The fans of wrestling want to get “worked”; they want to believe the spectacle is real, even though they all know that it is not. The way to get the fans to open up their wallets is to get them sucked into the fictional world of performances and rivalries, and so the companies and actors try very hard to make it all stick.

In contrast, a “shoot” is when the wrestling performance goes far enough that something actually crosses over into reality. As a wrestler, it is possible to “work” yourself into a “shoot”; to have the act you’re playing go so far as to take on a life of its own, outside of your control. A fan could begin stalking you, or could even attack you for things you did to the babyface in the ring; a fake rivalry could turn into a real one.

Today, a very similar dynamic has sunk its fangs into American society itself, and the consequences are becoming increasingly deadly. When Trump began his second term in office, he came in promising a far-reaching revolution in the basic assumptions that underlined American politics. In area after area, the status quo was to be overturned: industries would be onshored rather than offshored, US allies and enemies alike would be brought to heel by tariffs, and the results of decades of mass immigration would be upended through a titanic deportation effort. Having promised his voters the moon, Trump and his administration have struggled to actually deliver. Reindustrialization has turned out to be a bust, for US manufacturing employment is actually contracting. The trade war against China is de facto already over, resulting in only limited changes to the status quo but still causing huge damage to American farmers.

Centrally, the new project of mass deportations has also struggled to get off the ground. While the number of deportations are high in historical terms, they fall massively short of the goal of one million deportations per year that Trump set for his administration. The White House has found it tougher than expected to change the reality of slow enforcement, limited resources and the often glacial pace of legal proceedings. To make matters worse, there are a number of contradictions baked into the idea of massively expanded deportation efforts, and these contradictions don’t have a neat solution.

From the very start of his second term, the various parts of Trump’s coalition have been at loggerheads with each other about the direction and goal of the administration’s immigration policy. 2025 began with a bitter conflict between the “tech bro” wing and the broader Republican base over the need for, and scope of, the H1B visa program, a conflict in which Trump actually sided with the tech bros. On top of that, Trump has consistently wavered on the question of going after employers, even going so far as talking about extending some form of amnesty for illegals working on farms: an idea that the now-late Charlie Kirk warned could break the MAGA coalition. Like Saint Augustine, who supposedly cried “Lord, give me chastity and continence, but not yet!”, the Trump administration is caught between wanting to make good on its promises to ordinary voters, and the basic economic and political reality of having very wealthy donors who don’t actually care about any of that. This contradiction is nothing new in American politics — in fact, it’s been the status quo for the GOP stretching back decades. The GOP has long been the party of voters who are sick of illegal immigration and the employers who want more of it and in fact rely on it to maintain their profit margins. Historically, this awkward marriage has generally produced a politics that is heavy on the rhetoric and very light on the actual follow-through. Trump has not actually managed to transcend this fundamental contradiction; what he has done is come up with a very novel way in which to handle it.

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If you can’t meet the goals you set out for yourself when it comes to actual mass deportation numbers, and your political coalition includes business interests who risk losing serious money if they can no longer access cheap, illegal labor, then what can you do? Well, you can turn it all into wrestling. ICE agents — who tended to keep a low profile and work mostly in plainclothes — now ride around in the open, heavily armed and wearing masks, with massive WWE-style media blitzes announcing their arrival. Until recently, ICE generally took some pains to avoid announcing their presence, particularly in blue states where they were known to be unpopular. But all that has been replaced with heavily promoted and hyped-up ICE “campaigns” in blue areas; campaigns that invariably lead to protests, clashes with governors and mayors, and recalcitrance from local law enforcement. All of this of course makes the process of actually finding and deporting illegal immigrants much slower and more dangerous than it would otherwise be. But that isn’t really the point: just like in wrestling, the administration is in the middle of a “work”; building a story and a hyperreality that their “fans” can make themselves part of.

On one level, the administration is truly pushing the envelope: Trump talks regularly about sending in the uniformed military to police Democrat cities, either to solve crime or to simply arrest all the dumb liberals who have supposedly ruined places like Chicago or Los Angeles. But when you actually dig into the details, these plans and suggestions for military deployments are almost entirely hot air, often involving dozens of soldiers for cities of hundreds of thousands. When deployments do happen, like in Washington, D.C., they go on only for a short while before they are quietly rolled up. Just like in wrestling, what matters is the storyline: actions like these are calculated based on what will move the media cycle and on what sounds impressive to the base. As with wrestling, the point isn’t actually to be real; the point is to feel real.

To millions of Americans, what is happening right now is starting to feel very real indeed. Republicans cheer as masked officers finally take off the kid gloves and roughhouse their political enemies. Democrats increasingly feel that the country is becoming lawless, and that the talk about having marines and Army soldiers use their cities as “training grounds” for future military conflict might just be real after all. And even if the actual mass deportations are fake, even if Trump ends up deporting fewer people than Barack Obama or Joe Biden, even if the plans to send in the military to “clean up Chicago” fall apart under even the faintest scrutiny, it doesn’t actually matter. The rocks and snowballs being thrown by protesters right now are real; the tear gas and the batons and the bullets are real. Slowly, surely, the work is morphing into a shoot.

On 7 January, the city of Minneapolis saw a “shoot” happen in the most tragic and literal sense of that word. Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother with no previous criminal record, was fatally shot in her car after being stopped by ICE agents. There is a great deal of footage available of the scene and the shooting itself, taken from multiple angles; the reader is thus free to make up his or her own mind about the incident. Yet whatever conclusion you draw about the details, the reality is that the details actually do not matter. They do not matter in the slightest, because before the body of Renee Good had even cooled, Donald Trump had already taken to social media to denounce her as someone who had “viciously” attempted to kill ICE agents. The US Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, minced no words either, going so far as to essentially declare Good a domestic terrorist.

This kind of rhetoric is fantastically irresponsible, but it’s also not surprising. Rather than compelling people to tone down their rhetoric and back away from the brink, Good’s death immediately became another part of the hyperreality; in death she was transformed into another stereotypical, villainous heel for the crowd to boo and jeer. Pundits on Fox News immediately began talking about how this now-dead woman had written her pronouns — she/her — on her social media profiles, and that she apparently was in a lesbian relationship of some kind. At the same time, angry crowds in Minneapolis began pelting retreating ICE agents with jeers and snowballs, as videos of Good’s crumpled body spread like wildfire. One half of America had a new babyface, the other part got a new heel. Republicans could cheer that another dangerous and potentially terroristic liberal got what she deserved; Democrats received further evidence that the fascists in jackboots really were coming to kill them all.

America is busy weaving a great and terrible fantasy; one where the country is slowly inching toward civil war. Trump is talking about defeating the “enemy from within”, Steve Bannon is warning that Republicans will go to jail if Democrats win the midterms. Social media is increasingly filled with shrill talk about how the other side is dangerous and cannot be reasoned with, and polling indicates that a very large number of Americans are now worried about the risk of democratic decline and even civil war itself. People have already died as a result of this fantasy; even worse, their deaths rapidly become the fuel the fantasy needs to keep growing stronger and more believable. As the story grows in urgency, it is drawing in more and more people, making future confrontations and further deaths all the more likely. Neither side in this conflict has anything even remotely resembling clean hands. Before Renee Nicole Good, there was Ashli Babbitt. Before Donald Trump dismissed his own countrymen as seditious radicals and terrorists, Joe Biden and his party did much the same thing.

