Noah, I’d be remiss if I didn’t note the imbalance of who the extremists are calling for violence.
As you noted, every Democratic politician of any note expressed basically the right sentiments on this assassination. Seriously, the most famous pundit express joy or “good riddance” with Kirk’s assassination is…who now?
On the right, well only the richest man in America who until quite recently was the President’s right hand man expressing how this assassination is a leftist plot. And oh yeah, the wife of Trump’s other right hand man (who recently called the Democratic Party a terrorist organization) saying how evil leftists are responsible.
Do I really need to catalog all of the worst stuff the President has said?
I’m sorry there is a real asymmetry which people with the most extreme rhetoric have power and influence in either party.
::Deep breath:: Kirk’s assassination is a tragedy. He leaves behind two kids without a dad. It is awful. But can you please take a look at the rhetoric he was putting out? Lots of “great replacement” stuff.
This is 100% accurate. Whenever people talk about "extreme rhetoric from the left and the right", what they're really talking about is random nut job lefties on anonymous Twitter accounts suggesting government takeover versus the literal president of the United States calling for violence. That's not the same.
So you are saying he was a racist and fascist threatening the very fabric of “our democracy” who would turn our county into an authoritarian hellscape and must be stopped? Oh, but thoughts and prayers for…..Hitler?
Or is that only your typical Dem pol and talking head pontificating on Donald Trump and the right?
Though the chance of civil war does seem small, the political landscape has been so polarized for a prolonged period of time it is has become truly scary.
Not only the attacks of political violence mentioned in the piece, but also BLM, COVID, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the overturning of Roe v Wade, the Israel-Palestine conflict, and so much more.
There is an increasing agitation among younger Americans especially who so often find themselves unwilling to talk and hear out the other side.
Which makes Kirk's killing all the more tragic, because he was actually debating the other side. And civilized debate between Left and Right on the merits of their respective policy positions is the only way forward out of this mess.
Which is why I've booked Madison Square Garden for a debate between Marjorie Taylor Greene and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez!!! Get your tickets now!!
I'm just thinking of all the money I could make. I'm sure with proper marketing it would be a sold out event at the Garden.
Then I'll book Mayor Pete vs. Ben Shapiro. Now I'd certainly pay to see those guys debate a hot topic. Pete is very sharp; but Shapiro an especially strong debater.
Attention seeking folks...President Trump and his nasty remarks about almost everyone who is a Democrat OR one of his perceived "enemies" models the behavior we see on social media by ordinary folks who might not have an "audience" except for their presence on X, Blue-sky, wherever.
Never underestimate the importance of observational learning/modeling. There's a large research literature from the 1960's and beyond about the potency of "authority figures" in shaping behaviors. If you only had a PSY 101 course, you should remember the Bobo Doll experiments which set the foundation for this seminal work by Dr. Albert Bandura.
Remember this: true leaders lift up others while despots denigrate.
It always amazes me when I see people earnestly explaining that this is really a one-sided problem, or simply Trump, or from the right, maybe everybody but Trump:
I wonder about the bubble they live in, how on earth they maintain it, and why?
The first time I heard this appalling talk of civil war was from a family friend, a right winger in Arizona. He may have been an idiot, but he wasn't a loser. He was a retired firefighter with two government pensions and a 100,000 dollar Ford Raptor. He loved his guns.
He thought our political disagreements would only be solved in civil war. In the toxic brew of his brain, I heard something more than just political tribalism, racism, bigotry, and nationalistic rage.
I think what this guy wanted more than anything was the REAL.
He seemed frustrated, desperate for ACTION, for some definitive stop to all the political talk--an escape from the merely symbolic, the virtual, the discursive, which was too much of a tangle for him.
Bullets instead of Memes.
The man made me think our violence is our tortured, psychotic scream for the Real in a society that has forgotten what the Real is.
I thought we were supposed to be optimistic about our technological future?
Is this an unfortunate asterisk* in the good future that we can look forward to?
What happens to stochastic terrorism and political violence when AI can make those right and left peaks in the distribution shoot up astronomically high?
You have written very astutely about how the information ecosystem in our open societies seemed ill prepared for social media and now we are dumping AI into that. The incentive for all of these companies is still to maximize attention and engagement.
Solar panels, better medicines, autonomous vehicles are all great. The main chink in the technooptimist idea is the way that social media and the internet has acted as the "Diabetes of Democracy" where people over consume the most upsetting and biased media they can get. LLMs show every indication that they will only make this worse.
Well, Google's AI says this, "Online anonymity is the ability to use the internet without one's real-world identity being linked to their actions, which can be achieved through tools like VPNs, the Tor browser, and taking precautions like disabling cookies and using pseudonyms. While it offers benefits like protecting free speech, safety for vulnerable groups, and privacy, it also presents drawbacks, such as enabling hate speech, harassment, and crime."
As I see it, anonymity is the problem - speech without accountability. This is a legislative issue, not a technology fault.
It is a legislative issue... to deal with something that is only possible due to new technology.
That's why I brought up the incentive structure for all of these companies. Their incentive is to maximize engagement. This means they will lobby tooth and nail against any legislation that might limit said engagement.
In the 1970's, a person could publish an anonymous newsletter and send it around... But printing... cost money. Distribution... cost money. Writing took time. So speech (anonymous or otherwise) was some baseline of expensive, in terms of money and time. The internet has removed the printing cost, the distribution cost, and now AI is removing the time cost.
Social media just made it easier for the pamphleteer to get advertisers willing to pay for those costs. All the pamphleteer had to do was give up all their personal info and activity history plus the same from everyone who touched the pamphlet.
Firstly it’s great you called out what this was: a “murder”, he didn’t just “die” as other headlines are saying. It was violence and death.
Secondly though, we look and weep at what has happened to your society. And regret the lost value that you provided.
But third. Your agency in our broader world is dissipating, and going. And that’s from the choices you are making as a collective, and what you collectively now imposing on others.
And yet we still wish you well, and hope for your return.
You would think that as someone with a physics background, you could do the math. You are a nation of about 330 million with upwards of 500 million guns. If only 3% of your population experiences psychosis, that puts the population of potential psychotic killers at around 9.9 million. Add to that the breakdown of society produced by the internet where all soapboxes now are of equal height. Add to that the weapons in the hands of malicious or religiously inspired (Islamist primarily) actors and the rate of political murder seems destined to experience exponential growth, your "lets all be nice" sentiments notwithstanding.
Thank you for this post. The assassination of Charlie Kirk is awful and horrible and I hope the killer is caught soon. People (many of whom aren't American) using it to foment civil war are also awful.
I wonder why we can't have geographic tags on social media. Is it because it would harm revenues? Is it technically too easy to get around? If I were president (which I will never be), I would require all social media to show a subtitle to every post which gives the country of origin of that post and I would require social media companies to reject posts from Virtual Private Networks, so there was no way around it. Perhaps I'm naive.
They can't because there is no way to know whether an IP comes from a VPN or not. They are pretty good at figuring out which IPs come from a publicly available vpn service, but if you want to mislead it is trivially easy to spin up your own server to proxy the requests and then there really isn't any way to tell.
I would consult with the NFL, NBA or NHL. No organizations have worked harder to eliminate people using VPNs to get around their black outs and/or subscription fees. I stopped paying for NHL package after a few years, because so many games were still blacked out, but let's just say that maybe someone in "Paraguay" could watch them, no problem.
I really don't see the benefit of going on sites like Twitter/X anymore. The juice doesn't seem worth the squeeze. Spend more time on Substack instead :)
Noah, I don't think it's fair to say that someone is "celebrating" Charlie Kirk's death when they simply point out the fact that the man spent his entire public career antagonizing people and fomenting hatred and dissension, so it's not a surprise when he's a victim of the toxicity he creates.
It's possible to point out that someone playing in traffic put themselves in a position to get hit by a car without saying that you're happy that they got hit.
You're quite right on this Noah. I held the vast majority opinions and arguments of Mr Kirk's I ever read with contempt and felt he was doing an disservice to the US (and more generally) for espousing them. From what I read, he was a major promoter of the stolen 2020 election conspiracy, for example, a terrible thing to do.
Nevertheless. Even if he was contributing to the degradation of democracy, he was, as far as I understand it, within his first amendment rights to do so. And the same is true for his other positions. He never, again as far as I understand it, take any action that directly impelled American democracy or the like and, even if he had done so, the justice system would be the appropriate way to deal with such things.
I wish we had some way of estimating how many of the comments and the like celebrating or justifying the assassination are manufactured in some capacity (including edgelord behaviour) and how much reflects genuinely held beliefs. Probably too much is genuine. Note, per comments above, I do agree that there's definitely an imbalance when it comes to which political elites are fuelling the fire here, with rightwing types playing a much, much larger role. That's partly why it's shocking to see nominally "left" people celebrating murder like this.
All that said, one issue you're not focusing enough is the question of how much people are or are not keeping faith in the democratic system itself. It's probably not enough to have a polarised country, as long as people believe they can take power again in the (near) future and that peaceful transition is possible, civil war seems unlikely. At this point, how much of this is true for the US, I wonder?
When social media creates an ‘us vs them’ mentality it becomes difficult to differentiate the vast spectrum of opinions which exist on an issue. Being left wing doesn’t mean you support the most extreme leftists but being conservative also doesn’t mean you support everything the far right stand for
I could not agree more strongly with this piece. However, something trivial stuck out and bothered me.
When you ask:
'If the killer is caught and turns out to have been a rightist, or a politically confused nutcase, what are all of these people screaming for war against “the left” going to say? “Ahh well, nevertheless”?'
I hate to call you naive...but yes! Obviously! Or else lie and just continue to say the weird left ideas had were the "real" ideology. Or that it was a false flag.
You know how I know that? It happened with the Trump attempts! Hell, it even happened in reverse with a much more clear cut case with the MN House Speaker! Like, yes, that's what will happen in that instance. We pretty close to literally know it already.
That does not invalidate the points made of the article overall. But it stuck out as weirdly silly to even wonder.
Charlie Kirk was very clear that he did not want gun violence and murder to hijack the narrative. That empathy is weakness. That gun violence is the price we pay to keep our second amendment rights.
The Right is being very disrespectful to the messages that Charlie Kirk gave his life for. They are doing exactly what he argued they should not. It's disgusting to watch.
To your point Noah about blame, from what I've read and I'm no expert but this seemed like a technical assassination: 200 feet, gravity, wind ... As of now the assassin has just vanished. This is not someone who just walked off the street but someone with years of training who timed it for when Charlie was talking about gun violence.
In honor and respect towards Charlie though, moving on: I've been thinking about our best bets for employment in the future if AGI happens. Catastrophe or well just find new ways of working?
9/11, Charlie Kirk, the young woman in Charlotte, the elderly couple killed in their home in NY, all of these events must force us to confront the truth about America and Americans. We have a violent, sick nation.
I’ve called for doing something about our gun problem. At a minimum, we need to do a better job of keeping guns from the hands of the mentally ill.
Another school shooting is proof of our laziness, and frankly, that we no longer care.
I will be very curious to see if Charlie Kirk’s killer is mentally ill, just evil, or a fanatic of some sort. I highly doubt Kirk’s killer was engaged in a crime of passion. No doubt he or she had contemplated killing another human for some time.
Fascination with killing another human, we must admit, that killing is in our genetic code. Humans have always been violent, and it seems that something in America’s culture is preventing our ability to evolve. The elderly couple in New York was killed by an evil human. The young woman in Charlotte was killed by a severely mentally ill human. The killing on 9/11 was done by fanatics. The reasons vary, but it still comes down to the fact that humans are drawn to kill.
I was saddened to see that the killing of Charlie Kirk has so taken over the news that another school shooting barely makes a ripple.CNN finally mentioned it. Assassinations seem to hold Americans’ attention in ways that murders don’t.
I wonder how the residents of Chicago wake up each Monday morning and react, or not, to the number of shootings. Do they even bother to shrug their shoulders? Has America lost its ability to have compassion, to recognize that it shouldn’t be normal to have dozens of people wounded or killed every weekend?
Noah, I’d be remiss if I didn’t note the imbalance of who the extremists are calling for violence.
As you noted, every Democratic politician of any note expressed basically the right sentiments on this assassination. Seriously, the most famous pundit express joy or “good riddance” with Kirk’s assassination is…who now?
On the right, well only the richest man in America who until quite recently was the President’s right hand man expressing how this assassination is a leftist plot. And oh yeah, the wife of Trump’s other right hand man (who recently called the Democratic Party a terrorist organization) saying how evil leftists are responsible.
Do I really need to catalog all of the worst stuff the President has said?
I’m sorry there is a real asymmetry which people with the most extreme rhetoric have power and influence in either party.
::Deep breath:: Kirk’s assassination is a tragedy. He leaves behind two kids without a dad. It is awful. But can you please take a look at the rhetoric he was putting out? Lots of “great replacement” stuff.
This is 100% accurate. Whenever people talk about "extreme rhetoric from the left and the right", what they're really talking about is random nut job lefties on anonymous Twitter accounts suggesting government takeover versus the literal president of the United States calling for violence. That's not the same.
On cue. Trump talks about the radical left compared Kirk to Nazis and said this rhetoric is directly responsible.
“Both sides” are not the same.
So you are saying he was a racist and fascist threatening the very fabric of “our democracy” who would turn our county into an authoritarian hellscape and must be stopped? Oh, but thoughts and prayers for…..Hitler?
Or is that only your typical Dem pol and talking head pontificating on Donald Trump and the right?
See Noah’s point that civil wars are very bad. Normalizing political violence against your enemies leads to very dark places.
So yeah, as terrible as I found much of Kirk’s rhetoric, I’m going to have a really high bar for when it’s ok to turn to violence.
Reassuring,😊
Though the chance of civil war does seem small, the political landscape has been so polarized for a prolonged period of time it is has become truly scary.
Not only the attacks of political violence mentioned in the piece, but also BLM, COVID, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the overturning of Roe v Wade, the Israel-Palestine conflict, and so much more.
There is an increasing agitation among younger Americans especially who so often find themselves unwilling to talk and hear out the other side.
Which makes Kirk's killing all the more tragic, because he was actually debating the other side. And civilized debate between Left and Right on the merits of their respective policy positions is the only way forward out of this mess.
Which is why I've booked Madison Square Garden for a debate between Marjorie Taylor Greene and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez!!! Get your tickets now!!
Just kidding...but wouldn't that be cool?!
The combined brain power wouldn’t register on even the most sensitive device.
I'm just thinking of all the money I could make. I'm sure with proper marketing it would be a sold out event at the Garden.
Then I'll book Mayor Pete vs. Ben Shapiro. Now I'd certainly pay to see those guys debate a hot topic. Pete is very sharp; but Shapiro an especially strong debater.
An all too typical false equivalence.
"but wouldn't that be cool?!"
Depends. Will it involve mud wrestling?
Attention seeking folks...President Trump and his nasty remarks about almost everyone who is a Democrat OR one of his perceived "enemies" models the behavior we see on social media by ordinary folks who might not have an "audience" except for their presence on X, Blue-sky, wherever.
Never underestimate the importance of observational learning/modeling. There's a large research literature from the 1960's and beyond about the potency of "authority figures" in shaping behaviors. If you only had a PSY 101 course, you should remember the Bobo Doll experiments which set the foundation for this seminal work by Dr. Albert Bandura.
Remember this: true leaders lift up others while despots denigrate.
It always amazes me when I see people earnestly explaining that this is really a one-sided problem, or simply Trump, or from the right, maybe everybody but Trump:
I wonder about the bubble they live in, how on earth they maintain it, and why?
You're all over this comment section. Can you please stop being an agitator? Noah really ought to implement a maximum comment per post rule.
"I thought Donald Trump was actually on pretty solid ground when he called out radical leftists for poisonous rhetoric:"
Trump would be on even more solid ground if he himself weren't, *by far*, the most inflammatory purveyor of poisonous rhetoric.
The first time I heard this appalling talk of civil war was from a family friend, a right winger in Arizona. He may have been an idiot, but he wasn't a loser. He was a retired firefighter with two government pensions and a 100,000 dollar Ford Raptor. He loved his guns.
He thought our political disagreements would only be solved in civil war. In the toxic brew of his brain, I heard something more than just political tribalism, racism, bigotry, and nationalistic rage.
I think what this guy wanted more than anything was the REAL.
He seemed frustrated, desperate for ACTION, for some definitive stop to all the political talk--an escape from the merely symbolic, the virtual, the discursive, which was too much of a tangle for him.
Bullets instead of Memes.
The man made me think our violence is our tortured, psychotic scream for the Real in a society that has forgotten what the Real is.
wait, wait, WAIT!
I thought we were supposed to be optimistic about our technological future?
Is this an unfortunate asterisk* in the good future that we can look forward to?
What happens to stochastic terrorism and political violence when AI can make those right and left peaks in the distribution shoot up astronomically high?
You have written very astutely about how the information ecosystem in our open societies seemed ill prepared for social media and now we are dumping AI into that. The incentive for all of these companies is still to maximize attention and engagement.
