In the wake of mass shootings such as those in Gilroy, El Paso, and Dayton, I am often asked, “Are shootings part of Fourth Generation war?” When the shooter’s motivation is racial, religious, or ideological, the clear answer is yes. The shooter has transferred his primary loyalty away from the state to something else, and he wants to fight for whatever his new primary loyalty is. But what about cases where the shooter’s motive is unclear or he is simply insane?
These mass shootings too are objectively part of 4GW, in that they undermine the legitimacy of the state. The state arose to bring order, safety of persons and property, and when a state cannot provide order it no longer fulfills its function. At that point it becomes just a big money grab and people start looking around for something else worthy of their loyalty. Fourth Generation war is above all else a contest for legitimacy, and mass shootings strike directly and powerfully at the legitimacy of any state that cannot prevent them. Rapid “first response” is not enough; public safety demands prevention.
I think there is another way in which many mass shootings whose motive is unclear are an element of Fourth Generation war. They are responding to the war on men.
In a front-page article, the August 11 New York Times wrote,
The fact that mass shootings are almost exclusively perpetrated by men is “missing from the national conversation,” Gov. Gavin Newsom of California said on Monday. “Why does it have to be, why is it men, dominantly, always?”
As a Democrat, Governor Newson does not dare answer his own question because doing so recognizes that men and women are different. This difference is fundamental to the nature of both. When women get angry, they talk. When men get angry, they kill.
What is making more and more men, especially young men, very angry indeed is the ongoing war on men, especially white, heterosexual men. Cultural Marxism, the dominant ideology among American’s elites, condemns white, straight men as inherently evil. They are to be criticized, mocked, derided, and assailed in every possible way, all the time (this is known as “critical theory”–the theory is to criticize). The only response they are supposed to make is to grovel and apologize to their moral superiors, i.e., blacks, women, and gays.
More, feminism, which has been almost entirely subsumed by cultural Marxism, demands women be allowed–indeed, forced–into every institution that used to be all-male. The military, fire departments, police departments, construction work, all-male clubs, schools, and colleges must all now admit women, sometimes with a quota system that requires large numbers of them. Men must work cheek-by-jowl with women. But God help the man who does what men naturally do and makes an advance to one of them. He risks being accused (often falsely) of “sexual harassment” and his job and career are on the line. In effect, men must become eunuchs.
This puts men, especially young men with raging hormones, in an impossible position. They cannot escape women, they cannot object to the presence of women, they must take orders from women, and above all they must fear women, because if a woman yells “Sexual harassment!”, the man is considered guilty until proven innocent. And the feminists decree the woman must always be believed.
So men’s anger is rising, especially among young men. More and more of them are growing angry enough to at least think about killing. Some will act on their anger, which means so long as the war on men continues, the number of mass shootings will grow. And the state’s legitimacy will continue to crumble. Welcome to Fourth Generation war.
In my previous column, I laid out a way to speed up the response to mass shooters to keep the casualties down. But the only way to prevent such shootings is to end the war on men. If you want to keep men from hitting women, you have to separate them. Every past generation knew this. It is likely to be an expensive lesson to re-learn.