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Increasingly, this kind of wrestling-like dynamic seems to be applied everywhere. The now almost entirely abandoned trade war between America and the rest of the world, going even further than the trade war with China, was one great big spectacle from start to finish. Massive, business-destroying hikes to tariff rates got announced through late-night social media posts. Trade delegations of important allies like Japan, upon visiting the White House to try to work out new trade policies, found themselves part of what turned out to be mere photoshoots: the Americans were neither prepared for nor particularly interested in actually settling on the details of some new agreement. In his various feuds with countries like Canada and Denmark, Trump has strayed far beyond geopolitical norms; but the feuds are reminiscent of Trump’s own history inside the wrestling world. Indeed, Trump has the rare honor of being the only president in American history to have been inducted into World Wrestling Entertainment’s coveted hall of fame, engaging in fan-favorite feuds such as the “Battle of the Billionaires” match between him and WWE co-founder Vince McMahon, the outcome of which led to Trump shaving McMahon’s head inside the ring.

But acting out the fake wrestling version of an incipient civil war is fantastically dangerous. The level of dehumanization, cruelty and bloodthirstiness one now sees on social media is already reaching a boiling point. Without some kind of reconciliation — which there appears to be zero interest in — more people will die, and the fantasy will slowly begin to turn into reality. America already has all the prerequisites for dangerous levels of social unrest and internal violence. The national debt is exploding, internal dissatisfaction with the state of the economy keeps rising, and the growing AI bubble is looking increasingly unstable. On top of that, it is engaged in multiple simmering conflicts over the world: trying to strong-arm Venezuela, guard against China, counter Russia and Iran, while also antagonizing all of Europe and threatening to annex Greenland from Denmark, a Nato ally. It has few friends and a growing list of enemies, forcing an increasingly overstretched and under-resourced military to try to be everywhere all at once. Historically speaking, the combination of social and economic crisis at home, and overstretch and wars abroad, is a dangerous one.

Moreover, America’s recent spate of high-profile assassinations should put to bed any lingering delusions — popular in the Joe Biden era — that a domestic conflict would be neat, easy, and containable. The US military, for all that’s impressive about it, cannot actually do much against the kind of internal violence that would be relevant here. Even Donald Trump himself, a man one of the most expensive security details in the world, was an inch away from losing his life to an assassin’s bullet only recently. If a concerted outbreak of political violence happens, very few people will be safe.

But that outbreak of concerted mass violence has not yet arrived in America. All talk of dealing with “the enemy within”, of sending in the troops to clean out Chicago, of calling in the National Guard to defend against Trump’s fascism, of “communists” or “fascists” about to take over the country and kill your friends and family: it’s all just fake. It is made up, it is a story. Yet people have already begun killing each other over that story, and as things stand nobody seems inclined to stop. As the late wrestling legend, Hulk Hogan, would have put it: sometimes, when you work a work, you work yourself into a shoot.

To that piece of wrestling wisdom, we could perhaps somberly add: if the work you’re working is about how dangerous enemies of the republic lurk around the corner, and how every political enemy is a domestic terrorist, a bloodthirsty communist, or goose-stepping fascist, it’s usually only a matter of time before the shooting starts.

The Times got around to mentioning Westman’s gender identity only halfway through the story, carefully framed by the information that “conservative activists” on social media would use the data to portray transgender people as violent or mentally ill. Other mainstream liberal news outlets have treated the issue in a similar manner. A BBC News story described the shooting as an “anti-Catholic hate crime” and avoided pronouns altogether.

Westman killed two children and injured 14 more children and three adults, who were attending an opening-of-school Mass at at Annunciation Catholic School, where his mother until recently worked. Like all such shooters, he became contested terrain in the culture wars the minute he opened fire. The most obvious battleground is his transgenderism. Mainstream outlets like the Times, operating for the defense, have elected to suppress the trans angle. Minneapolis’s progressive mayor, Jacob Frey, chose to get out in front, speaking out at a news conference against transgender hate and in favor of gun control. The Right-of-center New York Post, meanwhile, took what the gender activists no doubt saw as a gleeful opportunity for trans-bashing, with the headline “Minneapolis school shooter confessed he was ‘tired of being trans’: ‘I wish I never brain-washed myself.’”

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Without avoiding the shooter’s trans-ness or blaming it, however, we might instead acknowledge that the transgender mass shooter is uniquely telling of the mass-shooting phenomenon, and of our times. The Westman crime happens in the same month as an excellent article by Sam Kriss in The Point magazine. It locates March 30, 1981, as the moment “John Hinckley brought us into the world we all live in today. He did it by firing a .22 ‘Devastator’ round into the chest of the president of the United States.”

Kriss argues that Hinckley’s attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan was the first such event to divorce the target from the goal. In 1981, Americans responded to an act of public violence by worrying about “things that used to matter,” such as who was in charge of the country, and if the shooting was a Russia-designed first stage of a nuclear attack. But the real story was elsewhere, in proto-incel Hinckley’s frustrated masculinity and desire for self-expression. Hinckley wasn’t political (and Westman, with his confused jumble of signifiers, isn’t political in any meaningful sense either). The cultural shorthand is that Hinckley, inspired by Taxi Driver, shot Reagan in order to impress Jodie Foster, who starred in the Scorsese film. But Kriss contends that this merely conceals the seismic event of a young man discovering “the door through which you can walk right out of the world and into eternity.”

Mass shootings allow the perpetrator to achieve the ultimate modern currency of selfhood — celebrity. “If you want to make yourself visible to the apparatus of electronic media,” Kriss writes, “you don’t need to be good at the guitar. You don’t need to sing. You don’t even need to drink the same peach brandy as a Scorsese character. All you need to do is kill and die.”

It’s true, but celebrity is fracturing these days, and Westman’s actions may be less about achieving fame and more about simply achieving something — a concrete, visible and indubitable accomplishment in a world in which young men are increasingly at sea. The action must happen on camera to exist, that’s a given, but it’s no longer about the camera, it’s about imposing and expressing himself, about making himself, finally, matter. This is not to say that the victims of the crime don’t matter in the real scale of things. Of course, they do. But they didn’t matter to Westman.

There’s nothing more male than a mass shooter. Demographically, they are overwhelmingly white, disenfranchised, isolated, young, angry, too online, caught up in paranoias and fringe causes, living with Mom and Dad, have failed to launch, are total losers. The Kriss piece refers to Hinckley as “Mr. Toxic Shock,” allegedly because this was the nickname Foster and her roommates at Yale gave him (he was so unfuckable that you’d go into toxic shock if you tried it). Westman fits perfectly, and the “mystery” of his motivations is no mystery at all. Attempts to attach him to the Left or the Right, a Trump-hater or a Satanist, are irrelevant. It’s perhaps slightly less irrelevant that he worked for a cannabis dispensary and had claimed on social media that the weed was driving him insane. “I cannot control myself, and have been destroying my body through vaping and other means,” he wrote in a journal page circulating on social media.

Nonetheless, the motivation is the condition itself: a man experiencing the complete failure of masculinity. Westman does not represent all trans people any more than mass shooters represent all men, but a transwoman, both by choice and definition, is also a very sad man. In this quintessentially gendered crime, “she” as a perpetrator was inevitable.

So what should we do about the pronouns? Noah Rothman of National Review posted on X that since “honorifics” are withheld from convicted criminals, “denying attempted mass child murderers their preferred pronouns should be similarly observed.” From one viewpoint, the suggestion is an erosion of trans rights and Rothman is just being an evil conservative. Then again, excluding men like Westman — who are experiencing, fundamentally a crisis of masculinity — from the ranks of women, trans or otherwise, doesn’t seem like such a terrible idea.

