The Dehumanization of Charlie Kirk

I will come out of this very surreal moment in American history and in the story of my own life, understanding the basic truth that our goodness is not determined by a political party. It isn’t the politics that make us better than anyone else. We all have our own ideas of what matters. Instead, it is our willingness to preserve our humanity when tested that really counts.

We can blame the internet and the algorithms for what has happened to all of us in the last 20 years, to our politics, to our culture, to our relationships. But that can only take us so far. At some point, we all have to reckon with who we are and what we’ve become.

I always thought we were the good guys. We didn’t mock, degrade, or dehumanize other people. We were decent and were empathetic. That is, until Donald Trump won in 2016 and all of that changed. What I saw happen to my own side was ugly. It was dark. I wanted nothing to do with it.

It’s been almost two years since Donald Trump was nearly shot and killed on live television. The way the Left dealt with that shooting was shocking. They diminished it. They said it was staged or just shrapnel. They did everything but wake up to the radicalization on their own side.

By then, they’d become consumed by hatred, having tried everything they had in their arsenal to take down Trump, and all of it had failed. How could they pivot back to their humanity?

So when Charlie Kirk was assassinated on video, with the clip going viral to millions of views in seconds, they were primed and ready to once again leave behind their humanity and celebrate one more battle against their named evil, a guy who said things they didn’t like.

It became a thing on TikTok:

They all took to X and competed for who could be the ugliest and the cruelest. The more disgusting they were, the more their hate and dehumanization were rewarded. Social media has messed with our perception of what defines love and hate, with those tiny deceptive hearts we press every time someone scratches that sadistic itch.

The reaction to Charlie’s assassination by the Left was unlike anything I’ve ever seen or anything I thought I would ever see from my former side. It might have been the people of Salem celebrating watching their friends and neighbors hang because they refused to confess. But this was America in 2025, not 1692. How could they not have been shaken out of their decade-long mass hysteria stupor?

My mind goes to Charles Manson and his followers, who showed no mercy, slicing up the bodies of the rich in the Hollywood Hills, a pregnant Sharon Tate among them. To hear the Manson family tell it, they deserved it. They were the establishment. They had been dehumanized, and their lives didn’t matter.

I bring up the Manson murders a lot because that was the last time we saw that same glint, the same wild-eyed happiness and glee at something as gruesome as a murder or someone’s death.

I thought that would have been the end of it, back then. It was enough to end the 1960s, keep Richard Nixon in power, and send our society tumbling toward Ronald Reagan and the 1980s.