Rot at the Core: Death, Social Media and the Collapse of the American Soul 

When Marcellus saw the Ghost of King Hamlet, he knew that “something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” This most menacing line has been on my mind since Charlie Kirk’s public assassination at a Utah college campus. Something is rotten in these United States. And it is, in some way, the very same thing that was rotten in Denmark: seeing the dead. One of the most frightening aspects of our entire social media architecture is that it can deliver to us in near real time the brutal death of a human being. This is not normal. Something is terribly rotten.  

On the day of Kirk’s assassination, I was in a Washington, DC coffee shop waiting for a friend to join me. At the table next to me, the group audibly gasped and then announced that Charlie Kirk had been shot. No longer on social media, I said a quick prayer, hoped for the best, and knew that I would learn more soon. Just then, my friend came into the coffee shop and so I put my phone on silent. A few hours later, when my friend and I parted ways, I looked at my phone and saw more than forty messages had been sent to me. And here is what’s hard to comprehend: the vast majority of those messages were the video of Kirk’s assassination. I did not ask for this video. I did not want to see it. But we live in a world where not only can you download a dead man’s final moments, but few people think twice about watching and sharing that video as if it’s a good pasta recipe.  

The ease with which those images and videos traveled, the thoughtless way in which we shared them, reveals the sinister side of technological advancement. It exposes the degree to which social media has desensitized us, stripped us of the natural horror that ought to accompany the spectacle of death, and conditioned us to consume human suffering as one more item in an endless buffet of digital content. Who would have thought that a large part of our modern world would mimic the ancient Roman world, where death was an opportunity for entertainment at the Colosseum? But there is one crucial difference. In the Roman world, one had to choose to go to the Colosseum. Social media do not give you the option to choose. Friends still on Twitter/X remark that the video of Charlie’s murder simply auto-played while they were scrolling. This is a harrowing reality. Imagine scrolling on Twitter and seeing a funny dog video, a great football throw, a standup comic, Charlie’s assassination, a spicy political take, another sports clip, in quick succession. The sad part is that so few people stopped to recognize that this reality is anything but normal. The internet should not thrust murder videos on us without our consent. 

We have normalized a kind of violence on demand. There are YouTube channels where you can watch police related shootings and see people die before your very eyes. For the first time in millennia, death has been absorbed into the circuitry of entertainment and politics and we, its users, have learned to accept this inversion of the natural order without hesitation. It is anything but normal. It is perverse.  

Some might say that we need to see these videos because such horrors galvanize change; seeing these videos causes people to act. At the very least, the argument goes, it causes people to feel. “Would you not pray differently if you had seen the video?” remarked one friend to me. Not only do I think that to be empirically untrue (had anything changed after President Trump was nearly assassinated last year? Have we become a more empathetic nation?), but as a society—dare I say as a species—we should not have our empathy, prayer, or desire to change domestic political life rest on having to see videos of murder, be it Charlie’s or Iryna Zarutska’s or anyone’s. The integrity of our souls is more important. I do not believe God wants prayer that comes at my soul’s expense. 

I am a military strategist by training, which means that the better part of my intellectual life is spent reading and writing about war. In war, we send troops to kill. This, however, is a very difficult prospect; it is not normal for one man to take the life of another. But if just wars are to be won, armies need to be able to arm soldiers with the capacity to kill. That end is accomplished by desensitizing soldiers to death and killing. One small change (among others) that modern militaries enacted to desensitize soldiers to killing was to switch out round, bullseye targets for human silhouettes in target practice, so that the soldier can get used to squeezing a trigger at something that resembles a grown man. This small change, according to Lt. Col. David Grossman, greatly increased soldiers’ capacity to kill. For the soldier, however, this desensitization serves a terrible but necessary purpose: just wars must be won, and they can only be won by soldiers ready and able to kill. But for the civilian public, watching the endless stream of killings on social media has no value, serves no purpose. It simply corrupts the soul and dulls the conscience, all for nothing. If that small change can make a difference in the mind of a soldier, imagine what happens to the soul of a nation when it can see gruesome death for free whenever it wants.  

My point here is not merely to warn about consuming this violent content; I imagine readers of this publication are with me in guarding our eyes from such vile material. The consumption of violence on social media is a social problem. This, dare I say, is much worse than the problem that we social conservatives have been raising about pornography. We are all intimately aware of what unfettered access to pornography does to our culture: declining marriage rates, increased divorce rates, less sex, more violent sex. But a society that can consume death with such ease, that is not repulsed by the videos (and the news of) death, is a terminally ill society that simply cannot survive. A society that shrugs at (or worse, cheers) murder has forgotten the sacredness of life.  

This is where we must reclaim the principle of promoting the general welfare. Our Founders did not imagine that liberty could survive when detached from government’s responsibility to safeguard the common good. Conservatives believe in using the law to promote the general welfare. Many of us, I imagine, are pleased that we outlawed child labor; not because parents were incapable of instructing their own children, but because the practice degraded the common life of the nation. In the same way, we must come to terms with the fact that unrestrained social media use is killing not only our politics but our souls. To speak of the general welfare in this context is to insist that a society that celebrates or passively tolerates the public circulation of murder videos is no longer a society in any meaningful sense. At the very least, it is not one I wish to live in. 

We need to change how social media operate in American society. My dream of turning it off will, I suspect, remain just that: a dream. But fundamentally altering how they operates, with laws aimed at regulating the content available on their platforms, is a first step. It should simply not be as easy as it is to share assassination clips online. Let those videos live on the dark web. They have no business being on platforms and sites that can reach the masses, especially children.  

Some will object, predictably, on First Amendment grounds. They will say that any restriction on what can be posted, shared, or circulated is a restriction on free expression. But here we must be clear: before guaranteeing the right of free speech, the Constitution encourages its adherents to promote the general welfare, to strive for a more perfect union. The Constitution protects speech. But it does not force us into living under technological systems that weaponize human weakness and dissolve the conditions of civic life. To say that government has no role in confronting social media’s destruction of our moral ecosystem is to abandon the very idea of promoting the general welfare. 

And here lies the dark, sinister truth: our society is already being governed, just not by laws accountable to the people. It is being governed by algorithms designed in boardrooms in Silicon Valley, optimized to addict, polarize, and monetize. When Twitter/X auto-plays a murder on your feed, it shapes what we fear, normalize, and ignore. When Discord, 4chan, and Reddit serve as breeding grounds for young men to become radicalized through online, anonymous “community,” they perpetuate the illusion that online life is real life. Digital media can be so powerful and toxic that what might start as online beliefs and grudges can morph into real-world violence and murder. These platforms, and many others, are undoubtedly contributing to the degradation of human dignity. We must ask whether we will allow ourselves to be ruled by the algorithm and unaccountable corporate powers or whether we will reassert the role of law in ensuring that society’s moral and civic foundations are upheld.  

This is a civilizational test. If we fail it, then Charlie Kirk’s assassination will not be the last moment of blood turned into spectacle, but one more entry in a growing archive of digital death that numbs us further with each passing day. The violence we consume today as content will become the violence we tolerate tomorrow as politics. I fear it already has.  

That is why we must act now, decisively and unapologetically. Death must never be reduced to content. To promote the general welfare in our age means to place the soul of the nation above the gatekeepers of the algorithm.  

Something is rotten in these United States. We can either acknowledge the rot, confront it, and begin the work of restoration, or we can continue as we are—scrolling past murder, laughing at cruelty, numbed to the sacred and wondering why our civilization no longer has the strength to endure. Pray that heaven will direct it. 

Image licensed via Adobe Stock.