Waddell started as a gamekeeper when he was 16. He was brought up by his uncle who was a farmer rather than a keeper, but he remembers him as a man who had terrific respect for the natural world. “ There was a generation of gamekeepers like that, men who were great naturalists,” he told me.

During the time Lindsay was a keeper, his profession transformed. Shooting used to be a pastime that depended on harvesting a small but sustainable surplus of wild game, such as grey partridges and hares. But over Lindsay’s career, it became big business. In the uplands, medication was used to sustain artificially high numbers of grouse, and in the lowlands, more and more reared game birds were released to sate ever-growing demand. In the early Eighties, it was reckoned that 10 million pheasants were shot in England during the season. Five million of those were reared and released, and five million were wild. Forty years on, it’s estimated that we shoot some 70 million pheasants each year, of which only a very small percentage will have bred naturally. “There were people in the Nineties who were just upping the ante all the time,” Lindsay told me, as we watched oystercatchers wheeling through the rain beyond the window, “it was man’s greed that took over.”

This summer, there has been a steady drip of news stories about gamekeepers losing their jobs because of avian flu on the Continent. Agricultural intensification means it’s almost impossible, in many parts of the UK, for wild hen pheasants to find quiet, insect-rich corners where they can raise a brood, and intensively rearing game birds in the UK is banned. Consequently, in normal years, shoots import some 20 million pheasants and 15 million partridges from France. The weather there is better suited to rearing game. We’ve destroyed vast swathes of habitat in under 100 years, but no matter: importing birds allows us to keep shooting while pretending everything’s fine.

Or it did anyway, until the spring of this year, when Defra announced a temporary ban on the import of game birds from parts of France where bird flu was running rife. Almost 13% of shoots have said that they aren’t going to operate at all this season and the National Gamekeepers Organisation believes that 111 keepers have been let go. Every time the papers cover the story, Shooting Times, gets tagged in jubilant posts on social media. The Twitter consensus is damning: shooting is awful and keepers deserve every bit of misery they get.

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There can be little doubt that the sport has become bloated, and it’s generally recognised that releasing excessive numbers of hungry birds denudes the land of invertebrates and flora. But it’s absurd to suggest that gamekeepers are the architects of shooting’s explosion. When Lindsay was a boy, many more keepers were employed, and far fewer birds were shot.

I know one keeper who has been at the same estate in East Anglia for 30 years. Initially, he had two lads beneath him, and they were tasked with running a wild bird shoot, which at that point, was let to an old bachelor who was happy to pay vast sums in the hope of a day or two of good sport. When the grey partridges on the estate bred well, he shot, and in poor breeding years he didn’t. All these years later, on that same estate, they sell three shoot days a week, 200 French partridges a go, and the keeper works singlehanded.

Like Lindsay, that East Anglian keeper is a naturalist at heart, and he’d love to be running a wild bird shoot. But when the old bachelor died, he was replaced by a shoot tenant who is a businessman first and foremost. Admittedly, there are fewer and fewer people able to fork out for shooting as it used to be. Britain is a different country now — the rural rich aren’t as rich as they once were, and labour is expensive.

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Last Christmas, Gerald Gray, formerly the headkeeper at one of Norfolk’s best wild bird shoots, told me he’d spent his life managing his boss’s expectations: often, he had to deliver the news that they wouldn’t be shooting at all, because the weather hadn’t been kind and the chicks hadn’t made it. If they’d gone ahead and shot, they’d have killed all their breeding stock for the following year. With reared birds, nature has been taken out of the equation and there’s no requirement for delayed gratification. Late capitalism promises us that we can have what we want, whenever we want — cherries in December and a 300-bird partridge day just as soon as the cheque’s made out.

It’s not that there are leagues of keepers out there wanting to go bigger and bigger; it’s that the people employing them make money out of doing so. When those Twitter users attack gamekeepers, they’ve got the wrong man.

Demonising gamekeepers can have grievous consequences. It’s tough and lonely, and keepering is a career with a suicide rate that’s three times the national average. On more than one occasion recently, I’ve been told by keepers who are under pressure that the struggle is often compounded by coming home to a slew of uninformed vitriol on social media. The natural word has been destroyed, the narrative runs, and it’s all their fault.

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Of course, not every keeper is an angel. There are still people out there illegally killing badgers and birds of prey, to limit the loss of game — but I’m not convinced they’re hellbent on destroying the natural world. Shooting has been turned into a numbers game and, too often, jobs depend on those numbers adding up. But I’ve met impressive keepers over the years who’ve handed in their notice when they’ve been asked to do things that go against their principles. The shooting world is a small one and walking away from a salary, a truck, and a place to live takes grit.

This year, my book on Britain’s endangered birds was published. It only took a couple of weeks for people to start telling me I’d wasted my time. One conservationist said that, frankly, he was disappointed I’d spent so much time talking to keepers about saving wildlife rather than organisations like the RSPB. I’ve met some wonderful RSPB staffers, but the myopic elitism of suggesting we should ignore a group of people who spend all their days, from dawn until often long after dusk, caring for a patch of ground is shameful.

While some who purport to care about wildlife take to the internet, gamekeepers are hard at work out there. They maintain woodland and hedges, manage moorland, and plant crops for game birds that provide sustenance for other wildlife. It’s hard to put a price on what they do, but the Scottish Gamekeepers’ Association reckons that the UK’s 3,000 full-time keepers carry out roughly £140 million’s worth of conservation work every year. When bird flu puts 111 keepers out of a job, we’ll lose a few who are doing things they shouldn’t. But we’ll lose many more who are doing their best to save endangered species, including the curlew, the capercaillie, and the black grouse. Farewell to them all.

Forty years ago, there would have hardly been a house on the peninsula that wasn’t lived in by somebody who wasn’t working the land. But like so much of the Highlands, its beauty has been its undoing and after the estate was sold off, a busy period of house-building began. My cousins got on board. Over the years, as well as farming, they’ve made hay out of holiday properties. But I do wonder, when my uncle’s out after deer at dawn, up on the hill, if he looks down to the coast and wonders about the part he’s played in taming a wild place he loved.

Last year, I drove through the West Highlands and on up to the Isle of Skye to talk to a young crofter about corncrakes. A little over 100 years ago, the corncrake’s strange “crex crex” call could be heard in spring, in most British counties. The latest counts suggest there are now fewer than 1,000 male corncrakes returning each year, almost all of them bound for Scotland’s northwestern periphery.

The crofter I was going to see, Cheryl, lives right at the other end from where the ferry docks, so I stopped for a beer in Armadale on my way. I realised, perched on a wall there, that I could see right across the water to my cousin’s house on the other side. “Your aunt won’t go to Skye anymore in the summer,” my mother replied when I texted her. “Traffic jams all across the island.” She was right. During my stay there were caravans backed up on the road to the Fairy Pools, there was never any parking in Portree, and an old farmer told me he’d given up on Highland cattle and gone into Galloways instead. “There were folks taking photos just non-stop and it doesn’t do to harass the cattle like that”.

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The precipitous decline in corncrake numbers, in mainland Britain, has been largely caused by agricultural intensification. Corncrakes traditionally nested in hay meadows and the bulk of them would have fledged by the time the hay was cut. But with the advent of the tractor and the transition to silage, which is cut earlier, countless nests and chicks die beneath the blades. The crofting system in the Western Isles is far less intensive and there are schemes that provide financial incentives for crofters to delay cutting until the corncrakes have taken flight.

