I might be a raging homo, but I still innately understand the male need to conquer, crush and win. Men need to express that dark, powerful part of themselves, or it can abruptly overflow. If it is suppressed, derided and ridiculed, it can show up without warning and with horrible consequences.

That’s why I’m so distressed that heterosexual men are being told, constantly, by the media and even in schools, that what they are is bad. This, I submit, is at least in part what’s driving the recent spate of shootings.

The media trash-talks everything men love: guns, booze, boisterousness, drugs, sex and video games. Economic pressures are relentlessly stripping away male spaces like the traditional pub, where blokes can drink and bond. Social pressures are opening up male-only golf and social clubs to women, destroying what made them precious and essential.

The breakdown of the nuclear family is a euphemistic phrase used to describe a more troubling picture: there are more absent fathers now and vanishingly few positive male role models for young men to admire and emulate. This is often fuelled, or at least endorsed, by wrongheaded progressives who want to tear down supposedly patriarchal institutions.

But it is those patriarchal institutions, if you like, that for centuries provided the sort of structure, order and role models that young men need.

Masculinity isn’t fragile, as a spiteful, sociopathic feminist Twitter hashtag recently claimed. But — and here’s where some man-hating feminists almost get it right — it is powerful, and exciting, and it does have a flip-side if not properly respected. At its best, male competitiveness is the driving force behind most of society’s progress. We would be nowhere without the patriarchy, from the internet and space travel to the road under your feet and the roof on your house. The same thing that drives mass shooters inspires courage, too.

That doesn’t mean masculinity is “toxic.” What’s toxic is society’s attitudes towards men. Masculinity only becomes “toxic” when it is beaten down and suppressed and when men are told that what and who they are is defective. It becomes toxic when young boys are drugged in school because they don’t conform to feminine standards of behaviour.

What’s worse is that the media ridicules, criticises, punishes and demonises masculinity, then uses the product of its own hatred to justify more man-hating, in a Kafkaesque cycle of progressive insanity that has only one, inevitable consequence: more innocent dead people.

Progressives don’t see the irony in going after “straight white men.” But they are hypocritical bigots, hounding people for gender, skin colour and sexuality and saying that essential male characteristics are wrong. Men must be allowed to compete. To fight. To shoot things. Today’s man-punishing, feminised culture is creating killers by suppressing these urges. We have to stop it.

The confusion and alienation that so many young men feel today drives some to drop out of society completely and to retreat into pornography and video games. But others — the less stable, less supported, less able to cope with their natures — become progressively more angry until they explode in rage and pain.

In a sense, what happened yesterday was also a suicide. A spectacularly melodramatic suicide from a man in pain who wanted to hurt the world that had hurt him. Society has got to start treating boys better if it wants to avoid more of this in the future.

Progressives are forever banging on about how mental health facilities are no good in Europe and the US. They’re right, but we rarely hear them acknowledge the primary victims of that shortfall: men. It’s men who are in trouble today; men who are killing themselves — and others — at horrifying rates; men who are retreating from society and giving up on women and careers.

Some macho types will say: let’s not defend pussies. These shooters are pathetic loners. They should be condemned as crazies. Those men are wrong. Basic decency, human compassion and evolution tell us that the strong should protect the weak. That includes more emotionally fragile men, too. If you want to stop the killings, learn to celebrate men like only gay men still do.

Denying essential human nature — that men can be powerful and dangerous and this should be harnessed for good — is a recipe for tragedy. This is why some of us rail against feminism so much. We don’t hate women. We don’t care about “manspreading.” We care about this.

Underemployed, disrespected and frustrated men drive terrorism, mass shootings, gang warfare, you name it. But railing against guys for “toxic masculinity” clearly hasn’t worked. So why not try something new? Why not celebrate what makes men unique instead of trying to turn boys into girls? Why not harness that power and set men back to work? To make America great again, we need to rescue our lost generation of young males.

Ignore the gender warriors. To me, what shootings like this should tell us is that men need to be celebrated more, not less. Men should be honoured. There is no progress, no civilisation without the healthy application of masculinity. Let’s get started.

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