06 Sep School Shooting in Georgia: Who Didn’t Know?
Assuming you have more important things to do today than peruse CNN’s website or Twitter/X, you may not know that we now know the motive in the deadly shooting at Apalachee High School in Georgia earlier this week. It is a motive that practically guarantees three immediate public-facing outcomes: first, the story will disappear quickly from the pages of the mainstream media; second, it will, at the same time, become an even more important story among right-leaning and other alternative media sources; and third, nothing productive or positive will be done in response. To wit:
CNN’s Isabel Rosales reports to Anderson Cooper about the Winder, Ga. school mass shooter’s alleged Discord posts in 2023 expressing a desire to kill and frustrations over transgender issues. A transcript of Colt Grey’s father’s interview with law enforcement last year reveals that his son was allegedly bullied for being queer at school.
Ugh.
None of this should surprise anyone – and nor, for that matter, should the inevitable reactions. The mainstream media will bury the story because it’s no longer about guns specifically and is, theoretically, about another instance of “trans violence.” The right-leaning media will play up the story for precisely the same reasons. As with most things these days, perceptions about this story’s newsworthiness depend entirely on its political implications. If it’s about guns, then it’s a big deal for the Left/mainstream media. If it’s about “trans ideology”/trans violence, then it’s a big story for the Right/alternative media.
That’s a big part of the reason that nothing good will come from any of this. Stories like this serve only to expand the divide between political “sides” and to exacerbate the dislike that the partisans on those sides have for one another. It’s “Total War in the Total State,” as I have put it countless times before.
The other reason that nothing good will come from any of this is that the political posturing and side-picking ensure that no one will recognize, much less address, the real issue here. This is NOT a story about guns. It is NOT a story about “trans ideology.” It is NOT a story about defunding the police or arming teachers. It is NOT even a story about mental health – or at least mental health as it is traditionally defined. This is a story about nothing – or nothingness, more accurately.
I don’t want to bore you today, but this is a subject about which I’ve written several times over the past few years – in the contexts of school shootings, public rioting, shootings at public riots, and college protests in favor of Jew-hatred and a “free” Palestine. Regarding this last of these, I wrote the following just five months ago in my weekly column for American Greatness:
Psychologists who have studied violence in young men and especially young men’s willingness to forsake everything they know, everything they’ve been taught, and everything they might otherwise believe about right and wrong, say that there is a set of shared circumstances and “revelations” that link spree killers and self-radicalized terrorists. Faced with the emptiness of their own lives, isolated from many of their contemporaries, and desperately in search of something substantive to give their lives meaning and purpose, young men—especially young men who find refuge on the internet and in social media—tend to create fantasy lives for themselves, alternate realities in which they not only find the meaning and purpose they crave but do so in heroic fashion.
For more than a decade now, the journalist and editor Robert Beckhusen has noted that the ties that bind spree shooters and self-radicalized terrorists are both numerous and consistent. Young men confronted by the social and spiritual emptiness of their lives and society default to what is often called “heroic modeling” or “heroic doubling,” which is to say that they take on a symbolic cause and kill not just to slake their own bloodlust but to exact revenge for a whole class of people with whom they believe they find common cause.
Almost exactly ten years ago, just after the spree shooting in Isla Vista, California, Beckhusen interviewed Roger Griffin, a professor of Modern History at Oxford-Brookes University in the UK and the author of Terrorist’s Creed: Fanatical Violence and the Human Need for Meaning. Griffin explained the phenomenon of “heroic doubling” as follows:
[I]n the mind of the killer, they’re not just killing someone as the sole purpose of the destruction. They’re killing someone symbolic of something more general, which is also meant to send a message to the survivors….
…what happens psychologically—the person has undergone a process whereby a rather confused, pained, ordinary self puts on a sort of mask, which turns them into an actor—or a protagonist—in a personal narrative drama. . . .
In his avatar double, he achieves the ability to run and fight. I believe that’s a very powerful metaphor for what happens in the process of heroic doubling. Because the person who’s previously felt impotent and had no agency . . . is made to feel potent and have agency returned to him by adopting this mission. So in that moment, he becomes a heroic version, or avatar, of himself.
Although the parallels are hardly perfect, over the years, I’ve found this concept of heroic doubling to be a useful heuristic for assessing the otherwise seemingly pointless embrace by American young men—and, increasingly, young women—of foolish, intellectually abhorrent, and often violent ideologies and practices.
Americans of all ages, but especially American youth, are desperate for meaning. They have nothing – no faith; no community; no purpose; no telos, in short. And they want something. They will do anything to find meaning, to find a purpose, even if that means killing others to make a point. The above-referenced CNN report contains this revealing bit about Colt Grey:
“im committing a mass shooting and im waiting a good 2-3 years,” stated the account user [i.e. Grey], according to screenshots included in an FBI incident report from May 2023 obtained by CNN. “I cant kill myself yet, cause I’m not contributing anything to culture I need to go out knowing I did.”
I mean…how much clearer could he be? This kid wanted to have a purpose, wanted to “do” something important.
Circling back to the issues discussed at the top of this piece, before the long quote, a big reason why people today are so unhealthily invested in politics and political fights is this same need for meaning, this same need to believe that they are involved in something bigger than themselves.
Unfortunately, they’re not going to find that in politics, and as long as they keep looking there, then they – and everyone else – will continue to miss the real problem here. Politics is poison. The state is not your friend. Tim Walz is not America’s daddy or grampa or whatever. We are experiencing a crisis of meaning in this country, and we are looking for solutions in all the wrong places.
