Why are so many young men becoming radicalized online? Rob Henderson, Carolyn Gorman, and Isabella Redjai examine the recent assassination of Charlie Kirk and the radicalization of his alleged killer, Tyler Robinson. They explore how social media and college campuses influence political beliefs and discuss the growing epidemic of loneliness and isolation. The conversation also addresses the normalization of violence and the blurred line between mental illness and political extremism, and what these disturbing trends might signal for the future.
Audio Transcript
Isabella Redjai: Welcome back to the City Journal Podcast. My name is Isabella Redjai. And today I am joined by two of my esteemed colleagues, Rob Henderson, a senior fellow here at the Manhattan Institute, and a leading voice on issues of social class, cultural trends, and social divisions. And joining us as well is Carolyn Gorman, our resident expert on mental health policy. Thank you for being here to both of you. Before we dive into today’s discussion, if you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss out on future conversations.
Now, let’s get into It’s been exactly one week since Charlie Kirk was assassinated at Utah Valley University. New details have emerged though about his alleged killer in the past week. Tyler Robinson, 22-year-old who reportedly was texting his trans roommate that he was disturbed by the hatred in Charlie Kirk’s rhetoric that led him to murder Charlie Kirk. I know we’re to get into this today, a lot of the prosecutors in Utah officials said that Robinson was chronically online and participated in a lot of these dark places on the internet, very niche subculture discussion forums like Reddit and Discord. And there was even a note that allegedly was found under his keyboard saying, “I had the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk and I’m going to take it” So really heavy stuff. I’m glad that I have you two here to break this down for me.
It didn’t seem like Robinson though was always like this. From what I heard, he grew up in a conservative leaning household. Even his father, when he turned him in, brought the family minister to try to persuade Robinson to turn himself in. But yeah, Robinson was a part of a conservative household. He then goes to college. I want to start with you, Rob. Do you think you could pinpoint one thing that you suspect caused the shift in Robinson’s change of thinking or that kind of escalated into this radicalization that we saw?
Rob Henderson: Yeah, well, my understanding is that online extremism does play an important role here, but it’s always hard to predict in advance. So if you have, you know, 100 young guys like Tyler Robinson, who are maybe a little bit mentally disturbed and kind of hostile and have this aggression in them, 99 of them won’t go as far as actually shooting someone and so these things are impossible to predict But you know if you have a country of 350 million people some non-trivial percentage of them, some, or rather a trivial percentage of them, but in terms of raw numbers it could be you know a few dozen or a few hundred are capable of something like this. And yeah, it’s you know this is sort of the version of more left-wing radicalization. My understanding is that the engravings on the ammunition showed signs of interest in far-left politics. I read this interview in the Free Press with the journalist Andy Ngo. And he talked about how, obviously, a lot of people are aware, one bullet said, “hey, fascist catch,” with exclamation points. But then another bullet had the phrase, it was the title of a song called Bella Ciao, which apparently is an anthem for Antifa in the U.S. and it is rooted in the anti-fascist movements in Italy in the early and mid-20th century, and you know a lot of people who aren’t sort of deep into the Antifa lore or whatever wouldn’t understand that. I didn’t understand that until I’d seen that article, that you know, this is something we should be aware of. A lot of people are concerned with right-wing extremism, but left-wing extremism can be obviously just as deadly.
Carolyn Gorman: So I’m actually, we were talking about this earlier, coming off a two-week digital detox, we tried to be not online, not on social media. So was sort of a crazy time to come back online.
Isabella Redjai: You missed a lot.
Carolyn Gorman: But honestly, I think this is so relevant because some of the things that we, sort of our takeaways from this, first of all, we failed. We could not stay fully offline. Our lives are just so online in ways that we are not even thinking about, like, right now, and it’s sort of important to recognize. Like, I thought we could do this and actually we couldn’t fully do it. But also, because taking even a substantive dial down or dial back on things, you actually, taking a step back, notice sort of like how quickly things are moving, how quickly information is shared, even when we don’t have the full picture always. I mean, this Jimmy Kimmel thing, you know, and again, I’m just coming back off this digital detox but apparently you know he made some comment about the shooter before we knew all the information that ended up being wrong or maybe it wasn’t fully wrong, you know, whatever it was, we didn’t have the full picture, and we’re all and we’re all sort of unfortunately culpable for, like, we all are doing this. And so it’s I think we need to think very seriously about how fast information is spreading the, the scale, the scope, and the speed. That’s sort of, when I think about policy change, think about scale, scope, speed, or the three S’s. And I think maybe it’s important to think about information spread this way as well. Like how many people is this information reaching? How quickly is it reaching them and how much is reaching them? And, you know, those are important attributes for making sure that we’re not riling people up into like a mob mentality.
