it's been one year.
On September 10, 2025, a 16-year old student at Evergreen High School, Desmond Holly, decided to change their classmates' lives forever. Another in a long history of youth who have been exposed to, indoctrinated by, and succumbed to extremist neo-Nazi propaganda that is pervasive in every facet of online life for youth.
You thought this post was going to be about Charlie Kirk. And in a way, it is. The rhetoric of the alt-right resonates through the halls that kids spend most of their time in. Not school - the deafening echo chambers of Twitch streams, podcasts, and gaming lobbies. Where many white male youth, whose fragile brains and egos are molded and shaped by the white supremacist political ideology that their world has been robbed of. And in that, they must take back their power.
It's interesting messaging, because if you were to dissect the ethos of it - like luck, power is neutral. It is those who hold power who decide where the morality lies and thus dictate the rules on how to retain it.
If you were to flip the script and ask any leftist activist or communist, they would tell you themselves that their fight is against power, yet what they desperately aim for in collective liberation is to shift the power balance away from the right. Power then is mostly about perspective. But this isn't an essay about that.
While the only death that occurred was that of the shooter himself, the trauma reverberates through their community, and while it is tragic that violence occurred, what continues to fail to be addressed is how distinct and typical white violence is against the collective at large, and against its own communities in a cannibalistic way. A violence that starts at home, in the heart and in the mind and ripples its way outwards like a cancer consuming everything in sight. It is the only way that this flavor of political ideology can stand on its own two legs. To be the toughest, roughest, manliest guys who can win a bar fight, or shoot up schools, or beat their wives and daughters. Or a president who sics ICE agents on a community, groups acting with impunity. A MAGA Sharia Law that has taken all of our communities by chokehold.
And every time, analysts, pundits, and the average Joe do the same thing. Call it a lone wolf. A troubled kid. A mental health crisis, a video game problem, a bad influence he fell into. We build him a whole individual biography so that what he did can stay his, alone, instead of ours, collectively. We've done this for decades, centuries. Because if it's just one, we don't have to look at the pipeline that built him - the algorithm that fed him, the forums that welcomed him when nothing else did, the men online who told him his emptiness was someone else's fault and handed him someone to blame.
This isn't a series of isolated incidents. It's a machine, built to oppress and running exactly as designed, producing the same outcome because we keep treating each one like a surprise. Desmond Holly is not an aberration in an otherwise healthy culture. He's a data point in a pattern we've decided not to name, because naming it means admitting it's structural - which means admitting it's up to white people to dismantle, not just his to be blamed for.
White people don't get to keep being shocked. Shock is what lets them go back to normal. What communities are owed, the ones absorbing this violence again and again, isn't another round of thoughts and prayers dressed up as analysis. It's the harder work of tracing the pipeline all the way back and refusing to let it disappear into one kid's story.