American Nosedive: The Charlie Kirk assassination

A strange wave has come over this country. We can’t quite pinpoint what that something is. Political battles have always taken place. Fighting has always happened. Animosity and violence, from time to time, have occurred. But the assassination of Charlie Kirk yesterday ignited a different kind of wave.

You had your usual back-and-forth: the “thoughts and prayers” crowd on one side, and then—far more disturbingly—people who weren’t just indifferent, but openly celebrating. Not hiding it. Not whispering it. Celebrating. Memes, mockery, gleeful remarks. We’ve all had family or friends who said ugly things about news events, but those conversations used to happen behind closed doors, around the kitchen table.

Now, they happen instantly on social media, in the raw hours after blood is still drying. Screenshots of celebrations go viral. Then there are fights about the fights—arguments over whether revenge is needed, whether to dox people, whether to double down. The chatter becomes clatter. The noise eats itself.

And through it all, the obvious truth: violence is a failure. When you turn to violence, you’re essentially admitting defeat. You’re declaring your ideas weren’t strong enough to win on their own.. so instead, you kill the person holding the ideas you hate. It’s morally bankrupt. It accomplishes nothing but more grief. Yet last night, videos spread of people defending it, saying Kirk’s murder proved that sometimes violence is the answer.

That’s where we are. The great American nosedive. We’ve talked about pop culture reactions to tragedy before. But this one? This one feels different. This one feels rotten.

It feels like we’re in a soft Civil War. Not the kind with battle lines and uniforms, but one fought in algorithms, comment sections, and dark private groups. The beginnings of a conflict with no victors.

We should be pausing, collecting ourselves. But nobody is. We should be thinking deeply. But thoughtfulness has been replaced by taunts and jeers. We cheer when “the other side” takes a violent end, as if that’s a point scored for our cult.

Sometimes I just want to tap out, let someone else step into the ring, because staying in the ring is exhausting. Where do we go from here? Maybe nowhere.

Did you ever see a perfectly crisp red apple, shining in the sunlight? It looks beautiful, delicious—until you bite into it and find it’s rotten inside. That’s America right now.

So who’s going to take the first bite?