Mass shootings and the spirit of division

Flowers and other gifts are placed near Annunciation Catholic Church after Wednesday’s school shooting, in Minneapolis, Minn., on Thursday, August 28, 2025. In the first Mass since an assailant attacked Annunciation Catholic Church, parishioners gathered to grieve and support one another. (Jenn Ackerman/The New York Times) .

By ROSS DOUTHAT

In recent years, certain supporters of transgender rights have developed a public language of militancy and conflict, in which familiar habits of left-wing activism — attempts to shut down controversial speech, claims that contrary opinions are fascist or genocidal — are supplemented by an armed-and-dangerous iconography that’s usually associated with the American right.

In the wake of the murders of Catholic schoolchildren in Minnesota, the second attack in three years carried out by a transgender shooter against children at a Christian school, it would be relatively easy to write a column holding such militancy responsible for the carnage. All I would have to do is adapt the scripts so often used to blame conservatives for violence, from the JFK assassination (which the scribes of Camelot quickly attributed to the angry rhetoric of Dallas right-wingers) down through the Tea Party and the Trump eras.

If I were making that argument, I would insist that words have consequences: If you tell people that they’re facing “trans genocide,” and that religious conservatives especially are agents of their fascist subjugation, why wouldn’t you expect some troubled souls to opt for vigilante action?

Likewise, if I were laying blame this way, I would insist that violent images inspire violent action: If you sport a shirt with the slogan “Protect Trans Kids” underneath a hunting knife (as the lieutenant governor of Minnesota did in 2023), or if you put a transgender writer toting an AR-15 on your magazine cover (as an alternative weekly in the Pacific Northwest did just two months ago) with a headline asking “Are You Triggered?” you bear some responsibility when the trigger actually gets pulled. Especially when the Minneapolis killer’s own manifesto reportedly trafficked in the same imagery, featuring a “Defend Equality” sticker overlaid with an image of a machine gun.

But I’m not making that case, because it would betray a consistent theme of this column, going all the way back to the attempted assassination of Rep. Gabby Giffords of Arizona in 2011: namely, that all attempts to blame extreme political rhetoric for mass shootings should be treated extremely skeptically, because the phenomenon of lone-wolf violence in America rarely attaches easily to either left-wing or right-wing ideology.

In the latest case, for instance, the Minnesota killer’s video and writings seem to gesture Joker-like at all kinds of political motivations — antisemitic, racist, anti-Trump, with the “Defend Equality” sticker just one item in the pantomime rather than a proof of an ideological crusade.

More broadly, while the tendency to extreme and apocalyptic rhetoric is a consistent feature of American politics (even a democratic birthright), most of the killers shooting up schools and churches or targeting politicians for assassinations are not really participants in this polarization. They aren’t taking wokeness or populism too literally or too far; they’re following other directives and acting on other purposes entirely.

Some of these purposes are simply impenetrable, the dream logic of the mentally ill. Others are a mixture of megalomania and mimesis, where the goal is to achieve the dark celebrity of prior mass shooters.

When the motivations do connect to politics, they aren’t usually radicalized extensions of progressive or populist loyalties, case studies in the terrifying power of extreme wokeness or militant Trumpism. Rather, many shooters seem to find these loyalties too weak to sustain a meaningful conception of the self or the world, too flabby to compete with more bizarre or bespoke identities, too impotent to survive the dissolving force of digital existence. They aren’t being radicalized by an ideological program; they’re passing through into terra incognito.

This also means that even when there seems to be some political purpose to an act of violence, as with Luigi Mangione’s alleged assassination of a health care executive, it increasingly comes stirred together with a bizarre farrago of political signifiers and gestures. Which, conveniently enough, gives everyone watching something to latch onto, some apparent motivation to single out, some ideological enemy to blame.

And accelerating that cycle of blame feels like one of the deeper impulses behind these kinds of atrocities. It’s made explicit by the idea of “accelerationism” that some shooters have been drawn to (whether the Minnesota shooter was one such remains unclear), which envisions spasms of violence as a means to heighten the cultural contradictions, hasten a civilizational collapse, bring down liberalism and Christianity together and usher in some new dispensation of satanic Nazi magic.

But even when there isn’t a self-conscious link to an apocalyptic vision, the spirit of division is still there, the diabolical aspect is palpable.

“Diabolos” in Greek means accuser, and in that sense the dark spirit that inspires these crimes suffers a defeat when we react with unity and solidarity rather than immediate recriminations.

Whereas it gains a victory every time we respond by immediately blaming our political rivals, and trying to prove over the bodies of the dead that, yes, our ideological opponents are even more evil than we thought.