The issue is Donald Trump, not social media or lonely white males

Last updated Sep 15, 2025

After a white conservative was shot, many of the prominent white people in politics and the media hurried to blame a variety of excuses when they found that the shooter was a white young man from a republican family.

The Republican governor Spencer Cox from Utah, where Kirk was killed, believes that the problem is social media.

Cox has become a media favorite by criticizing the platform that has increasingly made traditional media irrelevant.

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Governor Cox said on Sunday:

I believe that social media played a direct role in every single assassination and assassination attempt that we have seen in the past five or six years. I have no question in my head – “cancer” is probably not strong enough. What we did primarily for our children needed decades to see how bad these algorithms are.

Cox is not completely wrong. Studies have shown that social media is bad for mental health and that the mental health of the individual improves if they no longer consume social media.

The problem with the theory of Cox is that social media existed long before the current climate of political violence. Cox quotes the last five or six years of attacks, but social media are more than 20 years old, so it cannot be social media itself.

Pete Buttigieg Thinks that the problem is lonely white men:

I think a wider social illness that I honestly think and could feel how many people in America, normal people and not dangerous people were at a moment when we all are still supposed to pray for the victim and his family, would be online to pray for a few evidence that the shooter comes from the other political team.

This is not healthy and this is no way forward. But that is exactly what the algorithm pushes us. And that seems to be particularly acute for young men. Statistically speaking, young men are the group that most likely spend most of the time alone. This is a recipe for a deeper social level of pain and decryption that we have to turn around. We can’t go on like this. And I think it is particularly important to remember that some of the same people who are online are quite normal offline. For this reason, we simply have to put the phone down, lay down the computer, in environments in which our humanity comes through, step together and talk to each other.

Buttigieg talks about how loneliness and too much time online can lead to dehumanating other people, and how people would become brave and say things online that they would never tell a person’s face, but loneliness is as old condition as humanity itself, and keyboard warriors have existed on the Internet since voting.

None of them really provides a satisfactory explanation.

A CNN analysis In 2023, of 500 criminal criminal threats against elected civil servants were determined:

At least 41% of all cases throughout the decade were politically motivated.
Almost 95% of people who were prosecuted due to threats to civil servants are male. The middle age is 37.
The politically motivated threats to civil servants increased by 178%during Trump’s presidency.
Threats in connection with hot political issues such as abortion or police brutality also rose up during the Trump years and rose by more than 300% compared to Obama’s second term.
As a party in power, 16 Democrats received threats in the second term of office. This rose by 169%, with 43 GOP legislators being threatened under Trump.

None of this is called that Donald Trump causes political violence.

It is impossible to ignore that Trump has accepted violent political rhetoric and has attacked his perceived enemies both Republican and democratically, so that he has created a cultural political language that causes people who have not agreed with people who do not agree with them and describe opponents or critics as an enemy.

The rise from Trump on Twitter, where he published many of his threats, and the problematic nature of social media goes hand in hand.

America often takes over the personality of its presidents. A president affects the country’s culture.

The entire conversation about lonely white men and algorithms seems to be avoiding.

Until America requires better from the person in the White House, the broken political culture of partisans will continue to be pumped into our collective atmosphere such as contamination of a smoke stack.

As long as we continue to ignore the real problem, we shouldn’t be surprised if the problem continues or gets worse.

What do you think is the cause of the current environment of political violence? Share your thoughts in the comments below.