Jesus, it could be reasonably observed, recruited a motley cast to serve as the first heralds of the gospel.
An endlessly squabbling band of fishermen, with a few tax collectors and zealots thrown in, the biblical narratives have them endlessly jockeying among themselves for prominence and status before they, to a man, flee when the going gets tough and their Messiah gets arrested.
In the two thousand years since, the Catholic Church has done its best to balance the inevitable imperfections of its messengers with the perfect truths they are supposed to announce. It’s not always an easy task – and as with so many other things, the internet has made it much more complicated. Especially because there are as many or more self-appointed evangelists as those actually commissioned by the Church to do so, and often with far less formation.
Recently, one of the new crop of self-made and self-credentialed online evangelists appeared to flame out in grisly spectacular fashion.
Alex Jurado, a young man with a burgeoning following for his “Voice of Reason” platform, found himself accused via several social media accounts of exchanging sexually explicit messages with a number of women and, allegedly, a 14 year-old girl – which he has vigorously denied, while acknowledging unspecified “mistakes, failures, and sins.”
Screen shots of the supposed exchanges to one side, the details are a little murky. It’s not exactly clear when all of these exchanges were meant to have happened (if they did). In fact, it’s not immediately clear how old Jurado is himself – different reports suggest he is somewhere between 28 and 30 years old.
For those unfamiliar with him – as I was myself – it is equally unclear what his credentials are as a professional public explainer and defender of Catholic teaching, though he claims to have spent some brief period in a seminary, at some point, somewhere.
Other Catholic media sites have been quick to scrub guest appearances by Jurado in response to the accusations, and to distance themselves from the young man. It remains to be seen if and how his situation will resolve itself, but thus far the narrative arc is – like so many things in the online world – unique in the particulars but familiar in its outline.
In the great before time, before social media and YouTube, before podcasts and livestreams, Catholic evangelists and apologists existed in the same kinds of gate-kept ecospheres as many other areas professional expertise: to get in front of a large audience, generally speaking some institution had to credential you and put you there.
For Catholics, highly developed systems of doctrine, dogma and canon law favoured the ordained clergy, where most of the institutional knowledge, training and endorsement tends to be focused. And Catholics, unlike their Protestant brethren, retained an innate suspicion of anyone who showed up on the scene without an official hierarchical endorsement.
As American TV airwaves filled with self-made televangelists in the late 20th century, flashing their Rolexes and private jets and preaching a highly lucrative vision of salvation-as-pyramid-scheme, Catholics tended to shake their heads in amusement – all the more so when these self-ordained profits of prosperity would end up flaming out in scandals of one sort or another.
All that, though, has changed in an era of instant online celebrity and riches, where “influencing” is a big business with almost no barrier to entry. And in an age of institutional disaffiliation and suspicion, self-proclaimed experts of every variety have shot to celebrity status, opining online about everything from politics to medical science to the practice of journalism.
Among Catholics, a new micro industry of social media celebrity evangelist-apologist-commentators has flourished, fueled by skepticism of the Church hierarchy in the wake of clerical abuse scandals on one side, and the ever advancing tide of progressive sexual, social and political mores on the other.
Opportunities for money and sex and never far behind. A trailblazer of the online outsider Catholic persona was Michael Voris, founder of the combative Church Militant website, who pitted himself as a prophetic voice of truth and integrity against a supposedly compromised Church hierarchy and wicked secular world, before the whole project collapsed under the weight of debts, lawsuits and accusations of sexual misconduct.
One of the more established and credible websites to distance themselves from Jurado last week, Catholic Answers, has already had to watch Patrick Coffin, previously one of its more well-known in-house personalities, depart and slide into an obsession with anti-popes and chemtrails.
For the Church hierarchy, the phenomenon of celebrity social media Catholicism is a vexing problem. Indeed, the Church might reasonably conclude it has enough problems online with its official ministers.
The former Bishop of Tyler, Texas, Joseph Strickland was fired by the Vatican in 2023 in no small part because of his social media posts, which increasingly catered to the bishop’s committed personal following while taking aim at the pope personally.
