In the hours after a sniper’s bullet ended Charlie Kirk’s life on a Utah university campus, America was plunged into a familiar and horrifying ritual of grief. Leaders from both parties issued solemn condemnations of political violence. Cable news anchors spoke in hushed, somber tones. Across the country, citizens recoiled in shared shock at the brutal assassination of a father of two, a man who, for better or worse, had become one of the most consequential political figures of his generation. The act itself was a terrifying symptom of a nation’s spiraling political polarization. But another, perhaps more insidious, symptom was quietly metastasizing in the digital corners of American life.
As the nation mourned, a vocal minority celebrated. On Facebook, X, and Instagram, a shocking number of Americans looked upon the murder of a political opponent and did not see a tragedy. They saw a punchline. They saw karma. They saw, in the words of one university dean who would soon be unemployed, that “hate begets hate.”
A Daily Mail report cataloged this grim phenomenon, creating a rogues’ gallery of seeming professionals—teachers, a comic book author, an NFL team employee, an assistant dean at a university—who felt compelled to publicly share their glee. Their posts were a grotesque collection of memes, callous jokes, and bitter irony. But to dismiss them as mere “ghouls,” as isolated actors indulging in a moment of poor taste, is to miss the terrifying truth their actions reveal. Their celebration was not an anomaly. It was a diagnosis of the very disease that made the assassination possible: the complete and utter dehumanization of the political opposition.
To understand this wave of digital cruelty, one must first understand the logic, however twisted, that fueled it. A recurring theme in the posts was the use of Charlie Kirk’s own words against him. An elementary school teacher, a data analyst who claimed to work for the Department of Justice, and a junior employee for the Carolina Panthers all referenced the same 2023 quote from Kirk: “I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”
In the minds of these posters, Kirk’s death by gunshot was not a tragedy but a reckoning. “Why are y’all sad?” the Panthers employee allegedly wrote. “Your man said it was worth it.” The elementary school teacher, Kristen Eve, was more direct: “F*** that guy. Ironic, isn’t it?” This wasn’t just celebration; it was the proclamation of a dark, poetic justice. They saw themselves not as cheering on a murder, but as pointing out the inevitable, tragic conclusion of Kirk’s own professed ideology. They had stopped seeing him as a person who was killed and instead saw him as a symbol who had been hoisted by his own petard.
This is the final stage of dehumanization. It’s a process fed by years of relentless, high-stakes political warfare that casts opponents not as fellow citizens with differing views, but as existential threats. In this environment, empathy becomes a liability and cruelty a virtue. Kirk himself was a master practitioner of this brand of politics. He built a movement by framing his adversaries—progressives, academics, the media—as forces of evil working to destroy the fabric of the nation. The tragic irony is that the same rhetorical tools used to build his platform were ultimately used by his critics to strip him of his own humanity in death, making his murder something to be mocked rather than mourned. When you label your opponents “garbage humans,” as teacher Kristen Eve did, you give them permission to see you in the same light.
The response to this online callousness was as swift and brutal as the posts themselves. The Carolina Panthers fired Charlie Rock. Middle Tennessee State University fired Assistant Dean Laura Sosh-Lightsy, who had been an employee for 22 years. DC Comics cancelled a new series by author Gretchen Felker-Martin. A Florida teacher was suspended. The gears of what is often labeled cancel culture ground forward with ruthless efficiency.
This secondary wave of consequences presents its own uncomfortable questions about the nature of online speech and accountability. On one hand, the idea of educators and public servants celebrating any murder is profoundly disturbing, and employers have a right to protect their reputations. But on the other, this cycle of online outrage fueling real-world punishment feels like another facet of the same toxic ecosystem. Does firing a teacher for a hateful Facebook post solve the underlying problem of political dehumanization, or does it simply create another martyr in a culture war with no end in sight? The firings treat the symptom—the offensive post—while the disease of intractable, violent hatred festers in the body politic.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk was a horrifying act of political violence. It represents a catastrophic failure of civil discourse, the moment when words are abandoned for weapons. But the ghoulish celebration that followed is a failure of something even more fundamental: our capacity for shared grace. It reveals a society so fractured, so steeped in animosity, that the murder of a man can be seen as a victory. The two events are inextricably linked. The vitriol that fuels the celebratory meme is a tributary to the same river of hatred that feeds the assassin’s rage.
Looking at the timeline of vile posts and the subsequent firings, it’s clear that we are trapped in a vicious cycle. The extreme rhetoric of figures like Charlie Kirk fosters dehumanization. That dehumanization leads some to celebrate his violent death. That celebration, in turn, is met with public shaming and professional ruin, which only serves to deepen the resentment and paranoia of those who feel their side is being persecuted. And so the wheel of political polarization turns, grinding us all down. The story here is not about a few bad actors who posted stupid things online. It is about a country that, when faced with a moment of profound tragedy, proved it had forgotten how to grieve together. And that may be the most frightening tragedy of all.