Solar panels, better medicines, autonomous vehicles are all great. The main chink in the technooptimist idea is the way that social media and the internet has acted as the "Diabetes of Democracy" where people over consume the most upsetting and biased media they can get. LLMs show every indication that they will only make this worse.
I agree with the post as whole.
Well, Google's AI says this, "Online anonymity is the ability to use the internet without one's real-world identity being linked to their actions, which can be achieved through tools like VPNs, the Tor browser, and taking precautions like disabling cookies and using pseudonyms. While it offers benefits like protecting free speech, safety for vulnerable groups, and privacy, it also presents drawbacks, such as enabling hate speech, harassment, and crime."
As I see it, anonymity is the problem - speech without accountability. This is a legislative issue, not a technology fault.
It is a legislative issue... to deal with something that is only possible due to new technology.
That's why I brought up the incentive structure for all of these companies. Their incentive is to maximize engagement. This means they will lobby tooth and nail against any legislation that might limit said engagement.
In the 1970's, a person could publish an anonymous newsletter and send it around... But printing... cost money. Distribution... cost money. Writing took time. So speech (anonymous or otherwise) was some baseline of expensive, in terms of money and time. The internet has removed the printing cost, the distribution cost, and now AI is removing the time cost.
Social media just made it easier for the pamphleteer to get advertisers willing to pay for those costs. All the pamphleteer had to do was give up all their personal info and activity history plus the same from everyone who touched the pamphlet.
Outside looking in.
Firstly it’s great you called out what this was: a “murder”, he didn’t just “die” as other headlines are saying. It was violence and death.
Secondly though, we look and weep at what has happened to your society. And regret the lost value that you provided.
But third. Your agency in our broader world is dissipating, and going. And that’s from the choices you are making as a collective, and what you collectively now imposing on others.
And yet we still wish you well, and hope for your return.
You would think that as someone with a physics background, you could do the math. You are a nation of about 330 million with upwards of 500 million guns. If only 3% of your population experiences psychosis, that puts the population of potential psychotic killers at around 9.9 million. Add to that the breakdown of society produced by the internet where all soapboxes now are of equal height. Add to that the weapons in the hands of malicious or religiously inspired (Islamist primarily) actors and the rate of political murder seems destined to experience exponential growth, your "lets all be nice" sentiments notwithstanding.
So why does the math work out at a worse rate in the US than in other countries with guns?
A: It's guns and culture. So not just math.
What other countries have anywhere close to the guns the US has?
Thank you for this post. The assassination of Charlie Kirk is awful and horrible and I hope the killer is caught soon. People (many of whom aren't American) using it to foment civil war are also awful.
I wonder why we can't have geographic tags on social media. Is it because it would harm revenues? Is it technically too easy to get around? If I were president (which I will never be), I would require all social media to show a subtitle to every post which gives the country of origin of that post and I would require social media companies to reject posts from Virtual Private Networks, so there was no way around it. Perhaps I'm naive.
My thoughts are with Charlie's wife and kids.
They can't because there is no way to know whether an IP comes from a VPN or not. They are pretty good at figuring out which IPs come from a publicly available vpn service, but if you want to mislead it is trivially easy to spin up your own server to proxy the requests and then there really isn't any way to tell.
I would consult with the NFL, NBA or NHL. No organizations have worked harder to eliminate people using VPNs to get around their black outs and/or subscription fees. I stopped paying for NHL package after a few years, because so many games were still blacked out, but let's just say that maybe someone in "Paraguay" could watch them, no problem.
I really don't see the benefit of going on sites like Twitter/X anymore. The juice doesn't seem worth the squeeze. Spend more time on Substack instead :)
Noah, I don't think it's fair to say that someone is "celebrating" Charlie Kirk's death when they simply point out the fact that the man spent his entire public career antagonizing people and fomenting hatred and dissension, so it's not a surprise when he's a victim of the toxicity he creates.
It's possible to point out that someone playing in traffic put themselves in a position to get hit by a car without saying that you're happy that they got hit.
You're quite right on this Noah. I held the vast majority opinions and arguments of Mr Kirk's I ever read with contempt and felt he was doing an disservice to the US (and more generally) for espousing them. From what I read, he was a major promoter of the stolen 2020 election conspiracy, for example, a terrible thing to do.