The Vatican’s former ambassador to Washington, D.C., Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, a quiet career Church civil servant who retired in 2016, went viral at the height of the sex abuse scandals of 2018 when he publicly accused Pope Francis of covering up for the later defrocked Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and demanding that the pope step down.
From there, the archbishop became a fixture in the MAGA firmament, addressing “Stop the Steal” rallies after the 2020 election and hailing Donald Trump as a divinely-sent defender of Christian civilization, before deciding the Donald was soft on LGBT issues and switching his endorsement to Vladimir Putin and finally being excommunicated by the Vatican last year.
Minnesota’s Bishop Robert Barron, whose Word on Fire media company racks up considerable digital engagement across platforms, pitches himself as a patient pastor and friendly teacher, wide open to dialogue with all comers. Yet he’s also routinely savaged as being “Trumpy” for holding the Church’s teaching on, for example, trans issues, or for failing to make immigration a front line priority.
Social media, perhaps sadly, isn’t going anywhere. While it has become an unignorable reality, almost no one holds it out as a good thing getting better – in fact, the received wisdom is the opposite.
But, as long as there are souls to be saved and money to be made, Catholics of all ranks and kinds will be there, bringing a fair share of scandal along with the gospel.
Tag: Internet
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The perils of Catholic social media evangelism
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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.
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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.
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America’s ‘fringe’ has taken over the country
Another day, another public execution. The talking heads on television and Twitter tell us not to worry too much: America is still strong. They repeat this sentiment after every waking nightmare. These horrific events are not the norm, they say. They’re just the actions of a few people on the “fringe.”
But what is the American “fringe”?
The “fringe” tried to incinerate the country in 2020. The “fringe” tore down statues of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. The “fringe” control the universities and has spent years indoctrinating kids with discriminatory dogmas. The “fringe” created the policies that let violent, mentally ill men prowl the streets and kill refugees. The “fringe” killed a healthcare CEO at sunrise in December. The “fringe” tried to kill Donald Trump last summer. The “fringe” killed Charlie Kirk on Wednesday.
The “fringe” celebrated everything that was destroyed and every life that was taken.
The “fringe” is a bunch of very normal people I went to high school and college with, who have spent the last three days cavorting and reveling over the death of a man they never met and whose actual beliefs they likely cannot articulate, let alone rebut. These are not incels or idiots; they’re ostensibly educated people with jobs and families and degrees. And yet they’re possessed by an ideology that apparently prohibits them from accepting the sanctity of every human life.
The “fringe” is not on the fringes. It’s everywhere. It’s taking over the country.
And yet for years, well-intentioned voices have told us that the madness we see online is somehow unreal – that the internet is not real life. It may be true that the internet cannot replace real life, but it can certainly destroy very real, meaningful parts of life.
And it’s succeeding, especially in its pursuits to rot the brains of young people. To say that the radicalization we’re seeing is a “fringe” issue is to simply admit you have no idea the scale of the problem; it reveals you do not know what’s happening to young people online.
If you’re a Boomer, or a “not very online” person, you won’t understand the extent of the problem. That’s not a criticism. It means you’re probably doing something right – you’ve not witnessed the effects of online addiction. You’re not seeing the kinds of vile images and videos and calls to arms that create the world’s Luigi Mangiones and their disciples. But just because you’re not seeing radical, politically insane, very subversive, and dangerously attractive content online all day doesn’t mean others aren’t.
More and more of my friends are becoming openly Bolshevist or sympathetic to nihilistic authoritarianism, every month. This isn’t because they’re reading Lenin or Marx or Marcuse. No, they don’t read at all. No one does. Their minds have been captured by algorithms that exist solely to weld their eyes to their screens. Those algorithms feed them craziness to intrigue the scroller, and, with enough time, that craziness starts to feel normal to the addict, who then goes seeking crazier content, which the algorithm gladly supplies. This cycle replays millions of times across the country, every day. And then, before you know it, you have millions of people rejoicing over the death of a civilian who’d broken no laws.
