The Descent into Ghoulishness

By James Lileks

Thursday, September 18, 2025

 

In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, patrons of Twitter or TikTok or Bluesky or Facebook were treated to spontaneous exultations of glee and celebration. This was not surprising, or new. When Reagan was shot, I remember some idiot at the college bar where I worked asking, “Why couldn’t they have shot him later?” because her soap operas were being preempted. But things are different now, and here’s why.

 

Imagine if, after JFK or Reagan or the pope was shot, someone got out his Kodak home movie camera, filmed himself laughing and dancing with joy, then set up a bedsheet screen in his front yard and ran the scene on a constant loop. Anyone would have thought the person was deranged. But that is what people do now on social media.

 

If they don’t record a TikTok, they dribble bile on Facebook: “He was a racist nazi transphobe xenophobe veganphobe Trumpbot hatemonger, FAFO BABY Stew in hell in feces. Sorry not sorry.”

 

Check the profile: it’s from a fireman. Or a veterinarian whose profile page shows a cheerful guy with a puppy. Or a real estate agent. Or a military recruiter. Or a suicide-prevention counselor. Or a girls’ soccer coach. Or a nurse.

 

Or a teacher. So many teachers. When I was a kid I thought there was a hierarchy of sober authority figures, in this descending order: President, Pastor, Mayor, My Fourth Grade Teacher. They were paragons of the general order of morals, invested with probity by virtue of their office — at least that was your childish apprehension of the world. Now you open X and you see “reaped what he sowed, karma’s a bitch LOL” and it’s from the assistant principal of Ponyfield Elementary School in Happy Glen, Ohio.

 

And you think: Was it always like this? When Kennedy was shot, was your grade school principal communicating via shortwave radio with other like-minded people and praising Oswald? When Reagan was shot, did your kid’s youth counselor take a Polaroid of herself twerking with glee and pin it up on the grocery-store neighborhood message board?

 

Were we always surrounded by ghouls? Did the invention of social media give them the freedom to unfurl their sociopathic banners? You’re stunned: all these pretty women with perfect smiles, underscoring every celebratory line with fierce wide eyes and theatrical gesticulation, braying manic glee for likes and follows. Perhaps they’re a new phenotype that arose from the interaction with their phones, believing the devices to be a magic mirror that will always tell them they’re the virtuous ones. The smart ones. The kind ones.

 

Maybe it all started the first time someone in college strolled into class wearing a Che T-shirt, and everyone thought it was cool. Ah, the romance of rebellion. Look at that noble revolutionary, staring off to the near future when all will be equal and free! Bonus: He got to kill the right people. Dude had all the fun.

 

For many on the right and in the muddled middle, the murder of Charlie Kirk was another iteration of political violence from the left or left-identified causes. The murder of two Israeli embassy employees by a guy who shouted “Free Palestine.” The trans-identified loser with a portfolio of left-standard grievances who shot children in a church. The surfacing of the video that showed a repeat criminal stabbing a Ukrainian refugee woman on a train. And now this. And we need to have a conversation about guns and the perils of holding positions like “get married and have children”?

 

The left will say those aren’t related at all, except for their connection to, oh, colonialism and capitalism and the other bogeymen they see under their beds. But consider: A man known for his strict definitions of gender shoots up a mosque full of children. Two Arabs from Gaza, at an event in D.C., are murdered by an Evangelical Christian supporter of Israel. A repeat felon Kluxer stabs to death a Senegalese refugee woman on a train. A popular podcaster who shows up at state fairs and gun shows and has respectful, passionate, cheerful back-and-forths with anyone who disagrees is shot while giving a speech.

 

What do you think we’d be having a conversation about then? All the ills and sins of the West and America. Kirk would have condemned all those crimes. Someone would still have shot him. TikTokers would dance in praise. As the kids say, Moloch gotta Moloch.