Isabella Redjai: Yeah. I think one could also argue that with social media, being the first to get a scoop is extremely beneficial. So people would rather go back and correct a story than have the facts straight from the beginning. So yeah, things are moving at a rapid pace, but we don’t exactly always have the accurate version of reality.
Carolyn Gorman: And it’s really hard. Rob probably knows this better than I do, knowing the psychological literature very well, but when we hear information, it’s really hard to sort of then believe it’s like to correct our misunderstandings or to tell ourselves that something is actually false. Once we learn something, it’s hard to unlearn that thing. And so if we take in information that ends up being wrong, we sort of have that initial idea in our head. then in the fact that people are just getting really different information now is I think also sort of problematic. I mean, what I see on X working at a right-of-center think tank and what some of my more left-leaning friends see on X, I mean, it’s just totally different information and it’s not always helpful, I think.
Rob Henderson: There’s this really interesting finding from social psychology, this idea is related to confirmation bias, which a lot of people are aware of, but it’s this idea of implicitly asking ourselves the question of can versus must when we come across a piece of information. So if you come across a piece of information where the facts are a bit ambiguous, but they confirm what you want to believe, you ask yourself, can I believe this? And most of the time you’ll find the answer is yes, because it confirms your views. But if you come across a piece of ambiguous information that is at odds with what you want to believe, you instead ask yourself, must I believe this? And you’ll often find, well, the answer is no, because it’s ambiguous. Whenever we encounter information in the world that opposes or is consistent with what we view, we often have that question in our mind or those questions.
Isabella Redjai: I do think that you guys hit the nail on the head. And obviously, this is what the officials said, too, that social media was a huge cause of what happened to Tyler Robinson and his radicalization. I also would like to hear your guys’ take on whether going to a college campus and the sort of rhetoric that happens on college campuses might have had any influence or if this purely someone seeking out community online and that’s what started all of this.
Rob Henderson: I think there’s a bit of that at college campuses. So this has been a longstanding debate. Does college radicalize the students? Is it the radical left-wing professors brainwashing the students? That actually doesn’t seem to be the case. The students on campus seem to be more influenced by their peers than their professors, which, I think it makes sense. If you’re a young person, you care more about what your friends think than whatever the authority figures think. And so a lot of the students are already young and generally more left-leaning to begin with on average, not all of them, but many of them are more left-leaning when they set foot on campus. And then there’s this element of group polarization, I think, that happens where, when you spend time with other people who share your political views, those views tend to harden in part because it’s a method of bonding with your group. Like, you believe that that politician is evil. Well, I do too. And now we agree on something and now this solidifies our friendship and then your views tend to crystallize. And I think this this happens a lot on college campuses where a lot of students will kind of end up a bit more on the left than when they began, even though the professors, I think, had very little to do with that.
Carolyn Gorman: We sort of see the opposite thing happening too now. And Charlie Kirk, honestly, is maybe some evidence of this. People are social. They want to fit in with their peers. And so this sort of shift right for some young people, I think we need to be very aware of how the Overton window has sort of shifted to extremities and how it is happening kind of on both sides. We could debate all day long about whether it’s worse on the left or the right. I actually think that’s more problematic to do. I think we need to be recognizing that any extremity is bad.
Rob Henderson: Yeah, I think one of the concerns people had about Charlie Kirk and him speaking on campus. There’s a lot of people who would, you know, mock him and say, oh, you’re, you know, there’s this guy, he’s just going around debating a bunch of 18-year-old college students. This is kind of silly. This is, you know, he’s creating clickbait. But he played another role that I think threatened a lot of people’s views, which was that he served as an important kind of focal point for students on campus. So a lot of students who aren’t left-leaning on campus think they’re alone. And then when Charlie Kirk up on campus and they go to one of his events and they look around and think, I’m actually not alone. And then they could create these Turning Point chapters and form communities and friend groups and all of the conservatives would recognize who else was a conservative or at least not a progressive. And other people watched this and they really didn’t like it. And so, you know, they didn’t like Kirk’s views very much, but they also didn’t like the fact that he was creating this common knowledge of, actually there’s a lot of students on campus who disagree with the popular orthodoxy.
