Looking at the 22-year-old murderer of Charlie Kirk, the 23-year-old murderer of the children praying at a Catholic school, the 28-year-old murderer of children at a Nashville Christian school, earlier the 26-year-old murderer of 26 people at at Texas church, the 21-year-old murderer of nine people during a Bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, the 19-year-old who killed 10 people at a supermarket in Buffalo, and of course the 20-year-old who shot President Trump in the head a year ago, one thing starts to become painfully clear:
We are now in an overt battle for the souls of young people, the future of any nation. Souls are meant quite literally, representing the eternal in humans. This has been going on for many decades, but now it is in the open. Charlie was fighting for the soul of the young man who took his life.
Charlie recognized that the hearts and minds of youth are the primary target of leftist ideologues and engaged with this head-on. He went to college campuses. He saw the fight as between truth and lies and understood that the ultimate truth resides in the Biblical worldview.
The spiritual battle for America's youth can only be recaptured by pursuing it as Charlie did: understanding that the fight is spiritual at its core and fighting lies with truths — everywhere there are lies. He's not alone. Right after his assassination, Congressman Greg Steube wrote on X: "This is the real battle. I'm calling every believing Christian to start engaging in the true battle for our nation's soul…We must engage in the spiritual battle."
This recent surge in targeted murders by young people, often of young people, combined with the transgender mass psychosis, is the inexorable result of generations of breaking the national foundations that bound us together and allowing increased secular, leftist worldviews to dominate American culture. Barack Obama infamously promised this fundamental transformation, though its beginnings long preceded him.
British writer Paul Kingsnorth says that every culture in human history is built around a binding sacred order. For more than a millennium, the West's sacred order was built on the Christian story of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation.
This biblical worldview was the societal norm. It was the order that produced modernity from science to art to industrial to technological revolutions. By the American founding it offered the dignity of the individual through rights coming from God. The order built knowledge, wealth, comfort, and an understanding of life in every station. It was reality.
Its successes ultimately planted the seeds for its crippling, as that order has been unrelentingly attacked by a postmodern left that offers an alternate and destructive reality. Our accomplishments in the material realm made us soft in the spiritual, and the church became a compromised institution.
The elites driving the culture down didn't see all the beauty of the West, but instead created a fiction that considered it merely a tool for colonizing, slavery, and bigotry. The results are coming home to roost in horrific ways, from deadly Marxism to organized bigotry, to mutilating children under the lie of gender affirmation. Our age of comfortable abundance has been accompanied by the pulling up of our roots and the collapse of personal meaning.
Into this soup of declining religion and rising secular horrors, we have another phenomenon: Young people, mostly men, committing mass shootings and assassinations. In just the past few weeks, a rash of the phenomenon has slapped America in the face.
The young transgender shooter who opened fire on small children praying during mass at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis, killing two and injuring 17 others people, said in an online manifesto that he wished he "never brain-washed" himself into trans. Charlie Kirk was assassinated while doing an American act of debating opponents at the campus of Utah Valley University. The 22-year-old alleged killer was in a romantic relationship with a transgender.
We can't explain this and many other such shootings in recent years without giving the full context of how far the West has fallen and how the compromised church opened the door to the secularist monster.
The 1960s saw the secular busting through, unshackled from our foundations. The feminist-heavy sexual revolution pushed the anti-Biblical ethos that men and women don't need each other in the family and society. In tandem with this, leftists created the Great Society welfare imbroglio to abolish poverty — spoiler: it failed miserably — which all ended up rewarding women birthing children outside of marriage and freeing men from their responsibilities. Both sexes ran with that to disaster.
From that decade, the number of children born and raised in fatherless homes soared, from about 9 percent in 1960 to 25 percent by 2023. It's been most devastating among black Americans, where more than 70 percent of children are now in fatherless homes. Fatherless young men become some of the most dangerous people in a culture. Boys need a strong man to teach them constraint and purpose for their manhood.
As things inevitably spiraled, leftist ideals created a victim culture devoid of personal responsibility, preaching that all that goes wrong in your lives is caused by others, usually based on skin color and gender, or Western civilization. Technology created a culture of individual isolationists, while unrealistic social media-driven expectations put mental health decline on steroids. Violent video games, lack of perseverance, and basic consideration of others bespeak the absence of character to be expected from a society unhinged from religious underpinnings. In these late stages, this poisonous soup has served up the most bizarre detachment from truth: Transgender mania that attacks the fundamental basics of God-created humanity.
Postmodern leftists turn all truth on its head. Men and women don't need each other. Men can marry men, and women marry women. A man can do anything a woman can do, including having babies. A woman can do anything a man can, including physical strength. A man can become a woman, and is one if he believes he is. Killing unborn babies for any inconvenience is a moral virtue.
And our nation is reaping the harvest.
Rod Thomson is a former daily newspaper reporter and columnist, Salem radio host and ABC TV commentator, and current Founder of The Thomson Group, a Florida-based political consulting firm. He has eight children, seven grandchildren, and a rapacious hunger to fight for America for them. Follow him on Twitter at @Rod_Thomson. Email him at [email protected].
