The most prevalent guessing game on social media is “Who killed Charlie Kirk?”

Not who fired the bullet that ended the conservative activist’s life last week. That was presumably settled with the surrender of Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old student acting on his expressed hatred of Kirk. Rather, who or what pushed the buttons that led the killer to the pull the trigger.

That argument is fueling the most detestable national discourse in my memory. Since Kirk’s murder on a Utah college campus, the putrid swamp of social media has sounded the depths of hatred in America and revealed it as immeasurable. We are a nation awash in hate.

Tens of millions of social media users are taking to the various platforms to unload their vitriol, facing off across the political divide.

The right immediately declared Kirk a martyr to the cause of protecting the nation from apocalyptic wokeness. When they found out Robinson’s romantic interest is transgender, they were certain they had the motivation.

The left blamed the overheated MAGA rhetoric, including from Kirk himself, hinting he bore responsibility for his own death.

They were gleeful to learn Robinson’s grandmother and parents are Republicans. They claimed the right to tell Kirk’s widow how she should grieve and critique the way she told her young children about their daddy’s death. Because her husband was on “the other side,” many could muster no sympathy for her loss.

X Compulsive Disorder has cost dozens of posters their jobs. And the right is demanding more heads. A group called the Charlie Kirk Data Foundation boasted on X Saturday that it had compiled a list of 40,000 “radical leftists and their employers,” many of whom had publicly celebrated Kirk’s murder. Another group working with gotcha journalist James O’Keefe is offering concealed cameras to record educators saying bad things. Forget “1984”; this is borderline Stalinist.

I typically keep a close eye on X. But by Saturday evening, I was finished. There wasn’t enough bourbon in the house to ease the distress of watching Americans go after each other with such loathing.

On Sunday morning, I joined a WDIV-TV “Flashpoint” panel to discuss the murder. Guy Gordon, a broadcast newsman, boiled down the national mood to this: “We don’t just want to win the argument, we want to kill the other guy.”

That’s the culture social media is fostering, and what played out on that Utah campus. In the beginning the online platforms promised to connect the world. But connection hasn’t led to understanding, just more division. On the same panel, the show’s former host, Devin Scillian, noted social media has made it “so much easier to be nastier and more venomous to someone at your keyboard than you ever would be sitting across the table.”

Fear and hate are the currency. A friend sent a quote in an attempt at putting the horrific slaying in perspective: “One twisted man carried a gun onto one college campus and fired one shot, killing one man. Regardless of their side, many are turning ‘he’ into ‘them’ and blaming half the nation for it.”

There’s no place for that sort of tempering on social media. We are engaged in a virtual civil war, with social media as the battleground. Last week, we saw how easily the fight can produce real-life bloodshed.

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Nolan Finley is editorial page editor of The Detroit News and co-author with Stephen Henderson of The Civility Book, a Guide to Building Bridges across the Political Divide, published by Wayne State University Press.

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