Isabella Redjai: Yeah. I think that Charlie Kirk, a main focus of a lot of his debates and a lot of his advice either at video, like in videos or at conventions was he was addressing the men of the next generation and he made a couple points about the reasons why men tend to isolate from society and start to disassociate. It seems like Tyler Robinson was exhibit A of this exact phenomenon. I’m curious from both of you, we’re seeing more and more young men walk away from mainstream society, find community online, enter these echo chambers of ideas on Discord, Reddit, even like Twitch streams, things like that. What is driving this mass isolation in our society, especially among amongst young men? And why are more of them exiting reality to find, you know, virtual reality if you will?
Rob Henderson: I think part of it is just the death of boredom. You know, I was thinking about this for a while that I think I’m kind of like a middling millennial and I’m just old enough to remember, like boredom was like an ordinary feature of teenage life 15, 20 years ago. And when you’re bored as a teenager, it’s just you got to go meet up with your friends and get something going, social group, a gathering, a party, something to stave off that feeling of, you know, dullness and boredom. And now if you’re bored. You know, on the one hand, you could try to make friends and get people together and that takes a little bit of effort. Maybe there’s a bit of social rejection. Maybe it’s hard to, you know, get people together and you’re worried that they won’t want to hang out with you. And so, you just pull out your phone and it’s this short-term boredom killer. I just, I think boredom is…
Isabella Redjai: It’s like fear of rejection kind of?
Rob Henderson: I think it’s a bit of fear of rejection, but I also think there’s no more boredom in life. And so you could just look at your phone and you could hang out with your friends or you could pull out your phone and the phone is just so much easier. And there’s that parasocial thing, like, this guy, Tyler Robinson, instead of hanging out with real people, real friends, he could just go on Discord or Reddit or whatever and have the kind of illusion of the empty calories version of social interaction. And yeah, and you see way more radical, crazy stuff online than you do in real life. People tend to post crazier stuff online than they would say in person too.
Carolyn Gorman: Yeah. I think also the sort of like risk calculation has changed for both men and women, but you know, I’ve spoken to young men who say they don’t want to approach women because they’re nervous that they’re going to be accused of sort of harassment or and you know the risk of being at a party and there being phones and something that you do can be recorded. You know we were on this digital detox but we did take a flight and so I was watching some episodes of Entourage on this play and it was like an early 2000s show and seeing these guys go to these parties and no one’s on their phones. Everyone’s drinking a beer and they’re actually interacting, but you don’t see a phone anywhere. Even when there’s a celebrity, the main character’s a celebrity and he goes to this house party and no one is on their phones and no one’s taking pictures of him.
Rob Henderson: And secretly recording him.
Carolyn Gorman: You could not imagine that happening these days. And so I have to think that the sort of risk calculation for young people especially has, for young people, but maybe for everyone has just changed. You know, they’re so much less willing to just be natural and interact with each other because what if someone records something that they do or say or accuses them of something that they’re doing or saying and how do you walk back from that?
Isabella Redjai: Someone was just telling me that Andrew Yang, you know, political figure has been throwing these parties where phones are checked at the door and you only have disposable cameras to document the night so that people can actually interact. I think that’s a great idea, but is that sustainable long term? Who knows?
Carolyn Gorman: But I really like that we are having very serious conversations about whether or not our lives are better online or not. We need to keep having those conversations. But I think this is bigger than any one individual. We need to be thinking about sort of like, how as a society, whether as a society, an American society, this is better or worse for us and in what ways, because it’s going to take a lot to kind of change these dynamics. And I think you were sort of alluding to this before with sort of this click bait, rage bait stuff. The incentives are there for people to be posting extreme stuff.
Isabella Redjai: The algorithm seems to reward it in a lot of ways.
Carolyn Gorman: Look, sex, money, these things have always driven a lot of behavior. But it’s almost just so much more heightened online. Again, scale, scope, speed, how fast, how much, to what extent, who are we reaching? We should be thinking about these things because when it happens too fast, we’re all a mob, or in some mob. I think we should maybe recognize that a little bit.
