At 16-year-old girl was killed, another was wounded, and a third student suffered a non-shooting injury Wednesday at Antioch High School in Nashville, and the gunman, Solomon Henderson, killed himself.
There was a “manifesto,” and also another file that’s called a “diary,” posted online by 17-year-old Henderson, who also livestreamed his crime.
Wednesday afternoon, I saw John Sexton’s post at Hot Air where he said:
I’m seeing some additional claims on X about the identity of the shooter but I’m not going to post them yet because nothing has been confirmed. Authorities also haven’t said anything about a possible motive yet but it has only been a few hours so that’s not surprising.
So I went to bed early and woke up shortly before midnight and said, “OK, let’s see if they’ve ID’d the guy yet,” and started scrolling on my phone. Knowing how these things go, I checked KiwiFarms, because if anybody’s going to have the shooter’s manifesto, it’s the KF crew, right? Downloaded the PDF and it’s just utter nihilism. Someone suggested Henderson appeared to be a copycat of Wisconsin school shooter Natalie Rupnow, about whom I said this in December:
Most importantly, there is no politics here. People trying to turn Natalie Rupnow into a symbol of the Left or the Right, in order to score political points for their side, are misguided. This is not a crime with a clear political motive; this crime is a product of mental illness.
Or evil, if you’d prefer to call it that.
Ditto, Solomon Henderson. I’m sure the analysts at the FBI will have fun trying to discern some kind of coherent ideology in his manifesto, but it’s really just a collage of nihilistic craziness — “soyjak” memes, tributes to various mass murderers, “groyper” stuff, etc., and honestly what I want to say to these kids is simple: Y’ALL NEED JESUS!
Seriously. These kids see no meaning or purpose in their lives, which is an inevitable consequence of the de-Christianization of our culture. Our education system is openly hostile to Christianity, based upon the liberal secular humanist belief that Christianity is harmful, but if our Soros-funded cultural overlords were ever to make the mistake of inviting me to speak at one of their confabs at Davos or Aspen, I’d wake them up from their secular pipe dream: You think the “Religious Right” is dangerous? Wait until you get a look at what the Atheist Right has in store for you.
In the hyper-politicized media environment, incidents like this always lead to a search for some political angle, but what happens when it doesn’t fit neatly into the categories of the narrative? That was the case with Natalie Rupnow, just as it was the case with the school massacre that really got this whole trend going, when Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris went on their 1999 killing spree at Columbine High. There was no politics to what happened at Columbine; whatever Harris and Klebold were, they weren’t representatives of any political cause. They were just nihilists, killing for the sake of killing, and yet where was there any recognition of the danger posed by young people with no sense of meaning and purpose in life? Or where was the admission by the leaders of the public education system that they have created this problem?
Stipulate that mass murderers are, by definition, atypical rarities. It is always unfair to generalize from such rare examples in an attempt to scapegoat some group with which the killer is affiliated. Most of the weirdo geeks posting “soyjak” memes on a Discord server, or blabbering about “Zionist” conspiracies or whatever, are basically harmless. They may be hateful scum, but few of them are actually going to log off long enough to go commit a massacre. They’re just making chatter online. A more appropriate criticism of them would be, why are they just wasting their lives this way, spending so many hours regurgitating useless nonsense? If your teenagers or young adult offspring are engaged in such activity, ask them a simple question: Why aren’t you working?
Like, you’re spending at least 20 hours a week “gaming” or whatever, why not put that time into an actual job? Twenty hours a week at $15 an hour, that’s $15,000 a year. Certainly you could make enough to buy a gym membership, and between the extra money and improvements to your physique, you might actually be able to attract a girlfriend and stop being a useless incel. A whole lot of what’s wrong with underperforming youth — besides them needing Jesus, I mean — is simply that they have too much leisure. They are allowed to waste time doing stuff that doesn’t help them in any way, and which is in many cases detrimental to their physical and mental health. Work is always beneficial to young people; work tends to keep them out trouble, if nothing else, but the psychological rewards of work are worth considering. No matter how crappy your job may be, at least it’s better than lying around doing nothing. You get out of the house, meet actual people and hey, you get paid for working.
Doomscrolling . . . is the act of spending an excessive amount of time reading large quantities of news, particularly negative news, on the web and social media. . . .
It can be considered a form of internet addiction disorder. In 2019, a study by the National Academy of Sciences found that doomscrolling can be linked to a decline in mental and physical health.
Solomon Henderson may not be typical of anything, except as the tip of an iceberg of psychiatric damage caused by the always-online culture of the 21st century. Because my job requires a lot of online research, I have to find ways to avoid the swirling vortex of bizarre craziness that’s always out there beckoning — when you stare into the abyss for a living, the abyss is always staring back at you. It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it, and perhaps this would be a good time to remind readers that the Five Most Important Words in the English Language are:
