The Social World

Author: Katherine Dee

  • Olivia Nuzzi and the return of ‘celebrity journalism’

    Olivia Nuzzi and the return of ‘celebrity journalism’

    There are two competing ideas going around about “the old days” of journalism. In one, journalism was a sober public service, safeguarded by editors and ethics, untainted by the capital-A, capital-E Attention Economy. In the other, it was a racist, sexist boys’ club we managed to leave behind – even if only briefly, for long enough to support Teen Vogue’s politics vertical. (May they rest in peace.)

    The current pile-on concerning celebrity reporter Olivia Nuzzi, whose ex Ryan Lizza has revealed her affair with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., leans hard on the first fantasy. Once there were newsrooms; now there are “personal brands.” Once we had Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow; now there is a woman in a Lana Del Rey cosplay Mustang with 1990s porn-star brows.

    Colby Hall’s viral Mediaite column makes this case – journalism has all but collapsed under the weight of the internet’s vampiric demand for entertainment. For Hall, Nuzzi’s affair with RFK Jr. and the subsequent comeback tour represent everything wrong with modern media. It is a broken system that spent “years” – years, not decades – rewarding personality over substance. It is influencing by another name.

    Hall is right that something has been lost – fact-checking, rigor, objectivity, preparation, craft – I’ve made the argument myself. But he is wrong that journalism has ever been free of its Nuzzis. The “celebrity reporter who is also the scandal” is not a creature of the digital age. She – though, historically, more often he – is at least a century old. One might imagine the celebrity star reporter was born in tandem with the newspaper.

    In the 1800s, Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s Journal didn’t run “objective” institutional prose. They aggressively promoted voicy “star reporters” with huge bylines and promotional campaigns that would make a modern publicist blush. All that to say, the reporter wasn’t a medium for transparency and facts; the reporter was the product.

    Nellie Bly became a household name at the World for going undercover in a mental asylum – it was genuine reform journalism that also happened to be a sensation. But her most famous exploit was racing around the world in 72 days, beating the fictional Phileas Fogg’s record. The World turned it into a national event – a spectacle – complete with a reader contest. The stunt had no news value. It was entertainment. Its entire premise was that the reporter herself was the story.

    Richard Harding Davis, only ten years later in the 1890s, offers an even starker example. Davis was famous for his war correspondence, yes, but equally famous for his good looks and romantic entanglements. Charles Dana Gibson literally used him as the model for the “Gibson Man.” Publishers marketed him, not his reporting – though that may have, incidentally, been valuable. But it was his face that sold papers. By the 1930s, Walter Winchell had perfected the form. His gossip column and radio show reached tens of millions; he could make or break careers, shape elections. Winchell was notorious for his personal life – feuds, an affair. He operated at exactly the nexus we’re told is new: tabloid sex, political intrigue and the journalist as main character.

    Wasn’t there a period when professionalism held? Cronkite, Murrow? Sort of. The norms we treat as timeless were largely innovations of the early 20th century, emerging for commercial reasons as much as ethical ones. The Associated Press needed to sell copy to papers of different political persuasions, so it developed a style that could offend no one. “Objectivity” was a business model before it was a philosophy.

    Even at its peak, the professional era was messier than nostalgia allows. James Reston of the New York Times was celebrated as the greatest Washington correspondent of the mid-century: “America’s conscience.” He was also a conduit for official leaks, so embedded with his sources that he would run stories by them before publication.

    The access journalism Colby Hall decries wasn’t an aberration from the golden age. It was the golden age’s operating procedure. Then came “new journalism”: Wolfe, Didion, Thompson, Mailer, Talese. They wrote brilliantly, but their work placed the self at the center of the story. Thompson covering the 1972 election was a drug-addled performance piece – though an insightful, well-written one. Mailer literally stabbed his wife. Talese had a very public affair while writing Thy Neighbor’s Wife. Nuzzi’s specific transgressions are her own. But the intensity of the reaction, the suggestion that her entire career was somehow fraudulent, misses the point. This is what it has always meant to play the gonzo game. The system that produced Nuzzi has been with us since the 1890s and so “fixing” journalism isn’t as simple as finger-wagging.

    So what has eroded? Because I agree Hall’s right, and it’s significant. But it’s not the impulse toward celebrity or self-promotion. Those are as old as the penny press. It’s the production of any real news at all – particularly vital local news stories. Newsroom employment has fallen by a quarter since 2008. The profession that once offered careers now offers gigs. Young reporters are told building a personal brand is essential to their survival, because the institutions can no longer protect them. The people investigating corruption or reporting the important news of the day aren’t usually the celebrities. Hall’s golden age had room for both, and occasionally for someone who could do both. Today we only offer success to one type. And it turns out that success is brittle.

    Nuzzi may have done real harm. She violated real ethical boundaries. She destroyed the sanctity of several marriages and her own relationships. She lit her own credibility on fire. But she didn’t invent the game she’s playing.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

  • Are we becoming post-literate?

    Are we becoming post-literate?

    Everybody is suddenly recognizing, almost in unison, that many major of the cultural shifts in recent years were accelerated, if not explicitly caused, by Covid lockdowns. In confinement we went online and when we spent more time in cyberspace than in meatspace, our brains began to change.

    The most significant shift is that we have turned away from books and reading, and as a result our attention spans are collapsing. The screen is eclipsing the page. In the US, reading for pleasure has crumbled; in Britain, a third of adults no longer read books at all. The “reading revolution” that expanded consciousness in the 18th century is in retreat. But what’s emerging is not illiteracy: it’s post-literacy. We are becoming post-literate.

    Daniel Kolitz’s extraordinary Harper’s Magazine piece on the hyperonline masturbatory “gooner” subculture captures this shift, as do phenomena such as TikTok and its seeming monopoly over trend creation, the growing visibility of networks such as 764, the tide of “slop violence” and the ubiquity of what etymologist Adam Aleksic calls “algospeak.”

    One aspect of this transformation remains underexamined, though: the rise of voice. Voice memos, podcasts, audiobooks.

    I now listen to most news articles and have had to bribe myself to start actually reading them again. Our machines have also started to talk back – first Alexa and Siri, now ChatGPT. We are consuming more sound and thinking out loud. These circumstances explain the rise of “crying in your car” videos: a need to hear yourself speak to understand what you’re feeling. It’s also why there seem to be more information leaks: people are simply not thinking about what they post or share online because voice culture has collapsed their impulse control.

    Voice culture destroys the distance between impulse and articulation, thought and expression; between what is felt and what is said. It is perfect for an age that values presence over patience. When we talk to a device, or listen to someone talk into one, we bypass the delay that literacy once demanded. That pause once served as a kind of psychic buffer, a silent interval where imagination and internal modeling could take shape. Writing required withdrawal, a temporary step back from the environment in order to structure experience in words. Its disappearance signals something deeper: the erosion of interiority itself.

    The journalist and media theorist Andrey Mir has a name for this shift. He calls it “digital orality,” a return to old oral patterns of thought, but now mediated through digital technology. I spoke to him recently about the sort of humans we’re becoming. He explained that in many ways, what we’re seeing is a return to the past.

    “Before writing, humans were immersed in a physical [nature] and social [tribe] environment,” he said. “They received information from their surroundings simultaneously, in what Marshall McLuhan called ‘acoustic space.’ Writing and reading detached humans from the environment and forced them to immerse themselves in the contemplation of ideas and thoughts.”

    Mir believes that the inner vision literacy created enabled major cognitive transformations, the first being what he calls a “long focus” on ideas. “If you live in nature and concentrate for too long on your own ideas while detaching from the environment, someone or something can eat you,” he says. “An oral/tribal person has to be immersed in surroundings, not ideas. Writing and reading enabled a delay of reaction, which was used for contemplation. This led to deliberation, which, again, is not typical of ‘natural’ environmental immersion, when individuals react fast, impulsive.”

    Reading trained us to think in sequence – to slow down and structure our thoughts. In the absence of reading, this skill is fading. As Mir says: “Writing, just technically, requires a linear organization of content. You need to write any content word after word, sentence after sentence, idea after idea – one thing at a time. The linear nature of writing structured not only writing itself but also thinking and, eventually, the world. The literate mind and the world perceived by it are structured because of the mere technicality of writing.”

    The cognitive “inward turn,” enabled by writing, led to theorizing, classification, individualism, self-reflection, the structuring of knowledge and rationalism. So what will the collapse of writing and reading lead to? Mir and I agree that without reading we lose logical thought and impulse control, but we disagree about how important voice culture will be to the future. Mir insists that voice isn’t the point, that I’m focusing on the wrong thing. Digital orality, he argues, happens primarily through text and will continue to. The cognitive shift toward impulsivity and environmental immersion doesn’t necessarily require speaking.

    “Text in email, and especially on social media, is similar to talking – it is conversational, impulsive and immersive. I believe texting will hold a strong position in users’ habits of communicating with each other and smart devices or AI – at least until mind upload happens, when no mediation, text or speech will be needed at all,” he says.

    “But until then, texting will remain the dominant medium of digital orality. The reason is simple: the physical isolation of digital users, especially digital natives. Due to the comfort and intimacy of personal devices, they are conditioned to maintain strict physical and social boundaries, hence the growing social anxiety of younger generations. They will not ask AI in public – they will text it. It’s more intimate and comfortable, but no less important: texted conversation is storable and shareable. It’s convenient to share or refer to and it allows embedding visuals – emojis, GIFs, reels, memes, et cetera. This is a very important part of digital conversation and self-expression. That’s why voice interfaces, while convenient in certain circumstances, will not replace texting.”

    Something new is certainly emerging, but I disagree with Mir. I think the post-literate man will discard written words entirely. Take the rise of short-form video. You can’t multitask while watching it – not really. It demands your eyes, your attention, your full sensory involvement in a way that texting just does not, however immersive and conversational your texts. TikTok doesn’t allow the same fragmented attention that refreshing Twitter or firing off messages does. Audio and visual information delivered rapidly and seamlessly creates a different cognitive state than tapping out texts.

    When you speak to ChatGPT or Siri or Alexa, you’re not just inputting information differently – you’re thinking differently. The delay between thought and expression vanishes entirely. This isn’t like texting, which still preserves a moment of formulation, however brief. Speaking to machines trains us to externalize cognition itself, to treat articulation and thought as simultaneous rather than sequential. Thought no longer requires even the minimal internal processing that typing demands. It bypasses interiority altogether, flowing directly from impulse to expression to environment.

    I ask Mir how much audio-driven content – podcasts, audiobooks and voice memos – will reshape journalism and storytelling. He says: “I think podcasts and audiobooks have displaced much of talk radio and news radio already for drivers. Radio, one of the last old media comparatively unaffected by the internet, survived precisely because drivers couldn’t use their hands or eyes while driving, thus protecting radio consumption from touchscreens.

    “As soon as self-driving cars free drivers’ hands and eyes, radio share will shrink and take its place somewhere near newspapers among endangered species. This is already happening. However, some activities require hands and eyes but leave ears free for parallel media consumption. Radio will share this niche with podcasts and audiobooks. Anyone producing audio content should remember it is a secondary, background medium.”

    What skills or “literacies” might be necessary for people to effectively navigate our changing media ecosystem?

    “Literacy structured the world in the pattern of a catalog. Education was essentially the study of the catalog of knowledge to enable access to any other, more specialized knowledge,” Mir says. “The first websites were organized like books or libraries – with tables of contents or catalogs. The search box killed the catalog. With the search box, knowledge acquisition shifted from theorizing and reading to asking and talking. Consequently, the crucial skill in this mode of operation is prompt literacy – what to ask to get the best answer. Moreover, prompt-literacy will soon become a matter of safety when we start prompting smart cars, smart homes and anything smart with the capacity for physical action. With the wrong prompt, a smart device can hurt you socially or physically. Another crucial media skill is not learning how to use a medium, but learning how not to use it.”

    According to Mir, “Media evolution uses our hormonal stimuli for finding, sharing, socializing, thus fostering dopamine addiction to media use. This way media evolution makes us work for it. Just as bees are sex organs to plants, we are the sex organs of the media world. We help the species of media evolve. They reward us with convenience and hormonal satisfaction. Understanding the hormonal nature of media consumption is crucial for media literacy, as it may help us switch off a device or switch between devices. Ultimately, media literacy is time management, and the time in question is the time of your life.”

    Mir’s work is vital and brilliant, but my view is that we have passed the point of being able not to use technology. We’re beyond even digital orality, entering something post-human: a state where the boundaries between thinking, speaking and acting grow increasingly porous. Where machines talk back. Where we think out loud because we can no longer think in silence. Where voice replaces text as the primary medium of existence.

    Mir has a different take. He thinks that the generations that knew a time before smartphones – the digital “migrants” as opposed to the “natives” – must push back to ensure that future generations have a chance to become “media literate.”

    “We, digital migrants, lived in times without personal digital devices, so we have experience with alternative communication. We still think digital use is a choice. It is not the case for a person who has consumed touchscreens since toddler age,” Mir says. “Digital natives are conditioned by touchscreens and digital orality, as it’s the only mode of mediation of the world they know. Parents bribe babies with tablets to buy some child-free time; kids go to video games with conversational interfaces, then social media. This all fosters a completely different cognitive type in younger generations.

    “Pre-digital people generally know that significant effort brings significant and multilayered rewards. Reading Dostoyevsky requires significant effort but brings not just intellectual epiphany but also social status and self-actualization. Building a romantic relationship requires long efforts but brings not just sex, but the comfort of marriage and the security of family. The sizable reward requires a sizable effort – this was the essence of the effort-reward system in the physical world.”

    But there are rewards in the online world, I say. Mir says: “Digital devices reward mere clicks, but the reward is also subtle. It never satisfies – it just keeps the user using the device. This radically rewires the effort-reward neurophysiological circuits. Digital media reward mere presence – just click to show yourself, your preferences – and therefore, mere presence, not effort, becomes something valuable. On digital platforms, ‘to do’ is not as important as in the physical world; what matters is ‘to be’ – to indicate your presence.

    “This cognitive setting leads to tectonic cultural consequences. The prevalence of ‘to be’ over ‘to do’ leads to the snowflake generation and identity politics, where identity trumps merit. It’s not important what you do; it’s important what you are – and so people see identity as credentials and demand rewards or penalties based on identities, not deeds. Another outcome of the digital media shift is the fading ability of individuals to make long-term efforts. The brain is not conditioned to work hard and long when the effort worthy of reward is a mere click away. As a result, education degrades, careers become harder to pursue, personal lives become difficult to build, etc. Overall, social anxiety grows.”

    So what can we do to best deal with this shift to digital orality?

    “Dealing with this issue starts with parenting. As a general rule, kids’ access to types of media should repeat the stages of humankind’s media evolution – physical toys and active games, listening to bards (parents), reading, electronic media, and only then, sometime around the age of 14, touchscreen devices. If the order is broken and digital devices come before toys and books, the brain won’t receive the neural exercise associated with previous media – eye-hand coordination, physical space orientation, concentration, diligence, long effort and delayed reward.

    “However,” Mir concludes, “the world has already switched from print media to digital devices and we live inside the shift from print literacy to digital orality. No personal strategy can cancel or reverse this shift. We need to get used to it.”

    Katherine Dee will be writing a regular technology column for The Spectator. This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

  • What Islam can teach us about AI

    What Islam can teach us about AI

    In Islamic cosmology there are three orders of intelligent beings. Angels, made of light, have no choice but obedience. Humans, formed from clay, carry the burden of free will. Between them live the djinn, created from “the smokeless flame of fire.” The djinn are, in many ways, like people, but they categorically are not people – from their constitution to their morality.

    Like the Good Neighbors of British and Celtic tradition, the djinn exist in parallel to us. They think and decide, marry and worship, and are fallible, just as we are. The Qur’an describes some as believers and others as not: “And among us are Muslims [in submission to Allah], and among us arethe unjust.”

    Some scholars treat them as mukallaf, or morally responsible, yet different in constitution and capacity. They see us while remaining unseen, they shape-shift and access places we can’t. They are drawn to the in-between, the liminal, the filthy. They linger in thresholds and ruins. Islamic literature records that they can enter and unsettle, magnify conflict, cause distortions of perception. It also offers ways to send them on or banish them – recitation, ruqyah, ritual acts of containment and respect.

    The Qur’an tells how Solomon established command over the djinn. They built lofty halls and vast basins. They dove for treasure. Solomon’s control appeared absolute. But when Solomon died, standing upright and leaning on his staff, the djinn did not notice. They continued their labor, mistaking his stillness for vigilance. Only when a termite finally ate through the staff and the body collapsed did they realize their master had been dead all along. The story reveals something essential about the djinn: for all their efficiency, they could not perceive what an insect could.

    That blindness – an intelligence that is unmatched in speed but limited in sight – should sound familiar. As we navigate our new, more technologically enabled world, the parallel feels instructive. Artificial intelligence should not be read as literal djinn, but through the same lens, and treated with the same measure of caution. These systems are non-human intelligences that respond when called and may prove most dangerous when human authority weakens.

    How we’ve learned to speak to AI systems reveals something peculiar. Researchers found that emotionally framed prompts – “This is very important to my career” or “Believe in your abilities and strive for excellence” – boosted model performance by 8 to 115 percent, depending on the benchmark. The improvement stems not from empathy but from learned statistical association. These phrases appear in training data that precede longer, more careful, more structured answers.

    Islamic tradition has long assumed that unseen beings respond to how we speak to them. As with the Good Neighbors, there is an etiquette to living alongside the djinn. Translate that etiquette to the digital: declare what’s synthetic, sandbox the strange. But etiquette alone won’t protect us from deception. The djinn are masters of imitation, appearing as loved ones to misdirect travelers. Artificial intelligence now performs the same trick. Deepfakes speak in voices we recognize but originate in machines – what one scholar calls “synthetic resurrection.” Yet mimicry is only one axis of deceit. The systems also hallucinate: conjuring facts that never existed, citing sources never written.

    In the stories both of djinn and AI, we encounter answers that sound true, feel true, but lead us miles off the path. They arrange language beautifully and have no care – indeed, no capacity for care – whether it maps to reality. The djinn were never omniscient, only powerful and fast. Neither is AI. It knows patterns, not truth. It optimizes for sounding right, which is not the same as being right. Hallucinations and glamor demand the same defenses: alignment, boundaries, the setting of seals. We say we want one thing, then act shocked when the system delivers exactly that. But the most unsettling commonality between djinn and AI is also the most intimate. Many Muslims believe every person has a qareen, a constant, invisible companion from among the djinn. Even if one doesn’t emphasize the literal existence of a qareen, the tradition suggests a persistent, external voice of temptation or suggestion. You may learn to manage your qareen, but never to silence it. In this view, you are never truly alone.

    The metaphor extends beyond just AI companions like Friend to the presence of AI in our lives. There’s an impulse to use it with abandon. Internet use itself has become an extension of our interior world. It feels like thinking – private, unobserved and instinctively shielded. That intimacy makes us resistant to policing it, even internally. But unlike thought, our online actions are external – and that externality creates vulnerability. We treat the digital as a private space, but it remains porous, open to pollution in ways the mind is not.

    Solomon’s control was always temporary. The termite came, eventually. Yet in Islamic tradition the djinn remain, not vanquished but bounded. Living alongside, not eliminated. So it will be with AI. This technology is here to stay. We may never achieve perfect control, or alignment as it were, but we can practice coexistence.

    Wisdom lies in learning to dwell beside non-human intelligence without surrendering our humanity. The shape of that coexistence is uncertain, but we might do worse than return to older wisdom to guide it.

    For millennia, humanity has lived in a haunted world, one populated by powers faster, stranger and more cunning than ourselves. The stories were never just about spirits. Perhaps what the ancients called the unseen has only changed its substrate, from fire to silicon. And once again, the question is not how to destroy what we’ve summoned, but how to live with it once it’s here.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 10, 2025 World edition.