Isabella Redjai: Yeah. I don’t want to exhaust the point, but I feel like since Charlie Kirk’s death, I’ve been seeing a lot of old videos of his pop-up. And he actually did speak exactly to what you both touched on, this almost fear of rejection. He was talking particularly about dating and how when young men are rejected or disenchanted from the dating pool, they seem to isolate completely from society out of shame. Do you think there’s a role that shame or awkwardness or lack of self-esteem, whatever it might be, plays in the radicalization also of young people where they’re seeking some sort of thrill or community? We’ve already touched on this, but it’s just, I think there’s an aspect of shame as an element perhaps.
Rob Henderson: Yeah that sounds right. And I think a lot of young guys are unaware that the occasional rejection is part of growing up. It’s natural. You learn to deal with it and move forward. And if they’re not aware, it can feel catastrophic. It feels like if one person doesn’t like you, maybe no one will ever like you kind of thing. And then from there, you see we live in this kind of culture where we glorify fame and social media figures and influencers and you know, I can’t help but wonder and this is completely speculative if you know this guy, Tyler Robinson or maybe other young men out there saw the way that Luigi Mangione was glorified and romanticized and this you know people… He killed someone and a lot of people seemed to like him and people were calling him attractive and all this other stuff, complimenting him. And if you’re a guy who’s not doing very well in your life, but you do something like that, then maybe you can change your self-image and get people to start talking about you and caring about you.
Carolyn Gorman: And that’s exactly what we’re doing right now, unfortunately. You can’t not do it. We are talking about all of these tragedies that keep occurring. It’s, again, it’s just part of our culture now we just talk, talk, talk, talk about all of this stuff and then it normalizes all of these things. It normalizes, like, violence has just been totally normalized I think. And I think that’s really problem and then, problematic, excuse me and then you touch on something else like you know if young men maybe face rejection once and then it’s the end of the world. One thing I think about a lot is how we have sort of normalized, you know, mental health and talking about how we feel and everything is a mental health problem now. I, you know, anyone who has ever read anything I’ve written knows I say this all the time, unless we sort of distinguish what a big problem is from a little problem, then little problems seem like big problems. And then people don’t actually understand, like, this is normal. Yeah, you’re going to face some rejection. You’re going to face some hardship. You’re going to face some bullying. And when you don’t think that that’s normal, then you think it’s the end of the world. And that’s also problematic.
Isabella Redjai: Yeah, I think you touched on this, Carolyn. It seems that Tyler Robinson is not an isolated incident. We’ve seen a spike in violence amongst a lot of a lot more young people. There was the covenant Christian school shooting, Luigi Mangione and the United Health Care CEO Brian Thompson, who he murdered allegedly, and the Anunciation Catholic School shooting actually just like three or four weeks ago, and very close to home, the 345 Park Avenue shooting at the Blackstone and NFL building. Now we’re seeing it with the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Is there a common denominator across all of these different examples?
Carolyn Gorman: I have a hard time wanting to say it’s a mental health problem for everything because I think we really need to try very hard to sort of distinguish when, I mean look, anyone who shoots someone has a serious issue, right? But I think we need to distinguish what accountability looks like in different cases. I don’t know all of the information about Charlie Kirk’s shooter. And so I don’t want to say that this was a mental health problem. With the Park Avenue shooting, there were a lot of early signs that this individual had very serious mental illness, a psychotic disorder. He had been hospitalized. He was on psychiatric medications. These are the types of signs that for that shooter, we should have recognized and been able to prevent.
But that is something that maybe is a little bit different than a political assassination. And we have to be careful about saying it’s a mental health problem because I think Then we are almost willing as you said, can or must I accept this can I excuse this? Must I excuse this? Let’s not sort of sort things into the wrong place when we can avoid doing that.
Isabella Redjai: They’re certainly different categories. Some of these are mental health related others feel like they’re political or ideological vigilantes who have an end in mind. Go ahead Rob.
Rob Henderson: Well, it just occurred to me that I see a lot of speculative chatter about Tyler Robinson and you know Politically motivated. What was it mental illness related and so on? I to my knowledge no one ever Attributed mental illness to Luigi Mangione and I wonder, this is like not really related to this discussion, but I wonder if it’s because he’s good-looking and we’re like someone hot can’t be mentally ill. You know, like no one’s like, oh, Luigi Mangione, was he unhinged? Was he mentally ill? No, it was just like, oh, he was like a you know, you seem like a relatively smart guy who was politically motivated, he kind of messy politics, it wasn’t necessarily clear was on the left or the right.