As Cheryl pointed out, lots of farmers have just given up completely on their marginal crofting operations and turned to tourism. “The corncrakes do need the grass to be cut, they don’t like rank vegetation, but people just stop farming. Instead now you’ve got sometimes three holiday houses per croft”. Climbing up into her tractor to get back to cutting the field, Cheryl said to me she’s not yet heard a corncrake on the island. A lot of her day-to-day life is taken up with crofting in a way that doesn’t theoretically endanger the few birds that remain, but she suspects there haven’t actually been any corncrakes in her part of Skye for some 20 years.

Still, the impact of tourism is more complicated than many people pretend. Magnus Davidson, whose work at the University of the Highlands and Islands focuses on setting out a new vision for rural Scotland, told me that he no longer goes to Skye in the summer either. It’s very easy, he admits, to condemn tourists, but in lots of places they are the lifeblood of rural economies and achieving any sort of balance is next to impossible. “When tourism starts to negatively affect things like roads or the environment, infrastructure can help alleviate the impact but when it comes to cultural degradation” — the loss of dialects and languages and even ways of living — “you can’t infrastructure your way out of that”. Magnus admits that there probably are parts of the UK where the tourism is harmonious but it’s ever-evolving. “It could be that somewhere is only ever one Instagram post away from the scales being tipped”.

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Magnus was also keen to point out that too much low-cost tourism risks a place becoming flooded, but make it too expensive and you run the risk of exclusivity. In some instances, locals have to contend with both. Last month, in North Norfolk, where coastal cottages often change hands for over a million quid, I met an environmentalist who was on her way to a meeting about beachgoers peeing on the dunes at Wells. The quantity of urine there has become so great that it is having a serious ecological impact.

Tourism has been the ruin of many places, but parts of Scotland desperately need more of it. A little over six months ago, my parents left Dumfriesshire, a place of remarkable tranquillity, where most summer evenings, the sun casts the hills in heavy golden light. But the village pub had closed, like the village butcher, and the village shop before it. They could all have done with a few well-heeled holidaymakers in search of some local ales and a bit of beef for their smart new barbecues.

On Skye, the truth is that a crofter with three camping pods — on what was once fine corncrake habitat — can make more in a month out of people than they ever made in a year out of cattle. But that’s not to say that tourism is always necessarily terrible for wildlife. There are some places, such as Knepp Castle in Sussex, where the extraordinary recovery of birds has been facilitated by it. Nature was suffering there because of intensive agriculture, but the shift to making money out of people — out of shepherds’ huts, yurts, and pleasant places to pitch a tent — has meant they can manage the land in a far gentler and more ecologically sound way. In a binary world, we tend not to realise that there are different flavours of agriculture. Where the corncrakes of the Hebrides need farming, to keep the grass sward in check, farming in Sussex has done for turtle doves by tearing out hedgerow habitat in order to make fields bigger.

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It was five or six years ago that I last went north to see my cousins. Beneath snipe drumming and harriers cutting circles in the air, I fished for a couple of days — just a few small brown trout and one sea trout lost. On the last evening I was there, my uncle said I could go down to his farm the following morning and shoot a goose if I fancied it — the greylags had been eating his animals’ grass for too long.

I drove to the bay before dawn and picked my way across the marsh before settling in behind a cattle trough. For 20 minutes the geese grew louder and louder out on the sand. Just before the sun rose they got up and passed me 30 yards to the right, dark shapes against a cold blue sky. I took one out of the back of the skein. Two shots sent it tumbling into the reeds and the marsh lifted with the crying shadows of curlew, lapwing, and dunlin.

Then behind me, all around the bay, lights came on in houses that I hadn’t realised were there. I wandered back along the lane with the warm goose tucked under my jacket. I didn’t want to spoil things for any of those holidaymakers, as they sat down to croissants and the picture postcard view.

Elliot Rodger, the 2014 Isla Vista shooter whose “manifesto” was a laundry list of complaints about his loneliness and sexual rejection, felt particularly resentful toward his female classmates, whom he saw as “mean, cruel, and heartless creatures that took pleasure from my suffering”. Unable to attract a girlfriend, he settled on revenge. “If I cannot rise above them,” he wrote, “I will destroy them.” When Rodger finally buys a handgun, he is happy for the first time since childhood. “I brought it back to my room and felt a new sense of power. I was now armed. Who’s the alpha male now, bitches?”

We don’t know yet what motivated Salvador Ramos, the teenage gunman who killed 21 people in Uvalde, Texas, last week, but we do know that like most shooters, he was a misfit and social outcast. Early reporting suggests that he spent recent months harassing teen girls on social media, “repeating girls’ names until they paid attention to him”, and expressing to them his desire to get his “name out there” like the Canadian murderer Luka Rocco Magnotta. The Buffalo shooter, Payton Gendron, was also an oddball with a history of making threats, although his immediate motives seem to have been more ideological than social or sexual. Even so, in the course of his white supremacist diatribe, he blamed “weak” “European men” for the degeneracy of the West and concluded that “strong men are needed to fix it”.

Whatever the nominal motivations behind them, rampage shootings are nearly always a product of wounded masculinity. “They are the most masculine of crimes,” says Ralph Larkin, a criminologist at John Jay College who has studied mass shootings for decades. “Can you think of more than four or five female mass shooters? There aren’t any.” Shooters, Larkin says, are “marginal males who feel they have been wronged by society, and so they pick up a gun. There is always a sense of violated entitlement, and I don’t care whether it’s school shootings or racist shootings.”

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By Bari Weiss

Modern mass shootings, according to Larkin, began in 1966, when Charles Whitman, a former Marine with an undiagnosed brain tumour, murdered his wife and mother before climbing to the top of a tower in downtown Austin, Texas, and shooting 14 people to death. Larkin speculates that the sudden rise in these shootings was a reaction to the sexual liberation of the Sixties and the corresponding rise in the status of women — a point on which some of the more historically minded murderers would no doubt agree. “We’re talking about toxic masculinity here.”

Toxic masculinity, of course, is a somewhat slippery concept. Colloquially, it refers to the elements of traditional masculinity — competition, stoicism, aggressiveness, physical strength, a willingness to resort to violence — that fit awkwardly or not at all into modern liberal culture. A 2019 explainer in the New York Times defined it as “a set of behaviours and beliefs” that men are socialised into from a young age, including “suppressing emotions or masking distress”, “maintaining an appearance of hardness”, and “violence as an indicator of power”. More than a few articles have flagged toxic masculinity, combined with Americans’ easy access to guns, as one of the causes of mass shootings.

These elements of masculinity can no doubt be “toxic” in the wrong circumstances — the problem is with the assumption that they are purely a product of cultural scripts, rather than reflections of something inherent in men. Francis McAndrew, a psychologist who has studied mass shootings, told me that while socialisation plays a role in encouraging some forms of male violence, it does not create it out of thin air. This is particularly true for young men, who are ultra-sensitive to status competition, which historically would have determined their ability to attract women and form alliances with other men. Young men, McAndrew says, have been selected to regard adolescent social hierarchies as a matter of life and death.

“Today, you can go to college or move to a new city,” McAndrew says. “But when we were evolving, whatever happened during adolescence was a life sentence. And if you established yourself as a bad dude that nobody messed with, that could work to your advantage. Our minds are still stuck in that past of needing to be paid attention to. And the guys who don’t get that experience all kinds of dark emotions. They feel left out, they feel like losers, they feel desperate, and they need to make a statement.”

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For these alienated young men, guns and violence can be intoxicating. According to the “challenge hypothesis”, male testosterone and aggressive behaviour surge in response to “situational cues that represent either a threat to a male’s status or a signal that competition with other males is imminent”. Handling a gun acts as one such cue, especially for men who are not used to them. “If you pick a powerful weapon and you perceive that combat is imminent, you get a spike in your testosterone levels,” McAndrew says. Given that marginal males tend to have low testosterone, which can lead to feelings of anxiety and depression, this spike can be euphoric, as shooters like Harris and Rodger attest. “The solution,” McAndrew says, half-joking, “is that everyone should be allowed to own high-powered weapons except for men under the age of 40.”

Mass killings are also, themselves, a way to achieve status and notoriety. McAndrew notes that for ideological spree killings, like the Buffalo shooting or jihadist attacks, the ideology “organises and channels” the killers’ rage, providing them with a community, an audience, and a sense that they are contributing to some important cause — in other words, status and a measure of celebrity for people who feel they are invisible. And status and celebrity, even of the worst kind, have their benefits. According to a 2018 story from the Florida Sun-Sentinel, Nikolas Cruz, the far-Right loner who murdered 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, was inundated with fan mail from female admirers after being arrested for his killing spree.

This should not come as too great of a shock. According to the sociologist Nathalie Paton, rampage shootings represent a perverse expression of some of our culture’s dominant values, including self-expression, autonomy, and authenticity. “Nowadays the social norm is to ask each and every person to pursue individuation, to become autonomous,” she says. “But it’s a paradox — when you ask everyone to be original not everyone can be, so they have to go to extremes like violence. It becomes a form of empowerment, a way to pull away from social norms that are imposed.” As she wrote in an article from 2017: “The very project of a mass shooting not only allows the reversal of social roles, but ultimately it becomes the guarantee of subjective liberation.”

The shooters, Paton argues, highlight another contradiction in the dominant ideology. Everyone is supposed to be an individual, and all individuals are respected equally. Yet beneath this injunction and guarantee are all the typical modes of conformity and hierarchy we would expect of a human society. The beautiful, the talented, the athletic, the funny, and the interesting rise above the ugly, the clumsy, the anxious, the introverted, the boring, and the resentful.

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These relative statuses, for the losers, are all the more painful for being nothing other than a reflection of who and what they actually are. “Individuality” is wonderful when your true self is a tall and handsome swimmer with an unexpected love of classical cello, or a beautiful girl who likes to go backpacking with her friends. But who, really, is someone like Salvador Ramos, an odd-looking boy who disturbs nearly everyone he talks to, whose hobbies include shooting people with BB guns and throwing dead cats at strangers’ houses? Does anyone, really, want someone like that to be himself? I doubt it.

In his novel Whatever, in which he first advances his idea that sexual liberalism is a system of social hierarchy no less cruel than economic liberalism — now a cornerstone of “incel” ideology — Michel Houellebecq introduces us to the character of Raphael Tisserand, a man so stupendously ugly that despite his good salary and desperate efforts, he is still a virgin at 28. One evening, after Tisserand has spent hours at a club trying to charm a young women only to see her depart with a handsome black man, Houellebecq’s narrator offers Tisserand a knife and urges him to use it on the couple. “When you feel these women trembling at the end of your knife, and begging for their young lives, then you will truly be the master,” he says. But, after following the pair to the beach, Tisserand is unable to follow through on the murder and decides to drive back to Paris. He dies in a car crash that night.

Our society seems to have its own generation of Tisserands. The problem, in America, is that ours have guns.

I wonder if the elementary school students in Uvalde, Texas, had similar drills. I wonder if the teachers there, like my sister, worried about what they would do if they had to barricade the door. I wonder if the fourth graders in Texas had time to pick up their staplers and notebooks and lunch boxes to defend themselves from an 18-year-old armed to the teeth before he slaughtered them in their classroom.

The elementary school shooting in Texas is the 212th mass shooting this year. It is the 27th school shooting. It is also the deadliest mass shooting in the US so far in 2022, which says something because it happened just ten days after ten people were killed in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. So far, at least 19 children and two adults are dead in Uvalde. Others are injured.

I read these headlines and I think about how people grow accustomed to horrific things. How, not so long ago, people watched other people get hanged, drawn and quartered in the public square. They watched beheadings. They participated in honour killings. I think about things that, in other times, in other places, perhaps seemed perfectly normal to the people who witnessed them — and that still remain normal in parts of the world today.

We look at such practices from our civilised perch and wonder how human beings ever did this to one another. How did they witness such barbarism and still have the appetite for dinner? How do we?

How have we normalised the fact that innocent people in America can step onto a subway car or go to a grocery store or a synagogue or a church or a concert or a baseball game or a party or a car show or to work and maybe they will just be gunned down? How have we become accustomed to — let’s call it what it is — child sacrifice?

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There is a deep sickness in this country. It goes beyond our addiction to guns. It’s an anti-social, anti-human disease that has gripped our society and our politics. A big part of that disease is how numb we have become to violence. The country has been experiencing the largest crime surge in decades. Armed robberies are up. Shoplifting is up. Road deaths are up. Car break-ins are so common in some cities that people leave notes on their windows to the thieves that nothing is inside.

But the most devastating rise has been in murders. Since the FBI started tracking the data, 2020 marked the highest single-year increase in homicides. In 2021, it went up again. As of 2020, the leading cause of death among children in America is guns. Not cars. Not drugs. Guns. It was also the year that we had the highest rate of gun sales in American history.

The profiles of America’s mass shooters don’t fit into a straightforward political box. The 18-year-old who massacred elderly black New Yorkers at the grocery store in Buffalo earlier this month was driven by white supremacy and evil conspiracies such as the Great Replacement. The shooter the next day, who targeted a Taiwanese Church in Laguna Woods, California, was Chinese. The recent shooting in Dallas, at a Korean spa, was carried out by a young black man. The mass murderer in Uvalde, another 18-year-old, is Hispanic.

And the victims of the new crime wave fit no single profile. They include a young Eagle Scout in Philadelphia. A 24-year-old UCLA graduate student stabbed to death while working at a furniture store. An Afghan refugee who had worked as an interpreter for the US army who was shot to death while resting in his car between Uber shifts. It’s the 70-year-old nurse murdered at the bus stop on the way to work. The 19-year-old Burger King cashier robbed at gunpoint — and then killed after handing over the money. It’s the eight-year-old boy shot outside of Chicago. A pregnant woman who was shot to death just after arriving home from her baby shower.

Sixteen cities, including Philadelphia, Austin, Jackson, Columbus, Baton Rouge, New Haven and Portland, saw record high homicide rates in 2021. In the nation’s capital, more people under the age of 50 were gunned down than died from Covid.

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You don’t need to be told what you already know: that mentally ill people getting their hands on guns to commit mass murder this easily is deranged and wrong. Accepting this as normal has nothing to do with respecting the Second Amendment. You don’t need another writer pointing out that this doesn’t really happen in other places and maybe the fact that America has more guns than any other nation on Earth has something to do with it. There’s nothing well-regulated about Salvador Ramos, though it appears he bought those assault rifles legally on his 18th birthday. There’s simply no world in which our founders would look at inner-city gun violence and these sick teenagers in suburban schools and say this was their intention.

Gun rights activists will argue that other countries have guns and that murderers don’t need guns to kill and that some of the cities and states with the strictest gun laws in the country have the highest rates of violent crime and that people kill people guns don’t kill people and that anyway good guys with guns kill bad guys with guns. (Uvalde police officers and a school resource officer reportedly fired at the shooter. They couldn’t stop him.)