Refusing to acknowledge that these screechers are destroying the nation’s harmony is a refusal of duty. The very insistence that these people are fringe has allowed this scourge to grow to the size it has now, where it can take lives and endanger the democratic process.
It’s also made social media a more miserable place (which it was always destined to be). That has in turn made social life in America more miserable. Anyone still insisting that these forces are marginal is naïve or complacent, or speaking with their hands over their eyes. Perhaps they’re afraid of what they’d see if they peeked through their fingers.
Because the “fringe” has already infiltrated real life, real America. They were educated in our schools, and they now teach our children. They tyrannize the public square. They swing clubs when they cannot win debates. They disrespect our gods. They ransack our churches, and, like the barbarians of old, they do not speak our language. They speak only the language of violence and convulsion. And they are not “fringe.”
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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.
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Essex-boy Elegy: J.D. Vance meets the Bosh man
Vice President Vance is currently receiving visitors at an 18th-century Georgian manor in the Cotswolds, an implausibly quaint patch of the English countryside. Petitioners so far have included James Orr, the Cambridge academic and right-wing activist, Robert Jenrick, likely the next leader of Britain’s Tories, and Nigel Farage, likely the next UK Prime Minister.
Also on the list was one Thomas Skinner, a gregarious wide boy from East London turned e-celebrity turned patriotic influencer. After a stint as a pillow and mattress merchant Skinner, 34, found fame as a contestant on the 15th series of the British version of The Apprentice. In 2022 he began posting videos on social media of himself gobbling down steaming platters of traditional English fare – pie, mash, bacon, beans, sausage, chips (fries), fried eggs, fried bread, black pudding – while extolling the virtues of family and hard work. Each homily would end with Skinner’s trademark catchphrase: “BOSH.”
Skinner’s politics began to emerge. “I love Trump, I think he is brilliant, that’s my opinion. I think it’s good he is back in charge, it will be good for the UK economy,” he said in late 2024. Mayor Sadiq Khan had “ruined” London and militant eco-protesters were “ruining people’s lives.” Orr, who has emerged as a leading theorist of a newly-galvanized British right, took notice. Had they finally found their own Trump – or at the very least their own Archie Bunker? In June Skinner delivered a speech at Now and England, a conference organized by Orr, where he spoke of “kids being taught to be ashamed of their own flag.” The Vice President watched.
Now the two netizens meet at last. Vance, a longtime online admirer, invited Skinner over for beers and a barbecue. Skinner relayed his experience with his usual brio:
When the Vice President of the USA invites ya for a BBQ a beers, you say yes. Unreal night with JD and his friends n family. He was a proper gent. Lots of laughs and some fantastic food. A brilliant night, one to tell the grand kids about mate. Bosh❤️
Here is a pic of Me and Vice President @JDVance towards the end of the night after a few beers 🍻 I’m overdressed in my suit, but when the VP invites you to a BBQ, you don’t risk turning up in shorts an flip-flops 😂 Cracking night in the beautiful English countryside with JD, his friends and family. Once in a lifetime. Bosh ❤️🇬🇧🇺🇸
The encounter is another sign of the chaotic merger that’s being carried out between politics and the online world. Is Skinner a meme, or a politician? It’s increasingly difficult to disentangle the two.
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The UK censorship files: Jim Jordan’s crusade against Britain
The British Empire may be gone, but there is one area where the UK has not lost its global ambitions: online censorship. The latest vehicle is the Online Safety Act (OSA), a behemoth internet regulation law whose vast provisions are steadily coming into force – and increasingly drawing the ire of the Trump administration as it starts to impact US tech firms.
Under the OSA, “Britain has the power to shut down any platform” that breaks its content regulation rules, boasts secretary of state for technology Peter Kyle. The latest stage of its implementation began last week with new mandatory age-verification measures for social media platforms.
The Act is already curtailing what can be read online in the UK. Though the OSA was passed back in 2023 by the Conservatives, the Labour government has taken it up the internet “regulation” crusade with gusto. The rhetorical strategy is to claim that the law is unobjectionable since it is merely about restricting minors’ access to pornography and other “harmful” content – “think of the children”. But it all comes across as rather hysterical. In an extraordinary intervention this week, when the populist Reform Party’s Nigel Farage pledged to repeal the law, Kyle labelled him – and anyone else that’s opposed to it – as being on the side of child predators like Jimmy Savile.
