The bougie nihilism that is killing America

People are bemused that the man who allegedly rushed the White House Correspondents’ Dinner with all guns blazing was a teacher. Why? It should be common knowledge by now that a not insignificant number of American teachers go weak-kneed for a spot of political violence. In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination in September last year, teachers all over America were sacked or placed on leave for dancing on his grave before it had even been dug.

Public educators ‘across the US’ cheered the slaying of the Turning Point USA activist and father of two. In no fewer than 12 states, teachers were given the heave-ho for ‘implying approval of Kirk’s death’. One said his death was ‘karma’ for his ugly views. A teacher in Iowa posted ‘1 Nazi down’ on his Facebook page. In Texas, dozens of teachers were given a dressing down for celebrating the slaying of this man for his beliefs.

After the first major assassination attempt on President Trump – in Pennsylvania in July 2024 – educators swarmed social media to vent some variant of ‘Better luck next time’. University professors and schoolteachers were reprimanded over their public praying for the death of the president. As recently as January this year, two teachers in Pittsburgh were let go for cheering on the Islamic Republic after it threatened to bump off Trump. ‘Why are so many educators prone to violent rhetoric?’, wondered one newspaper.

It’s a good question, and one that’s been turbo-charged by the events of Saturday night. The suspect is one Cole Allen. He’s alleged to have opened fire at the annual get-together of the president and the press. No one was injured, though that small mercy should not detract from the fact that this was the third attempt on the life of the president. And Allen’s a teacher. A ‘teacher of the month’, in fact. He was given that accolade in December 2024 by C2 Education, the tutoring outfit he worked for. You just know there are teachers across America sitting on their hands to stop themselves from posting: ‘He’s teacher of the decade now!’

This is not to diss all teachers. America has many fine educators who are as repulsed by the Stalinist urge to violently silence one’s opponents as you and I are. Yet it would be a grave moral folly to deny there’s a problem. There seems to be a terrifyingly high tolerance for political violence in polite society. Among educators, influencers and moneyed poseurs in their mandatory keffiyehs, the dream of violence against ‘the other side’ comes naturally now. We seem to be witnessing the normalisation of savagery among the most learned and lettered in our society. The most shocking thing about Saturday’s alleged shooter being a teacher is that it isn’t shocking.

Many are explaining this unprecedented third stab at killing Trump as the bloody by-product of Trump Derangement Syndrome. That’s definitely part of it. The Babylon Bee captured it well with its headline about Democrats responding to the shooting with their ‘customary five-minute pause on calling Trump “Hitler”’. The coastal elites’ feverish treatment of Trump as a fascistic menace to the American republic – and world peace – undoubtedly fans the rage of the cranky.

We can see this in Allen’s alleged manifesto, which has been published by the New York Post. He froths about Trump being a ‘paedophile, rapist and traitor’, suggesting he’s been stewing, like so many others, in the digital shit-bath of Epstein mania. The media’s ceaseless painting of Trump as the great outlier of American morality has helped to hang a target sign around his neck. Paedo, fascist, destroyer of all that is decent – if you say this about a man morning, noon and night, you forfeit the right to be shocked when someone takes a shot at him.

But there is a broader backdrop to the malady of TDS: the inculcation of hyper-intolerance into a whole new generation. One of the most sobering polls of recent years was produced by the American Political Perspectives Survey last year. It found that Americans with a graduate degree are twice as likely to support political violence as Americans who finished their education at high school. Thirty-six per cent of grads said damaging property is justified as part of a protest, compared with just 18 per cent of Americans with a high-school diploma. Forty per cent of grads said ‘violence is often necessary’ to effect social change – only 23 per cent of non-grads agreed.

We now have an extraordinary situation where the university campus, once the great refiner of minds, seems to be indoctrinating the young with a fancy for violence. It seems that if you teach people that their self-esteem is the most sacred thing on Earth, and anyone who dents it deserves instant cancellation, then you will give rise to an army of the intolerant. That’s what we are witnessing, in the UK too: a style of politics that feels haughty, dogmatic and tinged with violence. From the trans lobby (‘Kill all TERFs’) to the orgy of Israelophobia that followed 7 October (‘Globalise the intifada’), silence through violence is the dream of those who LARP as progressive. A society where the educated openly clamour for the death of women and Jews is a society that is ill indeed. This is the jagged debris of cancel culture.

Ours is the age of bougie nihilism. That was brought home to me by Zohran Mamdani’s tweet about Saturday’s shooting. ‘Political violence is absolutely unacceptable’, said the New York City mayor. This is a man whose wife liked social-media posts that celebrated the most catastrophic act of political violence of this century so far: 7 October. This is a man who rubs shoulders with Hasan Piker, the leftie influencer who just last week was titillating the silver-spoon socialists of the keffiyeh classes by celebrating bank robberies and making excuses for Luigi Mangione’s murder of healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Bougie nihilism has broken free of the quad and now infects even City Hall. Where next?

We await further information about Mr Allen and his alleged shooting. But one thing we can say with certainty is that the culture of fragility begets intolerance, and intolerance begets violence. It seems insane now that we thought we could teach the young that everyone who fails to bow to their ideology is ‘the enemy’, and that everything would be just fine. It won’t be, not until we rebuild a society that values the democratic wishes of the majority more than it does the depthless self-pity and child-like vengeance of overeducated fools.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.