It’s Not Ideology, It’s the Internet — What the Media and Trump Don’t Understand About the Current Wave of Shootings

Sometimes I sit here and wonder: Is anyone really listening anymore? Or are we all just reacting to noise? Every time another young person picks up a gun and commits an act of violence—whether it’s a mass shooting, a racially charged attack, or some warped version of political war—the headlines start firing in every direction. Media outlets scramble for motive. Politicians jump to blame their favorite enemy: the right blames the left, the left blames the right, and Trump? Well, he usually blames “wokeness,” immigrants, or mental illness—whichever gets the biggest applause in the room.

But here’s the hard truth nobody wants to talk about: It’s not just ideology that’s pushing these people over the edge. It’s the internet. And if we don’t start reckoning with that, we’re going to keep burying our children and neighbors with no real change in sight.

The Digital Rabbit Hole Is Real

I’m a veteran. I served this country and believed in its values — even when those values didn’t always believe in me. I know what radicalization looks like. I’ve seen how young men get pulled into extremist ideas. But what we’re dealing with now? This is something new.

Back then, it took effort to get radicalized. You had to dig, meet people, sit through conversations or maybe attend certain meetings. It took a kind of commitment. Today, it takes Wi-Fi.

We have young men in suburban bedrooms scrolling through meme pages that glorify guns, hate, and fascism—mixing humor with horror until nobody knows where the line is. They obsess over forum posts full of coded language. They treat real-world violence like an anime power-fantasy—something to aspire to, not fear.

You won’t always find a traditional ideology in those twisted manifestos. What you’ll find is disillusionment, narcissism, online validation, and the parroting of things they half-understood from TikTok, YouTube, or some alt-forum deep on the web. They don’t care about policy. They want to go viral.

“To Be Seen” Is the Real Motivation

We keep searching for motive like it’s going to make sense. But in many of these cases, the motive is attention. These shooters don’t want to bring about the revolution or fix America’s problems. They want *likes*. Infamy. A name trending on Reddit, whispered in the darkest corners of the internet.

And let me be even more straightforward: This is not just some lone wolf story we can wrap up with a neat psychological profile. These kids are part of an *ecosystem*. A poisoned digital village where violence is a punchline and killing is a path to digital martyrdom. That’s not conservative or liberal. That’s sick—and systemic.

The Media Keeps Getting Played

Every time one of these incidents happens, the media zooms in on the outdated details. “Was he left or right?” “Did he mention Trump?” “Did he hate immigrants?” And while that analysis is happening, every shooter-wannabe sitting in their basement takes notes on what gets airtime.

They’re watching us. They’re studying headlines. And yes—Trump and other media figures stoke plenty of this with their reckless words, but they’re not the puppet masters. The internet is. And right now, it’s overflowing with unmoderated, glorified chaos that breeds copycats faster than the truth can catch up.

Even the way we report on these tragedies tends to amplify the violence instead of examining its roots. Did we need the shooter’s livestream? Did we need their full manifesto posted or described line-by-line? Naming them repeatedly? That’s exactly the kind of attention they crave.

We’ve Built a Culture Where Killing Becomes Performance

There’s something sick in our soul when young people obsess over K/D ratios in video games, then pivot to real-world attack planning. No, video games don’t *cause* violence—but when you combine disempowered youth with online isolation, extremist memes, and a culture obsessed with notoriety? You get this nasty cocktail where performance and violence merge.

We’ve blurred lines between digital and reality so badly that some of these young men don’t even *feel* real unless a camera is rolling. We taught them to chase followers, likes, “based” comments. Now they aim to turn their death toll into a scoreboard that outlives them on some message board.

What Needs to Change — Starting With Accountability

We need to stop blaming politics alone and start holding tech platforms accountable. If a foreign nation was training young Americans to become mass murderers through an online system, we’d call it terrorism. But when it’s coming from within—through forums, algorithm rabbit holes,