Carolyn Gorman: This is one way one could think about things. Someone who is homeless, schizophrenic, has been living on the streets for decade. They’ve failed out of every single system. They have, you know, they have, someone like this shooter, even the one who had had psychiatric hospitalizations, Luigi Mangione, they had a motive, they thought about this thing, and they, they completed the thing.
Rob Henderson: They made a plan and executed.
Carolyn Gorman: Thank you, they executed it.
Rob Henderson: It is this funny thing where like, he had a psychotic break from reality, but he was still, he created a plan, he got in his car, he was using turn signals.
Carolyn Gorman: It was premeditated. Yes, and these are the distinguishing… This is at least one way to distinguish these things. I think we need to be very careful about calling this a mental health problem, calling any of a mental health problem until we really know because the fact of the matter is we need to hold people accountable. This type of violence is not okay. And that is full stop, you know, end.
Isabella Redjai: Right. So I want to go back a little bit to the idea of loneliness and isolation kind of being this growing epidemic in America. Back in 2023, the Surgeon General actually declared an epidemic of loneliness and isolation. What sort of warning signs, and you touched on this a little bit, Carolyn, what sort of warning signs can parents, family members, friends, communities be looking for to prevent this sort of violent behavior in the future?
Carolyn Gorman: Well, one thing that we talk about a lot is youth on their phones. This is a societal problem. We are on our phones. Adults are on their phones. And so, I’m not a parent. It’s really hard for me to want to ever give parents advice. I would say if you’re anything like me, we could probably cut back on our screen time and just be more aware of what is going on around us. Taking some time off from your phone, making sure you’re actually paying attention to what your kids are doing and having dinner with them without being on the phones, little things like that. Even if you’re turning the dial down 10 percent from what you’re currently doing, I can’t think that there is a negative or a downside to doing that and just get a little more time with the people that are sort of local, that are right with us in life. Local, close to us, I mean.
Rob Henderson: And being aware of what you see online is not representative necessarily of the large majority of the population. So if you look at the data on Twitter, for example, something like two percent of Twitter users produce 80 percent of the tweets. So it’s a small volume of people who are chronic posters. And then the rest are lurkers and that kind of thing. There’s this old heuristic about, it’s called the 1 percent rule of social media, which is that 1 percent of the population does most of the posting, most of the content creation, 9 percent engage with it in some way. They’ll comment on it or like it or repost it in some way, and then 90 percent are just observers, lurkers scrolling through, but not really engaging that much with it. And so, I try to keep that in mind when I look at social media, that this is not everyone.
Isabella Redjai: Does that include bots too?
Rob Henderson: There’s some percentage of bots but my understanding is they’ve accounted for that, the bots. And it is something like yeah 2 percent of the population, 80 percent of the tweets and that’s roughly the same for all social media platforms is a lot of people make their living that way, or they just like sharing a lot about themselves online, but most people, you know, don’t post nearly that frequently. And so that is you know that’s worth keeping in mind that this is a kind of a distorted image of attention seeking people or people who make their living through content creation but this is not most people.
Carolyn Gorman: You know, even if you’re not posting, this is something I really felt taking a break from all of this. Coming back online and seeing things, I was like, wow this is actually way more kind of like distressing than I remember it being after having been away from it. We should be aware of what we’re watching. Even when we don’t mean to be watching, things pop up in our feeds. How good for us is that? Again, even if you’re not posting, you’re probably seeing things that you don’t want to. And so turning the dial back, seems like very simple thing. Like we all know, social media is bad for us, blah, blah, whatever. But it really is harder than I think we recognize to just get ourselves to turn away from it. And we should be trying really hard to do this.
Isabella Redjai: Something I would love also for you, Carolyn, to look into for me is what sort of effect is it having on our brains when one second we’re laughing and the next second we’re sad and then the next second we’re angry. I mean, the emotions within seconds scrolling through an algorithm is just stark. And I don’t think there’s really ever been a point in human history where our minds are probably shifting that quickly.
Carolyn Gorman: Look, it’s… It’s not just social media too, it’s just we are living in a very fast-paced life. Rob and I were talking about this earlier. We’re both pretty big readers and in the morning I like actually read for an hour every morning. I set a timer and read and you know, being away from work for two weeks, I sort of read without my timer and the way that I was even reading was different. I wasn’t like trying to get the most out of my hour of reading. It was much more sort of thoughtful and you know, our lives have just fundamentally changed. There’s no going back, but we should, I hate to drive this point home so much, but we just really should be thinking about the ways that individually this is affecting our lives and try to step away from it so that we can see, you know, I really like my life better this way or that way. This thing, maybe I don’t want to cut out it. I want to keep my sibling group chat. But do I need to be on Instagram at all, you know, once a day? Probably not.