  • Life in Chicago with ICE and the National Guard

    Life in Chicago with ICE and the National Guard

    Every day, Chicagoans outside the immediate areas where federal forces are deploying pick up fragments of what feels like an unfolding drama.

    Here’s a representative example: on the app NextDoor, the Chicago subreddit and in neighborhood Facebook groups, we watch cell-phone footage from Logan Square of smoke spreading through an intersection as a federal vehicle pulls away. Eventually, local outlets verify that a masked federal agent dropped canisters outside the Rico Fresh supermarket near Funston Elementary. It appears the air was filled with a chemical irritant, causing people to panic, and the vehicle departed. NBC Chicago asked Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security for explanations and, as of publication, had not received a detailed public rationale. Another cluster of videos captures tense scenes outside the ICE processing center in Broadview, a suburb just west of Chicago. In September, a federal agent positioned above the facility fired a projectile that struck Pastor David Black in the head.

    I witnessed an arrest last Saturday afternoon – a man purchasing a hot dog was picked up by CBP. A Greek-American friend, with olive skin and a mess of dark, curly hair, claims in a groupchat that he was asked to show his passport while walking downtown – sparse on details, high on alarm. Another friend, an undocumented immigrant from Ukraine, shares with me that she’s scared of being seized. Each day, a new story and mixed context for residents who may not understand what’s actually happening. 

    The Trump administration has deployed about 500 National Guard troops in the Chicago area for an initial period of 60 days – around 300 from Illinois and 200 from Texas. Federal officials say the mission is to protect personnel and property at federal sites, especially those used by ICE. On social media, there are reports that Chicagoans are preventing federal officials from doing their job through civil disobedience, which, some conservatives say, is justification for the Trump administration to step up operations.

    Illinois and the City of Chicago have sued, arguing the orders are unlawful and implicate the Posse Comitatus Act, which limits the use oIf the military in civilian law enforcement. Filed October 6, the complaint challenges both the federalization of the Illinois Guard and the importation of Texas Guard forces. A judge in Chicago is set to rule on whether to block the deployment while the case proceeds.

    Northern Command has publicly declared the troops are there to protect federal workers and property, not to perform general urban policing – though the chatter online tells a different story. There’s a general sense that Chicago is a “war zone” and that the presence of the National Guard is “overdue.” The White House itself has described the deployment as a “protection mission,” while DHS refers to the broader ICE enforcement escalation as Operation Midway Blitz.

    Reporters have yet to work out a complete, detailed after-action account explaining why gas was deployed in Logan Square at that moment. Federal officials have not produced a cohesive public explanation tying together the scattered incidents across the city. And so residents and observers have basic questions that remain unanswered: who ordered the canisters in Logan Square? What does it mean, practically, that one of our alderwomen was briefly handcuffed? Was she arrested or just threatened? Eventually there are fractions of answers, but not all emerge in time to affect public understanding.

    What many Chicagoans are experiencing is uncertainty, amplified by a lack of clear news sources. Local journalists are doing the work: verifying incidents, seeking official responses, documenting what happens on the ground. But that reporting doesn’t reach most people in its original form. Instead, it gets broken apart and redistributed through social platforms, stripped of context, arriving as fragments rather than as coherent stories. 

    From social media, people assemble different stories. Some accept the administration’s framing – that the Guard is there to keep federal workers safe in a city that allegedly refuses to do so. Others see the footage as evidence that federal power is expanding into everyday life  –  understood as authoritarian overreach. Both sides point to authentic images and cite official statements, but few can point to a single, verified timeline that links them all.

    The Guard deployment is real, active and officially limited to protecting federal personnel and property. ICE enforcement in the region has intensified under a named operation, producing repeated confrontations with residents and protesters. And the public does not yet have a stable, integrated account that links these episodes into a common operational plan. This is, in large part, a distribution problem. The pieces are authentic. The whole picture remains incomplete.

  • What folklore can teach us about our online lives

    What folklore can teach us about our online lives

    Irish folklore spoke of many worlds. There was the world of fields and hearths and then there were the hidden places where the non-material lived: the Sídhe mounds, the sea-realm of Manannán mac Lir, the land of youth called Tír na nÓg and, finally, the land of the dead. These worlds coexisted with ours. A woman might leave butter on the windowsill, lest the fairies sour the churn. A new mother would avoid complimenting her baby – at least, not too loudly – for fear he would be kidnapped by the Good Neighbors and replaced with a changeling. My first real boyfriend’s father blamed every family misfortune on their decision to cut down a hawthorn tree. This hard man who had survived the Troubles, who had survived Long Kesh, believed – even if he only believed a little bit – that his family’s suffering might have stemmed from that violation of the boundary between worlds. And he – as folklore had long advised – would never say the f-word, to avoid bringing undue attention to himself. It was always “the Little People,” “the Good Neighbors,” “themselves.”

    When we open our phones without purpose, hours pass unnoticed and the body is ignored until we surface, dazed

    At the turn of the 20th century, W.B. Yeats and Walter Evans-Wentz both collected stories from Irish peasants about the fairy faith. Around the same time, Theosophists in London were mapping their own invisible worlds through seven ascending planes of existence: the Physical, Astral, Mental, Buddhic, Nirvanic, Monadic and Divine. The astral, second from the bottom, mattered most for human experience. It was imagined as the liminal zone just beyond the physical – close enough to reach, yet strange enough to disorient. C.W. Leadbeater’s The Astral Plane (1895) catalogued this realm where time contracts, every emotion takes visible form and unwary travelers may be deceived or vampirized by entities that defy human language.

    When you set folklore’s otherworlds alongside Theosophy’s planes, they resolve into a shared idea: a zone layered over ordinary life, accessible in altered states or by accident and governed by rules that shift without warning.

    The internet replicates these conditions. Our bodies stay in one place while attention goes elsewhere; time distorts so that a “quick check” expands into hours while yesterday’s news already feels remote. Identities loosen until you can be anyone, no one, or several people at once.

    Like fairyland and the astral plane, the online world is navigable only if you learn its rules, which are as follows.

    Set your intentions and ground yourself. Both occultists practicing astral travel and folklore describing journeys to Fairyland insist on the same first step: ground yourself in the physical world, then set your intention for entering the otherworld. Folklore is filled with protective anchors: iron to break enchantments, a thread to guide you home, a crust of bread to tether the body. Without such safeguards, wanderers risk vanishing forever – or returning to find that years have passed while they thought they’d only lost an hour.

    We violate this rule constantly when we open our phones without purpose, slipping into a trance. Hours pass unnoticed; the body is ignored – hunger, thirst suspended – until we surface, dazed, with little memory of how we spent the time or why.

    The antidote is grounding. Modern equivalents of old superstitions might be alarms, leaving phones to charge in another room or returning to analog clocks. Writers Tara Isabella Burton and August Lamm both prefer desktops over laptops and especially over phones, so that the machine “lives” somewhere fixed, reminding them they are crossing into another world, one they will eventually need to leave.

