The Culture War Has Gone Hot

By Abe Greenwald

I saw the footage of Charlie Kirk’s assassination before I had a chance to click away from it. That’s what social media does. It forces the ugliness of the world into your field of vision without your consent. And it does it over and over again.  

But it’s not the technology’s fault. Someone, a human being, made the decision to post phone footage of a gruesome killing so that I, and millions of others, would have to see it—and he could rack up clicks. 

There was a time when the marketplace for snuff films was only rumored to exist. The idea that there were people so soulless as to enjoy watching real-life murder was too dark to fully accept. Today, social media is that marketplace, and we’re all snuff consumers. And whether or not we consent, we’re becoming an increasingly soulless people.

If you’ve lost the instinct to think twice before broadcasting a clip of a young man who was shot only minutes earlier, you’ve lost a good part of your humanity. Same for all those who retweet it, send it to others, or turn it into a meme. 

Inhumanity is a viral and progressive condition. As it spreads from host to host, it never stops eating away at their souls. It neither starts nor ends with the internet. Social media, like the radical campus, is just a segment of the loop it travels, gaining encouragement and a sense of purpose as it goes along. And then someone gets killed.   

We’ve run a gauntlet of national catastrophes in recent years, and we’ve moved on from each one. But yesterday’s sickening crime was different. Everything about it seems to have announced, finally, that we may not be able to keep moving on. Not like this, at any rate. Nearly a quarter century after the attacks of 9/11, the U.S. has been brought to the doorstep of ruination—not by foreign terrorists but by forces of inhumanity within. 

In 2001, it was almost impossible for Americans to understand how a group of terrorists could murder thousands of innocents and call it good. In 2025, the country has untold thousands who have folded the claims of those terrorists into their own radical ideology, who echo the terrorists’ call for the destruction of the U.S. and Israel. And there are subsets among them who hunt and kill innocents in the name of one leftist cause or another.  

Ideological violence has infused our politics like an invisible toxic gas, and it just keeps spreading.  “The culture war” is, ruinously, no longer metaphorical. We used to speak mockingly of “social justice warriors.” But now there are actual social justice snipers. We used to describe someone as a “racial arsonist” if they stirred up one group against another. Today, there are Jew-hating firebombers. Radicals kill in the name of a free Palestine, transgenderism, anti-capitalism, and even “Rationalism.” Their choice of targets has multiplied along with their causes. They shoot at politicians, CEOs, embassy staffers, counter protesters, and, yes, a 31-year-old political activist who made it his mission to engage in civil disagreement because, as he said, “When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence … because you start to think the other side is so evil and they lose their humanity.” 

That once-theoretical future suddenly looks a whole lot more like the present day.

Abe Greenwald is the executive editor of COMMENTARY.

https://www.commentary.org/articles/brian-stewart/summer-2020-covid-george-floyd/