Rob Henderson: Social media, it also… I mean we’ve talked about how gives you this distorted picture of society as a whole, but I think there was this long-standing debate about the dangers of social media where for a while, especially after the 2016 election, there was a lot of discussion about echo chambers. You know, people, the algorithm’s just feeding you stuff that you already believe, it’s confirming and reconfirming your biases, and there’s a real danger there. But actually, more recent research suggests that the opposite may be the problem, which is not that you’re seeing things that you agree with, because that’s even before social media, you know, you just kind of self-select into the people you date, your friend groups, people you spend your time. They already agree with you. You’ve already been kind of in an echo chamber before social media, but what social media did was present you with the most inflammatory and extreme opinions of the other side, and then this warps your view of the other side. You’re not seeing, you know, the moderate person of the opposing political party, you’re seeing the crazy extreme posters who love posting all the time, you know, finding the worst examples and resharing it. And you know, I saw this a lot with a reaction to Charlie Kirk’s death is a lot of people on the right were saying, oh look what these left-wingers are saying. They all believe, they agree and it’s not true. Like, you know. there’s a recent poll out of YouGov that even you know people who identified as very liberal, like 31 percent of them said that political violence was justified some of the time, which is a high number, but that also means about 70 percent disagree with it, you know they don’t believe that you should, and that’s not what… We’re not seeing the 70 percent who disagree, we’re seeing the, you know, the people who do agree, who post a lot. And this, I think, fuels a lot of the political animosity.
Carolyn Gorman: Totally, it’s rage bait. It’s rage bait.
Isabella Redjai: Speaking of which, an aspect of the Charlie Kirk story that has, I think, surprised a lot of Americans is the response online in celebration and glee over his murder, which is tragic. Brian Anderson, editor of City Journal, actually made an interesting point to me the other day. was saying, I’m noticing that a lot of these people celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk are women. I kind of want to get into that. I know, Rob, it’s probably a little bit speculative, but why do you think that women seem to be the majority of those that are celebrating such a horrible thing?
Rob Henderson: I’ve noticed that too and I don’t know again is this just social media showing us like if you if you take two videos of two people doing the exact same thing one is a man and one is a woman, the one with the woman will get more views. People, men and women, like looking at women more than they look like looking at men. Men are just less interesting to look at and so I think, like, this may be just the algorithm saying you know this woman’s TikTok video is saying you know I’m glad this person’s dead or whatever, that’s like, just people will pause and look at that versus some guy, you know?
And so assuming, like, we’ll just assume that maybe it is true, because it does seem that way. I wonder if, you know, there may be two possibilities here. So one possibility is that the reason why you don’t see more men doing it, even if they agree with it, is because they know that like they may be an actual, they may draw more violence toward themselves in some way. That if you’re a man and you say something and then other men see it, like they may want to come after you. Whereas if you’re a woman, I think it’s just less likely that some crazy person will take this as like a serious threat in some way. Basically, what I’m saying is if you’re a man and you say I’m glad so-and-so is dead, people may infer, like you also will carry out this act later because you’re a man and because you may be more aggressive and violent. If you’re a woman and you say I’m glad this person’s dead, I don’t think people are going to say, she’s the next person to pick up a rifle and take someone out. So they feel less, yeah.
The other possibility here and this is a little bit more spicy and controversial is, there’s this idea that you know college-aged women they’re, they have the impulse to care for vulnerable beings. And historically that’s been infants and children. And in the absence of that, that caring and maternal instinct gets redirected to marginalized groups or people who you think deserve care or treatment or sheltering from danger. And so you can imagine that if you’re a mother with an infant and then you see this guy who you believe is evil and wants to kill your infant, then you’re going to be happy when someone takes him out and if you’re a woman you think like oh you know all these historically marginalized and mistreated people like I need to look out for them and make sure that they’re safe and so on, and then you see this person who you believe or have been led to believe is a threat to them then you’re going to be glad when this predator is eliminated.
Isabella Redjai: Any thoughts?