Here’s where I think they are right, if inadvertently: the social rot that’s come over America, the nihilism and hatred of each other, is part of the cause here. The dissolution of our social ties — and with them the accountability and responsibility that an actual community demands — has allowed insanity to fester unnoticed. Lockdowns accelerated the isolation, the purposelessness, the lack of meaning that was already overcoming us.

If we insist on viewing this shooting as part of some isolated issue or species of violence, then we miss the point. The point is the country is being consumed by what Philip Roth called “the indigenous American berserk”. It stretches back many decades, or longer, and for ages it was possible to ignore or compartmentalise. Now the brokenness is everywhere we look — and it is impossible to unsee it.

A version of this article first appeared on Bari’s Substack.

Last Tuesday a 15-year-school boy, recently named as Ethan Crumbley, allegedly shot and killed four fellow students, injuring seven others. This happened at a high school in suburban Detroit, Michigan. The week before, Darrell Brooks allegedly drove his SUV into a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin, killing six and injuring many more. According to witnesses, he appeared to be intentionally trying to hit people; one of the victims was an eight-year-old boy. At the time of the attack, Brooks was on bail, after being charged with running over the mother of his child in a domestic dispute earlier last month.

Prosecutors in Michigan have levelled one charge of terrorism against Crumbley, in addition to four first-degree murder counts and numerous other charges. No charges of terrorism have been brought against Brooks; he instead faces six counts of first-degree homicide. 

This raises all sorts of questions about the politics of categorising mass-causality violence. While school-rampages often result in multiple deaths and terrorise those who are victimised in them, they are not conventionally classified as terrorism, since the motives of those who carry them out are typically personal. They are not intended to further a political cause or ideology. So it is curious that the authorities in Michigan have levelled a charge of terrorism.

Crumbley’s alleged motives are as yet unclear, although he reportedly left some writings that may shed some light on his thinking. Explaining the terrorism charge to CNN, Karen McDonald, the Oakland county [Michigan] prosecutor, said that Crumbley had set out to kill and injure as many people as possible. “If that’s not terrorism, I don’t know what is,” she said, in the process enlarging the concept of terrorism far beyond its standard meaning of politically-motivated violence against civilians and into the far broader domain of criminal murderousness. McDonald also noted, by way of further explanation, “how terrifying it is to be in close proximity of another student shooting and killing fellow students. I mean, it’s terror”.

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Brooks’s alleged motives are similarly unclear, although we know that he had advocated for attacks against white people on social media and shared an anti-Semitic meme praising Hitler. We also know that vehicular rammings, unlike high school shootings, are a common modus operandi of terrorists. Scores of ISIS-inspired and directed operatives, for example, have used cars and trucks as weapons of mass-slaughter. So it is seems worth noting that Brooks, who clearly harboured extremist sentiments, and whose alleged victims were all white, has not been given a terrorism charge. Needless to say, Brooks’s alleged actions would have been terrorising to those who were on the receiving end of them.

What is even more curious is the incuriosity of the elite media and extremism experts about the Brooks case. Had he been a white male who had expressed misogynistic views about women it is certain that they would have staged a giant moral panic about the global menace of incels and the far-Right.

But Brooks, who is a registered sex offender and trader in online hate, has attracted little sustained discussion or concern. To be clear: I’m not saying that the Brooks case should occasion a moral panic, or that he be given a terrorism charge. There’s still much that we don’t know about him, his state of mind, motives and indeed mental health. But I do think we should ask questions about the selection bias of the credentialed commentators and experts who command so much of our attention.

As the New York Post’s Sohrab Ahmari has recently documented, the coverage of the Brooks case by mainstream media outlets has been quite appalling. The Washington Post, in a tweet, described the ramming attack as a “tragedy caused by a SUV”. A CBS national correspondent made reference to “the Wisconsin parade crash”, as if what happened was an unfortunate accident. If this sounded coldly dispassionate and euphemistic in the extreme, it is because it was. What it emphatically wasn’t was an inferno of alarmist online commentary and outrage about the perpetrator’s vile beliefs.

The Michigan attack, by contrast, has provoked a very different kind of commentary and critical probing. Thomas Renard, director of the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism at The Hague, tweeted: “This case raises so many questions: What is terrorism? Does terrorism offence bring any added value in such case? Could it be counter productive? Should we use CT [counter-terrorism] toolbox more often, to deal with more forms of extremism, or not? Pros and Cons?”

Renard is right: the Michigan school shooting does raise many questions, one of which is why extremism scholars like Renard had nothing to say about Brooks’s alleged vehicular ramming attack and how that case might raise questions about terrorism and ideologically motivated violence more broadly.

To be fair to Renard and my fellow extremism researchers, perhaps they just hadn’t clocked the news about the Waukesha attack, especially given that it had attracted relatively little media attention. Or perhaps they had heard about it, but were apt to ignore it because Brooks wasn’t charged with terrorism.

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But neither explanation holds up to scrutiny. Many terrorism experts and extremism researchers are very online. Some of these people, evidently, are never not online. It’s hard to think that the Waukesha attack would have escaped their notice.

There’s also a whole cottage industry of counter-extremist entrepreneurs which thrives on churning out report after report on the wider online “eco-systems” of misogynistic hate and racialised invective. So it’s odd that Brooks’s violent rhetoric, and past violence against women, didn’t raise any eyebrows among a group of researchers who are nothing if not hyper-vigilant when it comes to spotting signs of hate.

I suspect other and deeper imperatives and incentives are at work. One is to do with what the American sociologist Erving Goffman called “impression management”, while the other relates to the politics of grift. The triumph of identity politics, and the fear of running afoul of the puritanical scolds who police it, has meant that whenever an act of mass-casualty violence has been perpetrated by a white male — that reviled figure of opprobrium in the cosmology of the what Wesley Yang terms the “successor ideology” — it is tempting to vigorously call it out and to account. The act of doing so has become a familiar ritual in public life, the purpose of which is to communicate one’s virtue.

It is to pronounce, in effect, “I really care about the evil of systemic racism”. In a Durkheimian sense, it also allows people to bond with other morally upstanding people, and in a way that is emotionally seductive.

The temptation to call out or draw attention to the mass-casualty violence of the far-Right is even stronger for extremism researchers, since many have made decent careers out of researching and writing about jihadist groups and violence. This makes them vulnerable to the charge of islamophobia and racism, or both, and perhaps even gives them a bad conscience. From the perspective of their Left-leaning critics, these researchers are guilty of focusing disproportionately on the jihadist threat or perpetuating dangerous “essentialist” tropes about Islam and Muslims.

Nobody wants to be accused of Islamophobia or racism, and one way of forestalling or neutralising that accusation is to constantly amplify the threat of the far-Right. Of course, extremism researchers would deny that they’re in the business of impression management, of trying to foster a righteous impression before others. And if they’re sounding alarmist about the far-Right threat, this is because the threat is so goddamn alarming that it keeps them awake at night.

Another reason why extremism researchers are now so transfixed on the far-Right threat is because it’s unquestionably good for business. It’s where all the grant money is. You certainly won’t receive state or private funding by saying that the QAnon threat is exaggerated or that incels are more dangerous to themselves than to others. And no publisher is going to offer a lucrative book deal for How Terrorism is Overblown.

