Grown Men’s Childish Shit
How local extremists tried to exploit a college campus and put our kids in the crosshairs.
“I just heard from him, he’s okay.”
When I flipped over my phone, that was the first message I read.
There was a flurry of other texts I had missed between my friends; all of us forty-something moms with kids off at college. I had silenced my phone during a meeting earlier in the day and forgotten to turn it back on. My heart skipped a beat. As a mother in 2025, one of your biggest fears is missing a call. This is why.
UNC-Wilmington was on lockdown with reports of an active shooter. Michele’s son was on campus. She told him to stay inside. He said he had thought he had heard shots. His phone was blowing up: A rumor of multiple gunmen was circulating on campus. Michele wondered if she should head out on the road for the two-hour drive to pick him up.
I thought of the time, years ago, when my mother called me at 8 AM. My father had been hospitalized during the night, and she had waited to call me until she knew I’d be up and on my way to work. I remember speeding along the highway with the cornfields blurring beside me. It felt like the longest drive of my life. When I got to the hospital, I told my mother to never, ever wait to tell me something like that again.
It’s so hard to live with part of your heart in another town. I know for Michele, Wilmington that night must have felt very far away.
Videos from UNCW were circulating online. Students crouched down, whispering and peering out the windows of their dorm rooms; police cars careened across the campus quad, officers with long guns running into buildings. For nearly three hours, a shelter-in-place order gripped the campus — and all the parents clutched their phones hours away.
Finally, the university announced there was no threat; however, classes were cancelled for the next day. I learned from another friend that his son’s classes had been cancelled even before the lockdown due to earlier security concerns and threats being made to the campus.
A week earlier, I had called my son. He’s in college, a few hours away from UNCW. We talked about the Charlie Kirk murder, and I had told him my concern that campuses would become a ground zero for those who wanted to exploit the killing and crack down on dissent. His campus seems not to have fallen for that trap, but UNCW was shaping up to be another situation entirely. I wondered why: It’s a very small school and campus and, unlike other state schools, is not known for its campus activism. According to my friends who are graduates, it’s very chill.
But that night as I watched the terrified messages of students fill up TikTok, Instagram, and X, I realized that none of it had to do with UNCW at all. Instead, all of this was being fomented by people not associated with the school in any way- these kids were just in their crosshairs.
The truth is, very little had transpired on UNCW’s campus related to the Charlie Kirk murder. There had been a vigil on campus, much like there was on my son’s campus, and so many other places. There had been a squabble over the campus rock — a small boulder on campus that students are encouraged to paint with messages. One group of kids had painted a tribute to Kirk on the rock; another group had painted over it with a message about civil rights. Apparently, this painting and repainting has continued for the last two weeks.
It’s a rock. It’s young people being away from home for the first time, trying to figure out their politics and how to express them. It’s kids trying on new ideas for the first time. It’s fumbling, it’s hot-headed, it’s messy, it’s paint. This is literally what college is about.
But people off campus want to up the ante and start a real fight. And they are looking to our students at UNCW to wage it.
Prior to the campus lockdown, an anonymous X account had been posting about forming a militia to go to UNCW. The Cape Fear Proud Boys were openly boasting about “being at the ready” to go “protect” the students who were mourning Charlie Kirk from the students who painted over the rock. Those same Proud Boys had shown up to the vigil and left flyers all over campus trying to recruit students. Both the Proud Boys and Libs of TikTok spent the entire week prior to the lockdown obsessively posting about this rock, even singling out young students by name whom they wanted the public to direct their ire at.
These are grown men, y’all. These grown men — mostly sitting behind screens — caused all those students who crouch down in fear on their campus for hours on end.
These grown men caused all these moms’ hearts to skip a beat.
And why? Why are these grown men upset about a rock? About the type of basic debate and tension that has been encouraged for generations on college campuses? They’re not upset about it. They are thrilled by it. They want to exploit our children and make them their ground zero.
As a mother, I value the political tension college offers. I want my kid to engage in it. I want him to debate, to challenge others, to be challenged. I want him to hold the values I have given him close to his heart, but then make his own decisions and forge his own path forward. I’m a single mother, and it’s been a long struggle to ensure my child can attend college — but part of the reason I want him there so badly is exactly for this kind of exposure and growth.
My son’s college roommate is, in many ways, his opposite. They aren’t going to become the closest friends, but they like each other. They grab breakfast together and sometimes play games or watch a movie together (my kid brought the PlayStation, his roommate brought the TV). His roommate is deeply conservative and was pretty shaken up by Kirk’s murder. My son is very leftist and was also shaken by Kirk’s murder. I don’t think they’ve discussed it much, but both of them know exactly what it means.
They know that what it means is that just like the students at UNCW, they will both have to be constantly vigilant. Not only do they have to be careful for their physical safety, but they’ll both have to form their political and ethical selves through confusing layers of exploitation and opportunism. They will have to determine who truly loves them and ward off those who would merely love to use them as foot soldiers and pawns. Those are lessons that can’t be built into the curriculum at their colleges, but might be the greatest knowledge they gain over these next four years.
From what I can see, the kids are up for it. Overwhelmingly, the students at UNCW — conservative and liberal if those labels even apply — are not having it. They are the generation that has grown up under lockdowns and doxxing. They want to get back to class and, frankly, are tired of the grown men’s childish shit.