Carolyn Gorman: Earlier this year there were horrific floods in Texas and a lot of young girls at summer camp were killed in Texas hill country. I live in Dallas right now and it was horrifying, horrifying. Young girls, like eight to 12. Really, really disturbing stuff. I have to say I really did not see a lot of coverage of this comparatively to other types of topics and I just wonder if maybe to your point Rob, the population wasn’t threatening and was there something there and we’ve just moved away from sort of caring about our local communities, problems that are close to us. We’re caring a lot about sort of more, kind of far-removed issues, like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I’m seeing so much more about that than I am about things that are happening in our own backyard. Again, I think the online world has made everything less local, and that is also, I think, really problematic.
Isabella Redjai: Well, we’ve been mentioning his name quite a bit throughout our conversation, but a story that I want us to talk briefly about is that Luigi Mangione, the alleged killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, his state terrorism charges were dropped yesterday by the New York State Supreme Court. I want to talk about first, I mean, the people outside the court were like cheering. They were so happy. Hashtag free Luigi, all the things. But what does this reaction say about, first of all, what we recognize as terrorism, intimidation against certain political or ideological figures and groups? And yeah, I mean, let’s just start with that.
Carolyn Gorman: I’m not a legal expert. We need Ilya Shapiro on here for that question.
Isabella Redjai: We do. Ilya, we’re coming to you.
Carolyn Gorman: But we’ve, I think what this says to me is we’ve just normalized. We’ve normalized extremity, we’ve normalized violence, and it seems people cheering about this is, it should really disturb all of us.
Rob Henderson: Yeah, yeah, I agree with that. That it’s horrendous. I mean, we used to have a strong norm against celebrating the death of an innocent person, but then, you know, people have attempted to redefine what innocent means. And if you’re a CEO, then you’re guilty by default. And therefore, you know, you’re acceptable target. And yeah, I mean of course like this is going to send a signal to potentially send a signal to other would-be assassins and killersn like oh, you’re going to be cheered and celebrated and lionized and yeah, potentially, you know a lot of severe charges against you will be dropped.
Carolyn Gorman: So today it’s CEOs. Tomorrow, it’s what, school principals? Like where do we decide who is guilty or innocent and who, I mean, yeah, I think to your point there’s we’ve really normalized that.
Isabella Redjai: Another one of our colleagues, Jesse Arm, Vice President of External Affairs here at the Manhattan Institute, actually coined a term after the Park Avenue shooting. And he referred to that shooting as well under this category of Luigism, which is the idea that violence is a legitimate response to the perceived injustices of capitalism or institutions. So that’s a lot of people are glorifying the violence because they think that somehow they are achieving, like you had said earlier, Carolyn, like some end, some objective for society. These people have done wrongs against humanity or against our society and in some ways that justifies murder. It’s really sickening but Rob, you were kind of starting to get into this. I’m curious, just 30 seconds, really quick, what type of precedent this sets for future violence. I mean we’re trying to minimize these things, and I feel like the response that a lot of these situations have brought about are positive for the, you know, the perpetrators in all of this.
Rob Henderson: Yeah, yeah, and they shouldn’t be positive. Yeah, I find it interesting. And you know, the old like journalism rule that three is a pattern. And right now there’s only kind of two of these types of guys, at least to my knowledge, got Luigi Mangione and then Tyler Robinson. And they’re both young guys, both smart, or at least, you on paper, they’re smart. Luigi Mangione went to Penn and Tyler Robinson got a 34 on his ACT. Smart guy. And I wonder if, you know, as you were describing Luigi Mangione earlier, I thought, OK, well, he killed a United Health Care CEO and now he’s a hero. But if he hadn’t done that, he would be viewed as a villain. Right? He’s white. He went to an Ivy League school. He is a child of privilege. And, you know, in other circumstances, people wouldn’t be fond of him but then he kills someone who has higher status than him and suddenly he is praised for it and I wonder if something similar was going on through Tyler Robinson’s mind, that you have these like intelligent young white guys and they think well everywhere I go people are putting me down or saying like I’m privileged, and this, that, and the other, but how do you ward off those charges against you, is you know taking someone out that everyone can agree that is even more hated than me.
Carolyn Gorman: Well that you think everyone can agree is more.
Rob Henderson: Exactly. In their peer group, in their college campuses. Yeah, exactly.
Carolyn Gorman: Whoever the normalized hate, whatever the flavor of the week is.