In reality, there are many valid criticisms to be made of this wildly overbearing law. Small online forums dedicated niche interests, for instance, including fixed-gear cycling and hamsters, have been forced to close due to heavy compliance costs. Many tech companies likewise view it as suffocating. Another major sticking pointis its stringent regulations on AI – a vital emerging field in which the UK risks being left in the dust.
Most egregious, though, is the OSA’s impact on free speech. Since the new rules came into force, platforms have been forced to censor political speech that paints the British government in a bad light. This includes footage of recent anti-asylum protests, and even speeches in Parliament and court transcripts about the rape gangs scandal. This latter is particularly galling: this was horrific abuse that the British state abjectly failed to protect these children from – and now speech about it is being censored in the name of child safeguarding.
The bigger problem, for Kyle and the British government, is how the OSA and their censorship cheerleading will play out in the eyes of America. The Trump administration is already unhappy with the state of free expression in Britain.
A good example of the culture clash came this week, with Jim Jordan, a Trump ally, free-speech advocate and chair of the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee. Jordan will meet Peter Kyle himself, where he is expected raise concerns about free speech. As part of his UK visit, Jordan has viewed documents produced by the Committee that seem to show that the UK government attempted to censor online content during the riots that swept the country last summer. Posting them on X as ‘THE UK CENSORSHIP FILES’, he has accused the British government, including Kyle and Keir Starmer, of “trying to censor criticism of itself,” and clamping down on “narratives” wounding to the British state – like claims of “two-tier justice”. Here’s hoping that Peter Kyle will refrain from alleging that Jordan is “on the side of predators” for his free-speech advocacy.
While freedom-loving Brits are grateful that their American cousins are helping to safeguard free speech, there is also the question of how the OSA will impact Americans’ own jealously-guarded First Amendment rights. If Washington, DC, looks askance at censorship laws the UK, it’s even less pleased about the British state’s attempts to expand the scope of that regulation across the Atlantic to US websites and tech firms. Back in May, the State Department fired a warning shot, mooting visa bans for foreign officials found to have censored “protected expression in the United States”. US free-speech concerns are also expected to feature in any forthcoming trade deal. Both Trump, in his recent visit, and JD Vance, in the Oval Office back in February, have publicly needled Keir Starmer over the issue.
The key question is whether America is happy to allow a few hundred Whitehall bureaucrats to bring its tech titans to heel. With the US celebrating 250 years of independence next year, there are many free-speech warriors stateside who would sooner tell Ofcom, Britain’s broadcast regulator, where to get off.
Prominent among the minutemen is Preston Byrne, an Anglo-American lawyer and free speech activist who also works with the Adam Smith Institute, a British free-market think tank. Byrne has already tangled with Ofcom over the OSA, following enforcement letters it sent to US websites including Gab and Kiwi Farms earlier this year. These sites, however, were comparatively small fry. Ofcom has now sent similar letters to Reddit and Rumble, and in response, Byrne is set to bring a case against Ofcom in the US federal courts.
For a notice to be served by a foreign power against a US company, typically it would have to go through the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT) to be valid. But that doesn’t seem to be the case for these notices: indeed, if Ofcom had gone through the MLAT, Byrne believes that the State Department and the Department of Justice would not be minded to abide by them. So the letters, for all they threaten these companies with fines or worse, are in fact legally dubious. “Ofcom,” Byrne tells me, “is the international equivalent of a stalker-y ex – they’ve been told to stop, it’s unlawful for them to continue, and now we need the courts to intervene.”
Just how much more will this battle heat up? What’s clear is that British officialdom’s zeal for online regulation is setting it on a collision course with a resurgent and energetic US free-speech lobby. Yet with trade talks looming, such escalation would surely be a grave mistake. Britain does not rule the world anymore. If London wakes up the “screaming Eagle”, Byrne says, “they’re not gonna like the results”.