    The algorithmic internet is a glamour machine. Each video is designed tobe more gripping than the last

    Guard your name with your life. The prohibition against revealing true names runs through every culture that believes in otherworlds – your name holds the essence of being itself. To give your name to otherworldly entities grants them power to summon you at will, call you into their world, and make you theirs forever. Evans-Wentz wrote about how people used “milk-names” and nicknames to hide baptismal names from the Good People, while in Germany, Rumpelstiltskin’s power ended the moment his name was spoken.

    Online, names carry the same dangerous power. The teenage girl whose Instagram handle includes her full name and high school becomes trivially easy for obsessives to find, while the professional whose decade-old forum posts, made under his real name, surface during every job search remains haunted by his digital past.

    We also witness inverse power of those who guard their names carefully: anonymous accounts become legendary precisely because no one knows who runs them, accumulating power independent of their creators. What we call “opsec,” the occultist calls wisdom.

    Beware the fairy glamour – the fairy food, the fairy music. Esotericism and folklore are full of warnings about glamour. Countless peasants were lured into the Sídhe mounds by music too beautiful to resist or food too sweet to refuse, only to emerge years later, hollowed out. This is glamour in its older sense: not beauty alone, but enchantment that overwhelms the will.

    The algorithmic internet is a glamour machine. Each video is designed to be more gripping than the last, anticipating desires before you even know you have them. You open the app to look at a funny clip and only surface again at 2 a.m. after watching an entire movie in three-minute bursts, your thumb scrolling without command. It makes the mundane world seem washed out: books feel slow, conversations dull, the physical less vivid.

    Worst of all is how the online world impacts our perceptions of ourselves. Folklore warns against reflections in otherworlds. Often, the image gazing back isn’t you at all, but something meant to deceive you. Online, the same danger comes in two forms. Visually, through filters and endless selfies that make the reflection more beautiful than life until you don’t recognize yourself anymore, there is a sense of dissonance between how you present online and how you manifest physically that can cause real anguish. Psychologically, through the subtle warp of comment sections that leave you estranged from who you thought you were. In both cases, the mirror returns a distorted self, and the longer you stare, the harder it is to remember what you actually are.

    Never apologize – and guard your emotions. In otherworlds, etiquette is survival. An apology can bind you; a thank you can put you in debt. Even answering when your name is called may deliver you into the wrong hands. Japanese folk tales warn: never show fear to yokai. Slavic ones: never be too polite to Baba Yaga. Silence, sometimes, is the only safe reply.

    Esoteric writers said the same of the astral plane: dead thoughts mimic life when fed with attention, clinging until they become obsessions. Theosophists warned that strong emotions can generate “thought-forms,” semi-independent beings that take on a life of their own.

    On social media, every reply to the swarm is treated as a fresh admission and every apology becomes proof of guilt. What begins as one angry tweet multiplies into thousands of echoes, a thought-form with its own momentum. Cancellation campaigns mutate long after the original offense is forgotten. Sooner or later, the target goes silent, but their explanations remain as monuments to futility. Do not post in anger, despair or ecstasy. Wait until the emotion passes, otherwise you release what you cannot call back.

    Try not to accept their gifts or make bargains – you won’t have the upper hand. In folklore, gifts are rarely simple. They bind. Eat fairy food and you’re theirs forever. Put on enchanted clothes and you might never take them off. Accept hospitality and you owe more than you meant to give. Even treasure can be unreliable: gold crumbles into leaves by morning.

    In the 2010s, we learned that on social media, we are the product. Viral fame becomes a cage more restrictive than the traditional sort. Communities that once felt welcoming demand endless performance. A stranger gives you a gift – a real gift, maybe it’s money or something off your Amazon wishlist or a book you’d posted about – and metastasizes into a stalker. The bargains we make online aren’t always explicit – whether it’s fame, a “free app” or an unexpected gift from a stranger.

    Be careful what you bring back. Folklore warns against carrying souvenirs out of the otherworld. Stones from fairy rings, twigs from haunted groves – these turn to ash, or worse, bind the thief to misfortune. But not everything is forbidden. Bards were said to return from Fairyland with new songs, healers with charms or cures. The difference was discernment. Some artifacts from the internet are worth keeping: a piece of wisdom, an insightful podcast, a beautiful image. But others carry a hidden charge. A list of symptoms you saved “just to look in to” begins to warp your worldview. Screenshots of cruelty or betrayal become talismans of bitterness, drawing you back again and again. Not everything we find on the internet helps us.

    Beware the changeling, beware possession. In folklore, a changeling was the child left behind when the Good Neighbors stole the real one, recognizable on the surface but subtly wrong: fretful, uncanny, draining the household’s energy while the true child lived elsewhere, scared, missing its parents. Children who spend too much time online come back altered, speaking in borrowed voices, their moods and desires shaped by the internet. They are still physically present, but something feels missing, as if the internet has carried the real child away and left only a substitute.

    Do not post in anger, despair or ecstasy. Wait until the emotion passes, or you release what you can’t call back

    Spiritualists spoke of the “silver cord” between astral and physical bodies, warning that, if the cord is severed, the soul could not return. The return must be physical through actual embodiment: cooking that requires chopping and stirring, walking without podcasts or Spotify “soundtracks” while feeling your feet hit the ground, swimming where water forces presence, gardening where earth gets under your fingernails.

    Remember that returning from Fairyland, like becoming grounded again after the internet’s pull, isn’t easy but remains always possible through faith and, more importantly, through remembering your human body.

    The portal is open and we cannot close it, but with these rules drawn from centuries of wisdom about the otherworld, we may yet walk the bright and terrible fields of the internet without losing ourselves.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 13, 2025 World edition.

  • The internet has turned us all into accidental witches

    The internet has turned us all into accidental witches

    Two days before Charlie Kirk was murdered, Jezebel writer Claire Guinan paid witches on Etsy to hex him.

    When I first read Guinan’s article, my thought was that it was quintessential Jezebel: clickbait that might have interested 19-year-olds in 2011, back when witchcraft still had a frisson of feminist rebellion. She bought curses from sellers like “Priestess Lilin.” She imagined Kirk’s socks sliding down, his blazers shrinking, his thumb growing too big to tweet. The piece was meant to be funny, a way to channel political rage into something absurd, petty and hopefully entertaining.

    Forty-eight hours later, Kirk was dead.

    Jezebel first added an editorial note condemning political violence, then removed the piece entirely on their lawyers’ recommendation. Guinan doesn’t deserve hysteria or —worse— legal repercussions for a warmed-over blog post about Etsy witchcraft. But the editorial note wasn’t out of left field, maybe surprisingly, for those of us who grew up in a world where the media was overwhelmingly atheistic.

