Parents, We Have to Talk About the Internet

Where radicalization starts

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As details have emerged about Tyler Robinson, the man who shot Charlie Kirk, very little of it should be shocking to anyone who has a sense of today’s internet culture.

These things don’t just “happen.” People don’t go from normal, well-adjusted kids from strong, two-parent households to being violent LGBT participants on their own. Evil, twisted people are influenced far more easily in dark corners of the internet, like chat servers on Discord, than they ever would be in real life relationships.

Looking at what we know about Robinson provides the perfect cautionary tale

Immediately after Kirk was shot, many people suspected the shooter would be a transgender person, following in the footsteps of multiple shooters in recent years. They were only slightly off, as it’s been revealed the shooter was romantically involved with his male (pretending to be female) roommate.

When the bullet inscriptions were read out by law enforcement, and then again when the trans boyfriend was revealed, I guessed that Robinson probably had a raging pornography addiction.

A post from his mother’s Facebook surfaced in which a 10-year-old Tyler Robinson had been given his own laptop and headphones with which he can “totally avoid us,” according to his mom. This only heightened my suspicion, as countless boys have fallen down the same rabbit hole.

Now, reports say he was an avid participant in an online “furry” porn video game. This is not early addiction kind of material. This is the kind of thing people go to after years of devolving desires. Way too many times, a simple porn addiction is where it all starts.

Numerous other LGBT-connected people seemed to have prior knowledge the shooting would take place, as prior tweets show. Robinson then reportedly posted a confession to a Discord chat with over 20 people. These degenerate corners of the internet are absolutely destroying lives and endangering others.

Still, I believe most parents have no idea how much deep darkness is only a click or two away from coming onto their kids’ radar.

For a long time, messages cautioning against pornography addiction often cited Ted Bundy, who said his path to becoming a serial killer began with his porn addiction. I’ve never believed that was a good tactic, as tens of millions of men have the addiction without ever murdering someone. That’s not what I mean to imply here, that a pornography addiction will turn every young man into the next Tyler Robinson.

However, the path to degeneracy looks different for everyone. Some might think it’s a stretch to draw a line from a kid’s pornography addiction to his willingness to murder for left-wing causes, or that I’m wildly speculating at the connection between all of these data points. I’m afraid those folks are woefully unaware of how this works.

Your kid gets really into a YouTuber, a TikToker, a Twitch streamer, or a video game community. Nothing wrong with that, at least not inherently. They then find Discord chats or Reddit threads centered around their favorite influencers and interests. Meanwhile, they often find porn elsewhere, because statistically almost every teen does.

From there it’s easy to end up in the spin-off, next-level Discord chat as they encounter new friends who nudge them toward more extreme views. Their entire online life pushes them further and further away from who they are offline. I’m not asserting that this is exactly how it happened with Robinson, as we don’t have all the details yet. But what we know so far hints that it very likely is a close estimate.

Degeneracy begets degeneracy. The need for darker, more twisted content grows—that’s just textbook Romans 1. A straightforward pornography addiction is bad enough for anyone’s soul, but so many times it leads to something worse due to desensitization.

And, it warps one’s moral sensibilities. When we interviewed Josh McDowell about his research on pornography addiction for Think magazine, he said he believed porn was the biggest reason that Christianity has grown so soft on doctrine.

Because so many of our preachers and elders struggle with it, suddenly they’re pushing a weaker line against sin and its consequences. Porn skews one’s sense of right and wrong. Good becomes evil, and evil becomes good. Just like we’ve seen this last week.

Yet, many Christians still believe pornography is a word that should be kept taboo in the church. That’s a big reason why the addiction rate among Christians is over 50%. When we can’t talk about it, we remain unequipped to help our young people be aware of it, fight it, and confess it.

A Parent’s Task

It should be noted that Robinson is in his 20s and does not live at home. However, that helps us understand exactly what needs to be done.

Monitor your kids’ internet use

It’s extremely unlikely that Robinson has only fallen down these internet rabbit holes since leaving home. But whether he did or not, the message remains that parents should have a firm “not on my watch” policy for what happens in their home.

You can’t keep your kids off the internet forever, but there’s also little reason to rush them onto it. They don’t need devices in their rooms. They don’t need unfiltered, unmonitored access. They need to learn where to go, where to stay away from, and what to do if they find themselves in the wrong place. They need to know they can talk to you if they do end up looking at things or talking to people they shouldn’t.

You also need to know who they’re following, who they’re talking to, and what their interests are. Yes, this is a tall task. But they can end up in very bad places, talking to very bad people, very easily if you’re not careful.

Equip them to stand on their own two feet

Just as much as you would have taught them to stay out of certain parts of town and away from certain people back in the day, they need to know why porn addiction is bad, why certain places shouldn’t be frequented, and why certain people should be avoided, even after they’ve left the house.

Keep the lines of communication open so they know they can talk to you about it. Just as the Rechabites knew without a doubt that their family would not touch alcohol (Jeremiah 35), our kids must know that our families do not look at worthless things, and we do not associate with those with twisted ideologies.

Odds are extremely likely that your kid won’t be the next Tyler Robinson. But countless others have hit their later teen years and suddenly let mom and dad know they won’t be coming back to church, that they don’t believe in God, that they’re now LGBT, and/or that they’ve abandoned all the values they were raised with. Others have done all that and more, growing far more radicalized.

If you wouldn’t let an atheist, marxist, homosexual through your kids’ bedroom door to talk to them one-on-one, don’t let them in through your kids’ screen, either.

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Notes

A heads up about a couple of guest spots I’ve done recently:

Talking to Marco Arroyo about the charge that church of Christ members try to “save themselves”

Talking to Nathan Rasor about Christians and politics