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This isn’t just an American pathology. Here in Britain two recent acts of lethal violence engendered two very different responses. One was a killing spree by a 22-year-old man called Jake Davison. In just 12 minutes he killed his mother in the house they shared and then went on to shoot to death four others, before turning his weapon on himself. Devon and Cornwall Police initially ruled out terrorism as a motive, although it was known that Davison had visited incel online forums and was a disgruntled virgin. This prompted a slew of commentary on how Davison was a terrorist, and how incels were far-Right extremists. The Guardian ran a story titled, “Should the Plymouth shootings be declared an act of terror?” Quite why the headline-writer thought it necessary to phrase the headline as a question was unclear, since the whole substance of the piece sought to argue that there was little doubt that it should be declared an act of terror.

Then, in October, Ali Harbi Ali, a 25-year-old British-Somali man, allegedly stabbed to death the Conservative MP David Amess. The police soon declared this a terrorist incident, and had referred to “a potential motivation linked to Islamist extremism”. Yet the main focus of the media response was not on the political motives of the perpetrator, but rather the scourge of online hate aimed at British politicians more generally, as if somehow the dark corners of the internet had murdered Amess.

It gets boring to keep pointing out the double-standard here, which is that progressives are liable to deny or sanitise the political violence of those with whom they are in sympathy (pre-eminently minorities), while amplifying the political violence of their enemies (pre-eminently the running dogs of white, heteronormative patriarchy). Of course, the Right is also prone to a similar double-standard, pointing out the mental health problems of far-Right attackers while prioritising the role of militant religiosity in jihadi attacks. But it’s imperative for terrorism experts and extremism researchers to resist this sort of tribal temptation.

What is terrorism and who is a terrorist? A lot of ink has been wasted in trying to answer this, but it’s really not that complicated. Terrorism, as the Australian philosopher Tony Coady has usefully defined it, is “the organised use of violence to attack non-combatants (i.e. civilians) or their property for political purposes”. Correspondingly, a terrorist is someone who commits this kind of violence.

The trouble with terrorism, as a concept, relates not to its core meaning, but to its practical application. Was the Michigan school-shooter a terrorist? Was Darrell Brooks? The honest answer to both questions is that it’s still too early to tell — and that both cases are complex. Yet it’s striking that only one of those questions is being publicly asked right now, and it’s not the second one.

He went to Kenosha, Wisconsin, last August to protect property during a Black Lives Matter protest after widespread arson and vandalism the night before. He ended up shooting three men that night, killing two, in what he claimed were acts of self-defence. All of the shootings were captured on video, some from multiple angles. He tried to retreat from everyone he shot that night, resorting to deadly force only when he was cornered, physically attacked, or threatened with a gun. At no point did he continue shooting after ending the immediate threat.

Although prosecutors attempted to argue that, merely by being present with a gun, Rittenhouse, now 18, had “provoked” the protesters, they were unable to provide any convincing evidence that Rittenhouse had done anything to threaten anyone or initiate conflict in any way. The defence, by contrast, was able to show that Rittenhouse, far from picking fights, attempted throughout the night to avoid or defuse conflicts with protesters.

The trial confirmed that the real villain of the night was the first man Rittenhouse shot, 36-year-old Joseph Rosenbaum. This was the most important shooting, because it set in motion the events that led a crowd to assault a fleeing Rittenhouse, allegedly in the belief that he was an “active shooter”, and which led to Rittenhouse shooting and killing Anthony Huber, who was attacking him with a skateboard, and wounding Gaige Grosskreutz, who advanced on Rittenhouse with a drawn pistol.

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Rosenbaum, a convicted child-rapist and domestic abuser, had no connection to the protesters. He was a disturbed man who had been released from a psychiatric ward earlier in the day and who, according to video evidence and multiple eyewitness testimony, had been belligerent and threatening all night.

According to both Rittenhouse and one of his companions, the Army veteran Ryan Balch, Rosenbaum told members of their group: “If I catch any of you guys alone tonight, I’m going to fucking kill you.” Later in the evening, he found Rittenhouse alone and began chasing him across a parking lot. After first attempting to run away, Rittenhouse wheeled around and shot the advancing Rosenbaum. The closest eyewitness to the shooting testified that as Rosenbaum approached the defendant, he yelled “fuck you!” and lunged for the barrel of Rittenhouse’s gun. The other main clarification at trial came from Grosskreutz, who admitted that Rittenhouse only shot him after he pointed his own gun at the teenager.

Many of the initial media reports that painted Rittenhouse in a sinister light turned out to be false — for instance, Grosskreutz’s claim, which he repeated in multiple interviews, that he had been shot with his hands up in a position of surrender. Rittenhouse did, as was reported early on, “cross state lines” to get to the protest, but only from Antioch, Illinois, a border town that is a suburb of Kenosha, which is where Rittenhouse worked and where many of his family live. He did not transport the gun across the border, and although it is legally murky whether he was allowed to be carrying it — he was 17 at the time — the judge threw out the charge because of ambiguities in the law.

Yes, he was a supporter of Trump and Blue Lives Matter, but there is no evidence that he was a “white supremacist,” as alleged by Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, or a “domestic terrorist,” as alleged by Pressley and Ilhan Omar. He was not a member of any militia group, despite the misguided representations of his initial defence team. He was not out “hunting” anyone.

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The most damning evidence against him, which was not admitted at trial, was a video from a few weeks prior in which he joked about shooting looters. But again, there was no credible evidence that he initiated or escalated conflict with anyone that night. He lied about being an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT), when in fact he had only received CPR training, but this was hardly relevant to the shootings. Perhaps he shouldn’t have been there, but the same was true of nearly everyone there that night. They were all defying a curfew. Many of the protesters were also from out of town. Some, like Grosskreutz, were also carrying illegal guns.

From the beginning, the case against Rittenhouse relied on obfuscating the actual events of the night in favour of mythmaking: easily debunked misinformation, moral and emotional appeals to the justice of the protester’s cause, the racial identity and political sympathies of Rittenhouse, the far-Right politics of some of his most vocal supporters, rhetorical flights against “white male tears” or “fascism”, and arguments about the United States’s gun laws or the biases of its criminal justice system. One index of the confusion surrounding the case is the number of Twitter users who appear to have only recently learned that Rittenhouse’s assailants were white.

Indeed, even on the Left, those reporting on the case or following it closely have tended to conclude that Rittenhouse was not the monster he was initially painted as. Long pieces in the New York Times Magazine and the New Yorker, while drawing attention to the extremism of some of the militia members who showed up to protests, to the general atmosphere of chaos, violence, and racial tension that summer, and to the role of Right-wing media in stoking outrage over rioting and property destruction, concluded that Rittenhouse himself was more or less a foolish kid with conventional politics who got in over his head. Last week, Ryan Grim of The Intercept tweeted: “People should be prepared for Rittenhouse to be acquitted on all the major charges”.

Emotional reactions, not to say irresponsible tantrums, are to be expected after a divisive trial such as this one. Commentators on both sides will say stupid things, and there will be no shortage of people on Twitter making triumphant racist memes about Rittenhouse or declaring that the verdict gives licence to MAGA wingnuts to hunt down liberals and shoot them for sport. Today, nearly every national issue in the United States is what the blogger Scott Alexander has called a “scissor” issue — one that is not merely divisive but in which the opposing sides seem to be operating in different planes of reality. The Rittenhouse verdict is no different, even if in this case, unlike in the Brett Kavanaugh or Covington Catholic controversies, we can know with reasonable certainty what actually happened.

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What happens next will be a litmus test for the country. Despite the uncertainties inherent in jury trials, the two main trials to come out of last summer’s unrest, this one and the murder trial of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, reached the correct verdict, though this is cold comfort in a country where the two main factions are defined by their mutual mistrust and loathing. Already, Republicans have begun pouring salt into the wound, and it looks as if the verdict will cement Rittenhouse’s reputation as a conservative folk hero — an innocent man smeared by corrupt politicians, a partisan media, and biased Big Tech companies.