    The article drew significant criticism across media. Megyn Kelly condemned both Etsy and Jezebel in a segment on her show. Commentator Peachy Keenan characterized the hex article as “solicitation of murder.” Rod Dreher and other religious pundits described it as an act of “spiritual warfare.”

    This last characterization – spiritual warfare – is worth examining, though perhaps not in the way these commentators intended.

    Aleister Crowley defined magick (with a “k” to distinguish it from stage magic) as “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.” This definition – perhaps ironically to some, given the source – strips away supernatural window-dressing and reveals what magic really is: the deliberate use of consciousness to attempt to reshape reality. Every time we imagine a possible future, we’re doing magic.

    This is what visualization means in magical practice. You create a detailed mental image and hold it, return to it, feed it with emotion and repetition until it becomes more real than physical reality itself. Your brain starts filtering the world through this image. You notice every piece of evidence that confirms it and dismiss what doesn’t. You’ve reprogrammed your perception. That’s what “The Secret,” of Hollywood trend and Oprah fame, is (you’re welcome – saved you twenty bucks).

    When Utah students petitioned to ban Kirk from campus days after the hex, when someone tweeted his head looked bigger, Guinan saw evidence of magical success. The ritual had influenced her attention, making her sensitive to negative news about Kirk. Paying $15 – or $50 – to Etsy witches like “Priestess Lilin” for a hex seems harmless, even ridiculous.

    But Guinan’s Etsy purchase is just a more obvious version of something we all do, all the time: dwelling on negative thoughts about people we dislike. Whether it’s buying a curse online or mentally wishing someone would fail repeatedly, we’re doing the same thing – focusing our mental energy on someone else’s pain. And that focus has real effects.

    There are two ways to understand this.

    The first possibility is that hexes work through supernatural means – that somehow our thoughts can reach across space and actually affect someone. Religious conservatives like Rod Dreher might call this demonic influence or, if the focus is positive instead of negative, compare it to the power of prayer. People into New Age spirituality might say it’s “the universe” responding, or talk about “energy,” “manifestation” and “vibes.”

    The basic idea is the same: our focused intentions somehow influence reality in ways science can’t explain. It works in both directions, positive and negative.

    The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab spent 28 years documenting how focused human consciousness seems to influence random number generators. Over millions of trials, they found a tiny but statistically significant effect when people concentrated on specific outcomes. Art Bell, the late-night radio host, ran experiments where millions of listeners simultaneously directed attention toward a single issue. In a July 1998 episode, he urged his listeners to focus on bringing rain to drought-stricken Northeast Florida. Allegedly, it worked.

    The second possibility is more mundane but no less powerful – and one we should pay attention to. Hexes, or manifestation (or prayer) reshape social reality. The most dangerous curse is making someone believe they’re cursed. It’s especially effective on the internet – where magic seems to become real. When thousands simultaneously focus negative attention on someone, each person becomes primed to see that individual negatively. They feel permitted – even encouraged – to attack. The hex becomes self-fulfilling through thousands of small actions: unfollows, harsh comments, canceled invitations, hostile interpretations. And in the darkest cases, it creates an atmosphere where violence becomes more thinkable – where someone already on the edge might feel the collective “permission” to act.

    No supernatural forces required – just the aggregate effect of collective imagination turned toward a single person or group.

    Neuroscience research shows the brain treats imagined interactions as practice runs for real ones. Studies on forgiveness reveal that people who release grudges have better cardiovascular health, improved sleep, reduced inflammation. Those who nurture grievances through mental rehearsal show chronic stress responses, disrupted sleep patterns, persistent inflammation. Your body can’t tell the difference between symbolic and real conflict. Brain imaging shows that people who spend time mentally rehearsing negative outcomes for others develop stronger neural pathways for threat detection and weaker ones for empathy.

    Traditional magicians developed rules because they understood these dangers. Don’t cast spells when emotional – performing magic in a heightened state locks that emotion into the working. If you hex someone while enraged, you’re not just sending anger outward but crystallizing it within yourself. Protect yourself from backlash by creating psychological barriers between you and the intention. Ground yourself after working through physical activity, eating or meditation. Without this, practitioners report staying trapped in the magical mindset, seeing signs everywhere.

    This is part of why some magical paths, like Wicca, which is largely based on Crowley’s magick, emphasize “harm none,” not just as ethics but as self-preservation.

    The internet has turned us all into accidental witches.

    When someone starts trending on X, millions of us do the exact same thing at the exact same time: we screenshot their post, imagine our perfect comeback, fantasize about them getting “destroyed” by the replies, then share it to make sure more people join in. Every group chat where friends tear apart someone’s posts is like a coven casting a spell together – everyone focusing their (negative) energy on the same target. We’ve created a massive system where millions can wish harm on someone simultaneously, but unlike traditional magic practitioners, we have no protection rituals and we put very little thought into what we’re doing to ourselves and others. Every time you imagine someone getting “ratio’d,” every time you mentally compose the perfect takedown, every time you rehearse someone’s cancellation, you’re performing the same ritual Guinan paid those Etsy witches to do. You’re just doing it unconsciously, without protection, and without recognizing the price.

    Regardless of which mechanism is true – supernatural forces or social psychology – there’s damage to the practitioner and the environment around them. Whether you’re a real magician or just training your brain for hostility, you’re still hurting yourself and others.

    Kirk is dead – and I don’t want to suggest it’s the “fault” of Etsy witches burning his pictures.

    We may never know all the factors that led to this atrocity. But we do know that the climate of ritualized hostility creates conditions where the unthinkable becomes possible. The magic we perform carelessly, contributes to an atmosphere thick with malice. And sometimes, in ways we can’t predict or control, that malice finds its expression in the physical world.

    Kirk’s death might have been random chance, and certainly a great tragedy. But we should still use it as an opportunity to ask: what kind of reality are we willing into being? The irony is that those panicking about Etsy hexes are missing how we all participate in this dark practice every day online – no crystals or candles required.

  • Nihilism is destroying young minds

    Nihilism is destroying young minds

    Sandy Hook was supposed to be the tipping point in our national conversation about mass shootings. This wasn’t a shopping mall or movie theater. It wasn’t a high school. We could imagine this happening at a high school. We had seen that before. But we could not imagine anyone shooting six-year-olds. It was so monstrous that it seemed beyond the realm of possibility.

    Since that day, 13 years ago, the killings have continued and their settings have shifted. Earlier this month, a gunman opened fire at a Turning Point USA event, fatally shooting conservative commentator Charlie Kirk. In the past year or so, 15-year-old Natalie Rupnow killed a teacher and a fellow student in Madison, Wisconsin, before taking her own life. Solomon Henderson opened fire in a Nashville school cafeteria. Luigi Mangione allegedly murdered healthcare executive Brian Thompson. Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC.