Nevertheless. Even if he was contributing to the degradation of democracy, he was, as far as I understand it, within his first amendment rights to do so. And the same is true for his other positions. He never, again as far as I understand it, take any action that directly impelled American democracy or the like and, even if he had done so, the justice system would be the appropriate way to deal with such things.
I wish we had some way of estimating how many of the comments and the like celebrating or justifying the assassination are manufactured in some capacity (including edgelord behaviour) and how much reflects genuinely held beliefs. Probably too much is genuine. Note, per comments above, I do agree that there's definitely an imbalance when it comes to which political elites are fuelling the fire here, with rightwing types playing a much, much larger role. That's partly why it's shocking to see nominally "left" people celebrating murder like this.
All that said, one issue you're not focusing enough is the question of how much people are or are not keeping faith in the democratic system itself. It's probably not enough to have a polarised country, as long as people believe they can take power again in the (near) future and that peaceful transition is possible, civil war seems unlikely. At this point, how much of this is true for the US, I wonder?
When social media creates an ‘us vs them’ mentality it becomes difficult to differentiate the vast spectrum of opinions which exist on an issue. Being left wing doesn’t mean you support the most extreme leftists but being conservative also doesn’t mean you support everything the far right stand for
I could not agree more strongly with this piece. However, something trivial stuck out and bothered me.
When you ask:
'If the killer is caught and turns out to have been a rightist, or a politically confused nutcase, what are all of these people screaming for war against “the left” going to say? “Ahh well, nevertheless”?'
I hate to call you naive...but yes! Obviously! Or else lie and just continue to say the weird left ideas had were the "real" ideology. Or that it was a false flag.
You know how I know that? It happened with the Trump attempts! Hell, it even happened in reverse with a much more clear cut case with the MN House Speaker! Like, yes, that's what will happen in that instance. We pretty close to literally know it already.
That does not invalidate the points made of the article overall. But it stuck out as weirdly silly to even wonder.
Charlie Kirk was very clear that he did not want gun violence and murder to hijack the narrative. That empathy is weakness. That gun violence is the price we pay to keep our second amendment rights.
The Right is being very disrespectful to the messages that Charlie Kirk gave his life for. They are doing exactly what he argued they should not. It's disgusting to watch.
To your point Noah about blame, from what I've read and I'm no expert but this seemed like a technical assassination: 200 feet, gravity, wind ... As of now the assassin has just vanished. This is not someone who just walked off the street but someone with years of training who timed it for when Charlie was talking about gun violence.
In honor and respect towards Charlie though, moving on: I've been thinking about our best bets for employment in the future if AGI happens. Catastrophe or well just find new ways of working?
It was either the luckiest hit ever, or a true pro. Hired? Acting alone with his (or her) own motivation? Hope we find out.
But Trump only missed having his noggin exploded by the goofball kid by a couple of inches. A turn of the head.
I’m posting my post in The Dispatch this AM
AMERICA, LAND OF THE VIOLENT
9/11, Charlie Kirk, the young woman in Charlotte, the elderly couple killed in their home in NY, all of these events must force us to confront the truth about America and Americans. We have a violent, sick nation.
I’ve called for doing something about our gun problem. At a minimum, we need to do a better job of keeping guns from the hands of the mentally ill.
Another school shooting is proof of our laziness, and frankly, that we no longer care.
I will be very curious to see if Charlie Kirk’s killer is mentally ill, just evil, or a fanatic of some sort. I highly doubt Kirk’s killer was engaged in a crime of passion. No doubt he or she had contemplated killing another human for some time.
Fascination with killing another human, we must admit, that killing is in our genetic code. Humans have always been violent, and it seems that something in America’s culture is preventing our ability to evolve. The elderly couple in New York was killed by an evil human. The young woman in Charlotte was killed by a severely mentally ill human. The killing on 9/11 was done by fanatics. The reasons vary, but it still comes down to the fact that humans are drawn to kill.
I was saddened to see that the killing of Charlie Kirk has so taken over the news that another school shooting barely makes a ripple.CNN finally mentioned it. Assassinations seem to hold Americans’ attention in ways that murders don’t.
I wonder how the residents of Chicago wake up each Monday morning and react, or not, to the number of shootings. Do they even bother to shrug their shoulders? Has America lost its ability to have compassion, to recognize that it shouldn’t be normal to have dozens of people wounded or killed every weekend?