Isabella Redjai: Very, very interesting. Well, we’re a little bit out of time, but I do want to end on a topic that I think we’ve weaved throughout our conversation here. It’s a little bit lighter though, but I’m very curious to hear what you have to say about this, Rob. So NBC News decision desk ran a poll with Gen Z asking Trump and Kamala Harris voters in Gen Z, what their definition of personal success is. Actually, I think you retweeted this or something to that effect, but men who voted for Trump said that having children, about 34 percent said having children is their definition. But if we take a look at women who voted for Kamala Harris, 51 percent said that a fulfilling job/career is their idea of success. But the surprising part in all of this was that women who voted for Trump, their top category with 40 percent saying what their personal definition of success is, was financial independence. I think there’s a lot there, but it seems that no matter the political leanings amongst Gen Z women, career, financial independence, sort of the traits of girl boss culture seem to be the definition of success. Why do you think that is? Thirty seconds each if we can.
Rob Henderson: Well, I think one possibility here is, and this is like a charitable view, is that they’re looking at the word success and maybe the young women are thinking like, it like, it’s not especially hard to have a child if you’re, I mean it’s a hard thing, but it’s well within the realm of possibility for a young woman. For a young man, it’s much harder because you have to convince someone to like you and then convince someone to let you marry them and then have a baby. There’s a lot going on there. And so they might think that’s this huge, insurmountable obstacle.
Carolyn Gorman: It’s out of their control.
Rob Henderson: Yeah, and so that would be success because it’s so hard versus getting a job and that kind of thing. Whereas, yeah, maybe for women it’s having some kids that’s more possible, whereas financial independence and those kinds of things seem more remote.
Isabella Redjai: I think that’s interesting. Yeah, men have a lot more agency in dating in a way. No matter, you know, if you’re a feminist or not, I think a lot of women want to be pursued. So men can kind of decide, OK, I’m ready to get married. I’m ready to have family. Women have perhaps less control over that and probably more control over a career. Do you think?
Rob Henderson: One thing that’s interesting there is that their number one priority for or definition of success, it’s I mean, at least historically, it’s required the opposite sex. Yeah, right? And so if you’re a man and you want kids you need to have a woman to find you and if you’re woman and you want financial independence and you want to live a comfortable life you got to find a man who’s earning money and so, you know, another way to look at is like men and women need each other and they maybe have not yet we lost that kind of wisdom along the way.
Isabella Redjai: There’s a division between the sexes is what I’m hearing.
Carolyn Gorman: I think that’s really interesting, actually, the way you frame that sort of like, how the question was framed might have affected the answers because of just what we associate the word success with. I might just associate the word success with professional success. Whereas maybe if the question asked had been something like, what do you want to have happen in your life? Or you know, 10 years from now, what would you like in your life? That might, the answers to those questions might be a little bit different. They might be, well, I’d like to have a family and have kids by that point. Whereas success might be associated more with like the professional, the professional world.
Rob Henderson: Oh, I see. There’s a connotation to success, versus like you use a word like meaning or fulfillment or something like that, maybe the answers would have been different. But still, I still think those differences were fascinating. The differences seemed much more along the lines of gender rather than politics, regardless of who you supported.
Isabella Redjai: Right. So last question. What is your personal definition of success around the table?
Carolyn Gorman: Well, I just got married and so I’m very, very happy about that. Yeah, we’d like to have kids. You know, we’ll see what the timeline looks like. But yeah, I’m excited.
Isabella Redjai: So exciting, congrats, Carolyn.
Carolyn Gorman: Thank you.
Rob Henderson: Yeah, well, OK, so it’s like a personal definition of success. Okay. Well, I mean, I think generally, yeah, it varies. Like, it’s what is it that you want and then did you get it? And everyone wants different things.
Isabella Redjai: I think I’ll use Carolyn’s question. Where would you like to be in ten years?
Rob Henderson: Well, I was going to say, so give me the answer. Well, I’ll go to the original question, which is, you know, I see a lot of young people now who have not like the best relationship with their parents and I would like my adult, in the future, my adult kids to like me. That would be my definition.
Carolyn Gorman: I love that. I would like that also. That would be my definition.
Isabella Redjai: That is a marker of success.
Carolyn Gorman: I love my parents, so mom and dad, you are successful in my book. Shout out to mom and dad.
Isabella Redjai: Well, that’s all the time we have for today. Thank you, Rob. Thank you, Carolyn, for joining the City Journal Podcast.
And thank you listeners for joining. If you haven’t already, please leave us a like and a comment and please subscribe to our channel so you don’t miss out on future conversations. Until next time, thank you for joining the City Journal Podcast. We hope you tune in again soon.
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