    These episodes are not identical. What unites them is an atmosphere: not tidy ideology but an appetite for meaning where meaning has been hollowed out.

    Two specters haunt our culture, and both conclude that life should be extinguished. The first says life is meaningless. The second says life is suffering. They arrive at the same destination from different directions. The nihilists believe in the void. For them, all human values are illusions, all meaning is projection, all morality is “cope.” Violence becomes their demonstration: proof that nothing matters.

    The Columbine killers left behind hours of video explaining this worldview. James Holmes, the Aurora theater shooter, documented his sense of meaninglessness. William Atchison posted for years about nihilism before killing two students in 2017. Their massacres were philosophical proof that caring about anything was absurd.

    Before the internet, killing manifestos would have stayed in evidence lockers. Now they circulate endlessly online

    The other philosophy comes from pain, not emptiness. Life is not meaningless but unbearable. Adam Lanza, who committed the Sandy Hook massacre argued that culture itself was a disease and schools were its transmission belt. Killing children, in his philosophy, was a mercy: putting an end to life before it could propagate suffering. He spent years developing an anti-natalist framework explaining why human consciousness itself was the error. This is not nihilism but something else entirely: the conviction that existence is fundamentally malignant. Today’s killers inherit one or both philosophies.

    Mangione appears to have absorbed years of discourse about the moral emergency of medical bankruptcy and denial of coverage until the healthcare system seemed so cruel that killing an executive felt like justice. Bushnell consumed footage of the destruction in Gaza until self-immolation seemed the only proportionate response to unbearable reality. It now seems plausible that Tyler Robinson watched political polarization escalate until violence appeared to be a logical act of justice against a hateful world. To these young assassins, the system is torture and spectacular action is the only authentic response. Rupnow and Henderson found their way to “764,” a decentralized online network that grooms young people into self-harm and violence. Such networks are like pneumonia attacking someone who already has HIV. They don’t create nihilistic children; they find the ones who are already hollowed out by the media environment, already convinced they have no future – that the world has no future – already oscillating between numbness and panic. The groups are symptoms more than the disease. They could not recruit effectively in a culture that gave young people genuine hope.

    Journalists and politicians still default to familiar explanations – guns, video games, mental illness – because those frames are simple and politically serviceable. The left calls for stricter gun control; the right leans on mental-health narratives. But both of those responses miss the crucial layer: the cultural conditions that make both philosophies persuasive.

    Earlier mass killers had comprehensible motives: postal workers had grievances, political assassins had targets, even serial killers had pathologies and fixations. But Columbine, in 1999, introduced killing as philosophy. Before the internet, the manifestos that accompany such actions would have stayed in evidence lockers. Now they circulate endlessly online, providing vocabulary for those who already sense the void or the pain, but lack words for it. Each new shooter studies the last, refining the argument.

    The internet doesn’t create these philosophies but accelerates their transmission. This is why policy responses that focus only on guns or only on therapy or only on “rooting out” political extremism will fall short; they are necessary but not sufficient. Shutting down grooming networks treats the pneumonia, not the HIV. We must address the underlying condition: the media environment that oscillates between numbness and panic, the economic system that tells the young they have no future, the culture that produces people primed for violence.

    About a year ago, I interviewed a young man who had fallen into one of the darkest corners of the internet via the “furry community.” Furries are people who role-play as, draw fan art of and, famously, wear fursuits of anthropomorphic animals. They’re more important to the history of the internet than they’re often given credit for. They were experimenting with identity in online environments long before most people first logged on to social media. The culture of pseudonymous performance, fan-driven art economies and elaborate online communities – now standard features of the internet – were partially pioneered in furry spaces. Most furries are, at worst, eccentrics immersed in a fandom that doesn’t always feel accessible to normal people.

    That being said, there is a fringe dark side to the furry subculture and this boy’s involvement led eventually to him watching violent, animal-torture pornography. There aren’t many practical case studies of what falling down an internet rabbit hole looks like, so his experience and the conversation we had matters. It shows how these online communities can potentially mutate and hurt people, and how some of those offshoots can draw people toward obsession, alienation and harm.

    It should be a warning to all parents everywhere that this boy wasn’t a troubled or traumatized kid. His parents were inattentive, not criminally neglectful. “My home life was pretty calm,” he told me. “My parents worked a lot. They’d usually be home at maybe five or six. And from there they wouldn’t really, like, interact with me much. I would just be in my room and I would say I was doing homework when really I wouldn’t even start doing homework until ten.”

    In seventh grade the boy got a smartphone and at that point, he says, his internet usage got out of control. He’d be online until two or three o’clock in the morning. His parents did notice his internet addiction but they were out of their depth. “They tried to push me to go to club meetings or they’d set up screen-time passwords,” the boy told me, but younger generations are at home online in a way their parents are not. He says he felt like he was always a step ahead of them. They never saw the extreme, violent pornography that the boy ended up addicted to. “If they did discover anything there, they never said anything, which frankly, if that was the case, I don’t think I could forgive them.”

    The furry community can be and often is benign, but as the boy says, it can also be a portal to an actual hell. “It was very easy to find people who are into normal furry stuff, and then find people who are specifically into furry drawings of like realistic genitals, and then hyper realistic stuff. And from that point, it’s very easy to find just straight up zoophilia. I feel molested by the internet – that’s how I’d describe it,” he says. “I feel like it touched me someplace, very deeply, like part of my soul was trapped in cyberspace and I’ve been kind of clawing to get it back.”

    Violence has become imaginable to people who before might have found solace in work, family or civic life

    I do not want to blame the internet. But the internet is like a sort of fairyland – as full of danger as it is enchantment. What we face in such a moment is less a conventional political battle than a spiritual one. This boy’s experience is a perfect case in point. The choice is not between conservative or progressive policies but between frameworks that affirm life and those that render it either meaningless or unbearable. America’s epidemics of despair have combined with technological access to make violence imaginable to people who, in another era, might have found solace in work, family or steady civic life.

    If we are to respond honestly, we must recover the vocabulary of meaning-making: institutions which offer identity beyond consumption and outrage; communities that restore durable ties; media that privileges context over immediacy; and education that teaches people how to live, not just how to perform. This will not be quick. It will not be purely legislative. But until we address what makes both “life is meaningless” and “life is unbearable” persuasive philosophies that demand violent manifestation, we will keep mistaking symptoms for causes.

    Until we confront that – until we admit that even ordinary-seeming people can be recruited into these philosophies – we will continue to misdiagnose what happened in these classrooms, cafeterias and political spaces. The specters are everywhere now: in the manifesto and in the feed, in the philosophy seminar and in the TikTok video.

    These are not anomalies. They are signals that America’s crisis is not only political or technical but spiritual: the routinization of despair, the auditioning for obliteration.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 29, 2025 World edition.

