In his weekly segment with syndicated columnist Mark Shields, New York Times columnist David Brooks reacted to the mass killing in Charleston, SC earlier in the week on Friday’s broadcast of PBS’s “NewsHour.”
Brooks said the problem was about much more than race, suggesting it was part of “an angry young man problem.”
“The horror is the horror,” Brooks said. “I confess, I’m a little confused about how much to generalize. We have a race problem in this country. That is so obvious. But we also have an angry solitary young man problem. And I’m not sure a lot of the angry solitary young men are directly connected. They are obviously loosely connected to the history of race in this country. But they are angry solitary young men looking for hateful and vicious ideologies. Some of them turn into neo-Nazi skinheads. I don’t think we have a Nazi problem in this country. They are solitary and they’re hate-mongers. And the guy sits with the Bible study group for an hour and then starts shooting them. That’s beyond — beyond imagination. And so I — it’s obviously connected, but I’m a little wary of the too pat causations that are linked between our general race problem and this specific, completely bizarre, and completely evil incident.”
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