speech could harm them. They were ushered into therapy, diagnosed, and medicated. Some, it turned out, were discovered to have been born in the wrong bodies. This designation was to be celebrated while it turned their lives into a sci-fi nightmare. 
But there were other competing nightmares to deal with. Climate change was forever on the verge of making the planet uninhabitable. Democracy was dying, while fascism waited in the wings.

Then came Covid, disruption of what normalcy they knew, complete social isolation, and years lived entirely online. 

By the time Gen Z were delivered into the hands of the revolutionary professoriate, they had been sufficiently broken down and were ready to be remade. AI could cover their day-to-day responsibilities while they devoted themselves to the propaganda on their screens and in their classrooms. All that was left was for them to go out into the world and finally be something.

The writings left by some Gen Z killers read less like manifestos than dystopian personal diaries. And that’s probably what they should be understood as, reflections on the devastated life that made them who they are.

Abe Greenwald is the executive editor of COMMENTARY.