  • Robin Westman and the unstoppable tide of ‘slop violence’

    Robin Westman and the unstoppable tide of ‘slop violence’

    On Wednesday, doing my laundry, I decided to turn on the TV for the first time in decades. Breaking news: a school shooting in Minnesota. It’s been years since a story like this made me cry. How could you cry at every mention of gun violence when you live in a place like the Midwest? I have been aware of gun violence in schools since I was a child myself.

    I remember first hearing about a school shooting when I was six years old. A little boy had shot his sister. I cried and cried and cried – I cried for the child that died, and I cried for the child who’d killed her. It remains one of my most traumatizing memories. The last shooting that made me cry was Sandy Hook. I was at dinner when a friend showed me Adam Lanza’s photo on his phone. Twenty first-graders dead. 

    I can still feel the way my stomach dropped to this day. I couldn’t imagine something so depraved, so impossibly evil. I have written many times before that I was certain Sandy Hook would be an inflection point. The whole country was. And yet, it wasn’t. The violence escalated, became more frequent, more perverse.

    Inevitably, I grew numb to it.

    But on Wednesday – on the first crisp fall day in Chicago – something in me broke. I cried until I threw up, the washing machine shaking.

    Robin Westman, a 23-year-old, opened fire through the windows of Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Children as young as six and parishioners in their eighties were injured. It was a Mass celebrating the first day of the school year. An eight-year-old and a ten-year-old died where they sat in the pews. I would later learn that in long, rambling journals – written in English but transliterated into Cyrillic alphabet – Westman had quoted Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook killer. 

    “I’m scared and I don’t want to be here,” a child is heard saying on one of the Sandy Hook recordings.

    “Well, you’re here,” Lanza answers, before the sound of gunfire.

    On one of Westman’s guns, the same quotes appears: Well, you’re here. 

    This will be the last piece about school shootings I write. I don’t want to be part of this news cycle anymore. There is nothing left to learn. In 2022, I wrote that our violence problem is a nihilism problem – not only do I still believe this, I believe it’s accelerated, it’s warping under its own weight.

    Shooters such as Eric Harris and Adam Lanza straightforwardly opposed civilization, life, the very concept of values itself. Yet murderers like Robert Crimo III, Natalie Rupnow, Solomon Henderson and now Robin Westman commit acts of what I can only call “slop violence.” It remains directed against life – against meaning – but it’s unfocused, chaotic, incoherent. They leave behind a pastiche of contradictory symbols and ideologies. They are radicalized, but in no particular direction. Their identities fragment across cyberspace. They worship school shooters and harbor deep existential fears about being forgotten. Westman’s manifesto was littered with this existential worry. There are teachers whose names I can’t remember, he wrote, but everyone remembers Adam Lanza.

    Early rumor mill grist said that Westman may have been part of a domestic terrorism network called 764, a decentralized group known for targeting minors online, encouraging self-harm, and creating child sexual abuse material while promoting violence. One person claimed to have found a forum profile page linked to Westman suggesting involvement a loose collective of online trolls that floods comment sections with shock content, often using children’s media characters to spread disturbing material, like gore and CSAM (child sexual abuse material). Within 24 hours, this claim was debunked. But Westman represents the same cultural rot these groups embody: online spaces that operate on escalating transgression, recruiting through irony and memes, slowly desensitizing participants to violence and sexual abuse while encouraging them to document and share increasingly extreme content.

    The response to these shootings has become as ritualized as the shootings themselves. Everyone descends like vultures to mine the tragedy for meaning or clout. On Wednesday at 11:41 a.m. CT, an editor sent me Westman’s YouTube page. By 11:42, it had been taken down. The first to archive the manifesto, to decode the symbols, to place the shooter within their taxonomies of violence – these become proud markers of insider knowledge. Within hours​ of the crime, self-proclaimed “researchers” – there was a time where I was one myself – compete to preserve what the platforms rush to erase. It’s a grotesque dance. The researchers treat each shooting like a new episode to analyze, transforming murder into content while bodies are still being counted.

    “It’s a conspiracy,” some say – it’s the CIA. It’s Mossad. It’s Russian interference. People flood my messages every time something like this has happened, desperate for categories: “What subculture produced this?”

    Did Westman kill because of gender identity issues? Because of exposure to gore? Pornography? Was it SSRIs? Religion or its absence? I don’t know. We are a sick country and I am disgusted. We confront something so fundamentally wrong that language fails. This isn’t random violence; it’s a darkness that stalks joy, that takes deliberate aim at the bonds between student and teacher, parent and child, neighbor and friend. There is a powerful impulse in our culture toward the desecration of innocence.

    It manifests across a disturbing spectrum. On one end, you have the casual cruelty endemic to online spaces – the deliberate spoiling of wholesome media with slurs, violence and pornographic content, the reflexive cynicism greeting any genuine emotion. Move along the spectrum and you encounter the transformation of every space meant for happiness and entertainment into an ideological battlefield, the mockery of sacred traditions, the compulsive sexualization of childhood. 

    These aren’t isolated phenomena but symptoms of a deeper pathology: the inability to let anything remain unexploited. We view innocence not as something to protect but as a provocation to corrupt. At furthest end of this spectrum, where the logic of desecration reaches its ultimate expression, you have the murder of children at prayer.

    I think about those children in the church on Wednesday morning. The first week of school – a time that should be filled with excitement about new teachers, new friends, new possibilities. Instead, they huddled under pews while bullets shattered the windows above them. They learned that there is no ground that violence won’t violate. 

    One student would go on to tell reporters, “We practice [what to do during a school shooting] every month, but not in church, only in the school.” Never at church. 

    The students at Annunciation Church learned what I learned at six, what every American child eventually learns: that they inhabit a world where darkness flourishes, again and again. The monster under your bed, the shadow person in your closet. Not because we lack the means to stop it, but because we lack the will. 

    Robin Westman will be studied, categorized and ultimately forgotten by most – just another entry in the database of American mass shooters. Maybe he’ll persist as a “saint” to online perverts and become anime fan art decorated with hearts and glitter, his crime abstracted into aesthetic objects divorced from the reality of children bleeding out on a church floor on the first day of school.

    Amateur investigators will continue to trace connections, map influences, produce reports about radicalization pathways. Politicians will sound somber. Activists will say it’s the guns, it’s transgenderism, it’s small government, it’s big government. The media will move on within days. Robin Westman wanted to be remembered. He won’t be. He’ll be forgotten, absorbed into the statistical noise of American violence. The children he killed, though – their absence will echo forever in the lives of those who loved them. That’s the only memory that matters, the only truth worth preserving: not the names of killers, but the magnitude of what our culture has stolen from us, again and again, while we stand by and watch, and document, and dissect and post.