Youth Violence Rising On The Brett Winterble Show

Tune in here to this Thursday's edition of the Brett Winterble Show! 

Brett talks about the deepening crisis of youth violence in America’s cities and the cultural decay he believes has contributed to it. He emphasizes that safety is not a luxury but a basic duty of any functioning society. Brett highlights how social media, the erosion of community institutions, and lenient juvenile justice policies have led to a generation growing up without moral guidance or accountability. He cites alarming statistics, including a 14-fold increase in the lethality of youth violence and high homicide rates among young men in the Americas.

Brett criticizes the political left for what he sees as a dismissive attitude toward family, responsibility, and consequences. He also discusses emerging ideas like building supermax facilities in every state to house violent youth offenders long-term, framing them as “street terrorists.” Brett calls the situation a moral and civic emergency, urging serious action before the violence becomes completely normalized.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
There's talk eleven ten, not nine three WBT. It is
the Brettwiner bullshew seven oh four five seven eleven ten.
What are we going to do about the violence in
our cities? What are we going to do? How are
we going to handle this? How do we get to
this place? It's it's tough thing. It's a tough thing

(00:30):
to kind of think about. It's a it's a really
really difficult thing when it comes to having to go
after people who are not behaving themselves the way they should.
I mean, I think it's it's it's abundantly clear what
we're seeing happening around us, right when you when you
think about what we would expect, what we should expect.

(00:54):
I mean, this is this is a big problem, especially
when you've got people who live in communities and don't
have any other options where they can, you know, just
pack up and move away. Now, safety is not a luxury.
Safety is not a luxury. It is the first duty
of civilization. Without it, freedom becomes chaos and rights become

(01:22):
empty promises. A society that cannot protect its citizens, especially
its children, has forfeited its moral authority. If you just
go back over the last twenty years two decades, several cultural, technological,
and policy shifts have eroded the deterrence to youth violence.

(01:48):
There is no more deterrence. Just think about the digital desensitization.
Social media platforms have normalized violence through viral fight videos,
gang glorification, and nihilistic memes. The memes that are made

(02:13):
by the nihalists are attached to the belief that there's
no point to life. The line between entertainment and brutality,
it's been blurred. I think we can all agree the
decline of accountability. My gosh, absolutely, you can go all

(02:33):
the way back to the sixties and maybe even the
late fifties. Juvenile justice reforms, often well intentioned, often prioritize
rehabilitation over consequence. In many jurisdictions, youth offenders are released
before victims are buried. Imagine that firearms obviously have become

(03:02):
more lethal and more accessible. Criminals are happy to hand
those those weapons to kids. According to the Council and
Criminal Justice, the lethality of violent incidents involving youths increased fourteenfold.
That means fourteen times over one two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve,

(03:32):
thirteen forty between nineteen ninety nine and twenty twenty. The
collapse of community structures, churches, civic clubs, mentorship programs, they've
all been lost, and they've lost influence. Many young people
now grow up without any moral anchors or adult guidance.

(03:57):
They are self raising humans. Poverty, unemployment, concentrated disadvantage remain
strong predictors of youth violence. In cities like DC, Entire
neighborhoods have become zones of despair. In two thousand and five,

(04:18):
a youth homicide was a community tragedy. In twenty twenty five,
it's a statistic. This shift is not accidental. It is
the result of cultural erosion, policy failure, and moral abdication.

(04:38):
And what do you get from the left? Abort your kid,
abort your kid, abort your kid, leave your kid? Who cares? Do? Go?
Be who you want to be? It's terrible, It's terrible.
The World Health Organization reports that youth homicide is now
one of the leading causes of death for people aged
fifteen to twenty nine Globally. It's not just the United States.

(05:01):
In the America's young men fifteen to twenty nine face
the highest homicide risk, with rates exceeding fifty per one
hundred thousand. The rise of gang culture, online radicalization, revenge
killings has made murder a right of passage in some circles.

(05:23):
So what do we do about this? I know what
some people are starting to talk about. Some people are
talking about a supermax in every state, and supermaxes where
you take young offenders, youth offenders and put them away
for a lot of years. Permanent isolation, removing the most

(05:50):
violent individuals from society to prevent recidivism and protect communities
just like you would a terrorist. These are street terrorists.
Every state has equal capacity to manage its most dangerous criminals,
regardless of their age. Offer structured moral reckoning, not leniency

(06:10):
within secure environments. These are the things that people are
talking about. The government's got plenty of money, and the
governments around this country, with the exception of places like
California and Illinois, these are places where the people there
are calling out for a different approach. They're talking about

(06:36):
an estimated two to three billion dollars per facility over
the course of the next ten years. Is that the answer?
It may not be up to us