Democrats, meanwhile, are convinced against all evidence that a cold-blooded murderer has been set free due to the colour of his skin, with leading politicians declaring the verdict a “miscarriage of justice” and asking the Justice Department to pursue what could only be described as a political prosecution of the Wisconsin teen. These are signs that the scars opened over the past few years will not be quick to heal.

Yet some on the Left have already begun to signal that things got out of hand last summer. They are admitting, for instance, that “defund the police” was a stupid and politically toxic idea, that riots and arson lead predictably to violent chaos and should therefore be discouraged rather than cheered, and that some of the police shootings that initially sparked outrage — including the one that set off the riots in Kenosha — were based on initial reporting that, had it come from Fox News or the Right-wing Twittersphere, would have been clearly labelled as disinformation.

Many of these things were obvious at the time, and it can be frustrating now to observe those who only found the courage to say the obvious after Joe Biden won the presidency. But it is better than the alternative, which is to continue denying the reality in front of their faces. In this case, the reality is that Rittenhouse was found innocent of murder, and correctly so. Biden, to his credit, has already stated that “the jury system works and we have to abide by it”. One hopes that his allies will listen. To refuse to do so is only to court more tragedies.

In the days since, much of the coverage given to the attack — both in the UK and abroad — has focused on the new type of terrorist threat posed by “incels”, or involuntary celibates. The police, for now, have ruled out terrorism and links to far-Right groups as motives for Davison’s actions; what drove him to such violence remains unclear and the investigation is ongoing.

And yet, at least in the way much of the media has covered this tragedy, the matter is all but settled: Davison was an incel, another young man driven to violence by a nefarious online movement that breeds terrorists.

But as someone who has spent years researching incels, such assuredness leaves me uncomfortable. Though the language changes from one news outlet to another, their reports are all essentially the same: “Plymouth shooter was a product of a violent, misogynistic ‘incel’ subculture.” The pieces tend to include quotations from former or current government officials, or experts in terrorism or gender-based violence who explain the danger facing our communities when thousands of young boys are radicalised online, just like Jake Davison.

The source of all this speculation is Davison’s digital footprint, the collage of his social media presence, including a now-deleted YouTube channel and a now-suspended Reddit account that chronicles a long history of isolation and self-doubt. He was a frequent poster in various Reddit communities, known as “subs”. Some were popular with incels; a few were “photo-rating subs”, where users are encouraged to rate each other’s appearances.

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Interestingly, despite the certainty of many who have described him as an “incel”, Davison was also active on an anti-Incel “watchdog” sub, and two others dedicated to debunking the tenets of the incel ideology known as the “Black Pill”.

Of course, these things are never black and white. Davison certainly talked like an incel, using their terminology  and citing concepts from evolutionary psychology popular in “black pilled” circles. He uploaded a number of confessional-style video bogs lamenting his lost youth and his inability to lose weight, as well as the crippling insecurity that prevented him from talking to girls. In one video, he spoke emphatically about why women are biologically hardwired to select men based on appearance, to be “picky” for reproductive reasons. Just days before the attack, he claimed that “women are arrogant and entitled beyond belief”.

But most of his videos just showed him lifting weights. In one, entitled “Older vid when I was a bit leaner”, he starts posing to the camera, with an Eminem track blaring in the background.

Still, according to the definition provided by incels themselves — a man unable to form a romantic or sexual relationship despite desiring one — Davison would have met the criteria. He was a virgin at the age of 22, and had never had any kind of a girlfriend.

But Davison himself did not self-identify that way. The one time he mentioned the word in a video, he paused to clarify that he did not include himself among their ranks, but considered them “people like [himself]”. This detail appears to have been lost on much of the media — as have Davison’s broader criticisms of the incel movement.

Three months ago, he described on a Reddit thread how much of the misogyny of the incel movement was “just toxic negative bullshit” and explained how he was excited for the end of lockdown, to begin driving lessons and start socialising more. Soon after, he responded to a post in the same subreddit by a depressed 17-year-old, encouraging him to overcome his insecurities, stand up to bullies, and not “let the blackpill or whatever shit you read online drag you down”.

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Davison’s final post to the site, written just two days before the attack, was less optimistic. He explained that he was a loner by nature, something which he used to accept. But now he felt that he should have tried harder. “It’s vital you try your best to integrate with people, fit in and establish a solid social life and develop socially you can’t afford to be a loner as a young person it will only destroy your life,” he wrote. He sounded defeated but introspective, like someone taking accountability for his choices, not “echoing” an ideology.

None of this is to say that Davison wasn’t influenced by, or protective of, the incel community. But does that mean the media is right to ascribe his horrific attack to that relationship? I’m not convinced it’s as clear-cut as that.

Indeed, it’s striking just how inaccurate and irresponsible some of the commentary by self-appointed incel experts has been in recent days. Take the claim, made in the Guardian a day after the tragedy, that incels “actively recruit” young men, recalling the tactics used by extremist groups such as ISIS. I’ve spoken to dozens of incels for my research, and not one of them has suggested this happens. Overwhelmingly, these young men find the content on their own, which isn’t difficult to imagine for young people with internet access.

Most are “lurkers” who do not even interact with other members of the community. They also do not “actively incite” acts of violence, such as an “Incel Uprising” or the “Beta Rebellion,” as has been suggested. Unlike in other groups, who offer the promise of some kind of reward for such actions — the caliphate, the ethnostate, or eternal salvation — there is no common goal that binds incels together or mobilises them toward violence.

That is not to minimise the potentially toxic effect of a fatalistic, misogynistic echo chamber in which misery and failure are celebrated, or to deny the possibility that some very vulnerable individuals with a predisposition toward violence might come across their community and use it to ascribe their vengeance to some greater purpose. The murder of ten people by Elliot Roger in 2014 tragically demonstrated this is possible.

But the coverage thus far has focused on the “incel angle” to the exclusion of everything else, at times even cherry-picking details in a way that feels intellectually dishonest. For if we’re going to look at the case of Jake Davison honestly, we have to look at the whole picture.

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We know that an assault allegation from September of 2020 led police to seize Davison’s firearm and revoke his licence the following December. It was returned just a week before the attack, for reasons that are unknown. The Independent Office of Police Conduct is investigating the decision to do so.

We also know that Davison’s mother, Maxine, and other relatives reportedly “begged police and NHS to help him with mental health problems — he had been diagnosed with autism and attention deficit disorder — though the timeline is unclear. Neighbours have commented that he was “a troubled soul”, who had always been very quiet and close to his mother, but had recently begun to clash with her.

For now, that is all we know about this devastating atrocity and the man who committed it. Yet somehow, armed only with (understandable) indignation and a few hot takes from social media, we seem to have lost sight of the perpetrator behind this awful attack, preferring instead to blame the atrocity on incel culture. In some ways, this is an understandable response to tragedy. It is more comforting, after all, to seize upon a simple explanation — in this case that incel culture is to blame — than accept that the situation is more complex.

But doing so makes it impossible for us to have the more important discussion about how we got here in the first place — and why certain men are drawn to incel culture. What is it about these communities that makes them appealing? Is it our increased isolation and lack of human contact? Or is it, as incels suggest, the fact that they feel marginalised in our current “woke” culture? I don’t have the answers to these questions, but if my research has taught me anything, it’s that we can’t help incels — and, in turn, protect our daughters — until we have that honest conversation.