In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, something deeply unsettling emerged across the digital landscape. Within hours of the announcement, social media platforms filled with memes, out-of-context clips, screenshots, and threads demonizing the man.
Some had followed Kirk for years, others disagreed with him on every imaginable policy issue, but many openly admitted they had never even heard of him before the news. And yet, almost instantly, they found themselves swept into a tide of hostility, hatred, and in some extreme cases, outright celebration of his death.
This wasn’t simply disagreement. It wasn’t reasoned criticism. It wasn’t even satire. For many, hatred seemed like the reflexive default response. That phenomenon—hating someone you don’t really know, sometimes up to the point of justifying violence against them—is worth pausing over. Not because it’s unique to Charlie Kirk (it isn’t), but because it says something alarming about the way we now operate as a society.
Hatred by Proxy
What happened here was a kind of hatred-by-proxy. People didn’t necessarily hate Kirk the person; they hated the image of him that circulated online. A clipped sentence, a meme with snarky commentary, or a cherry-picked quote could serve as a stand-in for his entire identity. People who had never read his books, never listened to his full speeches, never met him in person, and never followed his career felt confident enough to pronounce sweeping moral judgments: He deserved it. He was evil. Good riddance.
This dynamic is not confined to politics. We’ve seen it happen with comedians, athletes, CEOs, influencers, and even ordinary people who go viral after a few seconds of video. A moment captured on TikTok or Twitter gets divorced from its context, grafted onto a pre-existing narrative, and then weaponized. Before long, the mob forms a complete portrait of the person—usually monstrous, often irredeemable—and the call for condemnation follows.
But here’s the sober question: How much should you really know about someone before you commit to hating them? And perhaps even more importantly: should hatred itself ever be our goal?
The Illusion of Total Knowledge
Part of the problem lies in the illusion of total knowledge. When you see a viral clip of someone saying something outrageous, it feels like you’ve glimpsed their “true self.” The mind leaps to conclusions: If he said this, then that must be what he always believes. If he joked about that, then that must define his entire character.
But human beings are infinitely more complicated than soundbites. A person is a collection of virtues and flaws, insights and blind spots, kindness and cruelty. Even our closest friends and family members—people we’ve known for decades—can surprise us, disappoint us, or act inconsistently. To think we can fully “know” a stranger through secondhand snippets is a dangerous delusion.
This isn’t to say Kirk’s words or anyone else’s shouldn’t be criticized. Criticism is healthy, necessary, and central to free expression. But hatred? Hatred carries an implicit finality. Hatred doesn’t just disagree—it wishes ruin. And when hatred fuses with misinformation or partial information, it becomes combustible.
Hatred as Entertainment
Another element at play is the way hatred has been gamified. Social media rewards outrage. Expressing moral disgust earns likes, retweets, and applause. The more clever the dunk, the more viral the meme, the more points you score in the endless tournament of online righteousness.
In this way, hatred isn’t always organic; it’s performative. People exaggerate their revulsion not necessarily because they feel it deeply, but because it plays well in front of an audience. When someone dies, especially someone polarizing, there’s a race to stake out your position quickly. Say something snarky, dark, or cruel, and you might win a moment of viral glory.
But here’s where it turns perilous: when cruelty becomes performance, empathy becomes weakness. Hatred starts to masquerade as virtue. It becomes not just permissible, but celebrated. And that cultural shift can make justifying actual violence feel less unthinkable.
The Dangerous Leap: From Hatred to Justification
We saw this leap in real time. Some who mocked Kirk’s death went further, essentially arguing that his assassination was somehow poetic justice. He preached X, so dying like Y was fitting. Others suggested that his political stances made him complicit in broader harms, and therefore, his own murder was merely “accountability.”
This kind of rationalization is profoundly dangerous. It confuses criticism with capital punishment, debate with death sentences. When society grows comfortable with the idea that disliking someone’s words or beliefs makes them eligible for violence, we all stand on a cliff’s edge. Today it may be a political figure you oppose; tomorrow it may be you, your family, your community.
Hatred built on half-knowledge and memes is unstable fuel. It burns hot, but it burns without wisdom.
The Humanizing Lens
So what would it mean to take the opposite approach—to withhold hatred until we truly know someone? Or better yet, to reconsider whether hatred should ever be our default posture at all?
Philosophers from the Stoics to Hannah Arendt have warned against the dehumanizing pull of hatred. Hatred clouds judgment. It collapses nuance. It transforms a person into a caricature, an avatar of everything we despise, and blinds us to their humanity.
Taking a humanizing lens doesn’t mean excusing bad ideas. It means recognizing that people are more than their worst words or moments. It means distinguishing between disagreement and dehumanization. It means cultivating the strength to say: I oppose what you said, but I will not strip away your right to live, to speak, and to be treated as human.
Lessons Beyond Charlie Kirk
While Kirk’s assassination triggered this reflection, the lesson extends far wider. How many times have we seen ordinary citizens destroyed by viral outrage, only for the fuller story to emerge later—sometimes too late? How many friendships, communities, or workplaces have been fractured by premature hatred?
In every sphere—politics, culture, personal life—the temptation is the same: to judge swiftly, to condemn harshly, and to believe that hatred offers moral clarity. But often, hatred reveals more about the hater than the hated. It exposes impatience, insecurity, or the desire for social belonging dressed up as moral certainty.
And it raises a haunting possibility: that hatred itself may be less about the person we think we despise, and more about the hole inside us that needs filling.
Toward a Different Standard
So, how much should you know about a person before committing to hatred? Perhaps the answer is paradoxical: if you don’t know them deeply, you’re not justified in hating them. And if you do know them deeply—if you’ve seen their humanity alongside their flaws—hatred might not feel like the right response anyway.
Criticism? Absolutely. Debate? Without question. Opposition? Sometimes necessary. But hatred? That should be the rarest of tools, if it is to be used at all.
Because when hatred becomes casual, when it becomes meme-driven and crowd-sourced, it loses all proportion. It stops being about real people and starts being about avatars. And avatars can be burned without conscience. People cannot.
The sober truth is this: hatred is cheap when built on ignorance. It is expensive when weighed against the fullness of a human life. And the cost, once normalized, is borne by all of us.
Conclusion
The aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination revealed more than just partisan bitterness. It exposed a troubling cultural reflex: the rush to hate strangers on the flimsiest evidence, and sometimes to celebrate their suffering or death.
That reflex should give us pause. Because hatred is not only corrosive to civil society—it is corrosive to our own humanity. To resist it requires courage: the courage to slow down, to seek context, to remember that behind every meme or quote is a complex, contradictory, living human being.
If we are to preserve both freedom and decency, then perhaps the better question is not “How much should you know before you commit to hatred?” but rather: Why commit to hatred at all, when so many better tools are available?
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