In the wake of the Santa Barbara shooting, plenty of hashtag activists took to social media to use the tragedy as a way of pushing their own agenda. Guns are bad! Men are misogynists! Conservatives want babies to carry guns! If Glenn wanted to play the agenda game, he could easily point out the progressive themes in the shooter's absolutely crazy manifesto.
Don't believe it? Let's play!
Round 1: Reproductive Rights
Shooter: "If women continue to have rights, they will only hinder the advancement of the human race by breeding with degenerate men and creating stupid, degenerate offspring" - Elliot Rodger
Progressive: "The mass of ignorant Negroes still breed carelessly and disastrously, so that the increase among Negroes, even more than the increase among whites, is from that portion of the population least intelligent and fit, and least able to rear their children properly." - Margaret Sanger
Round 2: Contributions to society
Shooter: "All women must be quarantined like the plague they are, so that they can be used in a manner that actually benefits a civilized society." - Elliot Rodger
Progressive: "If you can't justify your existence, if you're not pulling your weight in the social boat, if you're not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little more, then, clearly, we cannot use the organizations of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us and it can't be of very much use to yourself." - George Bernard Shaw
Round 3: What to do with all those people you don't deem worthy?
Shooter: "I would have an enormous tower built just for myself, where I can oversee the entire concentration camp and gleefully watch them all die" - Elliot Rodger
Progressive: "A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people’s time to look after them." - George Bernard Shaw
Bonus Quote: More on reproductive rights (because both the shooter and progressives obsess about sex)
Shooter: "Women should not have the right to choose who to mate and breed with. That decision should be made for them by rational men of intelligence." - Elliot Rodger
Progressive: "Every feeble-minded girl or woman of the hereditary type, especially of the moron class, should be segregated during the reproductive period. Otherwise, she is almost certain to bear imbecile children, who in turn are just as certain to breed other defectives."- Margaret Sanger
Game over.
See how it easy for Glenn to tie the shooter's craziness to the progressive movement? #AgendaGame
Now, what are people ignoring?
The sense of disconnect from society the shooter felt after becoming obsessed with video games? Rodger wrote:
The upside of moving to the apartment was that my mother acquired high speed internet. I was able to play World of Warcraft on her computer, along with Halo 2 on Xbox Live. This was the point when my social life ended completely. I would never have a satisfying social life ever again. It was the beginning of a very lonely period of my life, in which my only social interactions would be online through video games, with the sole exception being my friendship with James. The ability to play video games with people online temporarily filled in the social void. I got caught up in it, and I was too young and naïve to realize the severity of how far I had fallen. I was too scared to accept it. This loss of a social life, coupled with the advent of puberty, caused me to die a little inside. It was too much for me to handle, and I stopped caring about my life and my future. I even stopped caring about what people thought of me. I hid myself away in the online World of Warcraft, a place where I felt comfortable and secure.
Do you think video games might have something more to do with what happened than gun laws or knives? Would this have happened if he had a stronger social attachment to a real community, not a virtual one?
At a time where parents are attached to their phones and kids to their consoles - maybe it's time to have an honest conversation about how we are handling the real world, rather than retreating to the virtual one.
A big theme on Glenn's show this year is going to be "Create". Let's start with creating stronger relationships with our neighbors and our families, so our kids can have role models that connect with reality.