America’s institutions exist to resist evil, teach virtue, and instill purpose in all of us. Charlie Kirk’s murder commands us to restore them.
I n 1993, terror gripped America when David Gunn, an abortion doctor in Florida, was shot and killed by the disturbed extremist Michael Griffin. To Daniel Henninger, a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, this incident was more than just a tragic act of wanton violence. It was the latest symptom of a profound moral sickness afflicting the American soul.
Henninger diagnosed this sickness in a famous editorial titled “No Guardrails.” It argued that during the latter half of the 20th century, the “barriers of acceptable political and personal conduct” had all but crumbled in American life. Rules and norms of right behavior had been disregarded, and the virtue of self-restraint had been abandoned. America had plunged into a morass of “social and personal dysfunction” embodied by figures such as Griffin and Fran Stephanie Trutt, an animal rights activist who had attempted to bomb a surgical-supplies company four years earlier.
How did this transformation occur? Henninger pointed to the riots that engulfed the 1968 Democratic National Convention and how they were justified by pundits, politicians, and intellectuals. In the aftermath, “America had a new culture, for political action and personal living.” Everything became permissible, and moral standards were no longer sacred. As the political and cultural elite embraced irresponsibility, the rest of America followed suit, and social disorder flourished.
“No Guardrails” ended with a call to reconsider this new reality of daily “confrontations and personal catastrophe.” But more than 30 years later, we have never been more overwhelmed by examples.
Stories of death and despair saturate the news cycle. The corrosion of basic standards of decency has only accelerated, leaving no institution unaffected. This rise in public indiscipline has emboldened our leaders in politics and the media to behave with brazen disregard for decorum and the law. The internet, still in its infancy when Henninger’s editorial was written, has consumed everyday life, with almost no guardrails to constrain its content. Anonymous accounts flood the virtual landscape with death threats, conspiracy theories, and coordinated trolling campaigns. When violent tragedies strike America, they are broadcast to the world in unfiltered form throughout social media, then instantly converted into memes.
Charlie Kirk’s sickening assassination is our culture’s latest monument to the degradation of self-control and its consequences. From what we know at present, his suspected killer, Tyler Robinson, was a young man from a stable, ordinary family. He had a strong academic record and briefly attended Utah State University on a prestigious scholarship before leaving to pursue an electrical apprenticeship. Friends and neighbors saw him as “normal” and “goofy.” Somehow, somewhere along the way, part of his humanity was lost.
The case of Luigi Mangione, who assassinated UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last year, is disturbingly similar. Mangione was a high school valedictorian and a University of Pennsylvania graduate with a promising career in the tech industry until he slowly withdrew from normal life and isolated himself from his friends. Suffering from a back injury and other physical ailments, he came to resent the health-care industry and saw Thompson as a suitable vehicle for vengeance. “Frankly these parasites simply had it coming,” he wrote in his manifesto. Evidently, like Robinson, Mangione’s sense of morality was warped to such a degree that he ceased to regard extremism as beyond the limits of permissible behavior.
Gunn’s murder has inspired other attacks on abortion clinics and physicians in the years since it occurred. But in our hyper-online age, the assassinations of Kirk and Thompson have had an immediately sinister influence on a much grander scale. In the days since Kirk’s death, social media has been flooded with depraved posts celebrating, mocking, and marginalizing this horror. The suggestion that Kirk somehow deserved to be killed for expressing his beliefs and debating their legitimacy has been widespread. When Mangione’s identity was revealed, a similar phenomenon occurred. Online voices hailed him as a hero — a freedom fighter who performed an act of retribution against a villainous system of oppression. His crime has inspired fashion trends, and he has received more than $1 million in donations for his legal defense.
A nation that glorifies cold-blooded killers has become hopelessly unconstrained by the guardrails erected to sustain it. If we cannot condemn murder, then we cannot abide by the fundamental moral precepts on which the rule of law depends. When we champion such horrific killings, we inure ourselves to increasingly severe breaches of social order. Any violent or destructive act can be given some twisted justification. A social fabric stained with such nihilism is doomed to unravel.
To reverse this trend, our political leaders must recommit themselves to the norms, virtues, and standards that ensure social stability. This, however, will be no simple task. Politics today is indistinguishable from tribal warfare. Since 2015, President Trump has animated the MAGA movement through crude and combative rhetoric. His supporters cheer him on, reveling in his talent for outraging progressives while ignoring the ongoing corrosion of civility in public life. His beleaguered Democratic opponents, meanwhile, can only attempt to outdo him by embracing their own profane approach to political dialogue. After all, the Democratic Party made clear its own egregious disregard for the guardrails of government when Joe Biden’s allies desperately sought to conceal his obvious mental decline to secure a second presidential term.
More than anything else, strong guardrails are a product of strong institutions. As they become dysfunctional, so does our culture. From schools and churches to families and meeting places, institutions shape our moral character and keep us grounded in reality. Their decay has left people rudderless and alienated, and the artificial communities that abound on the internet have become a powerful force in their place.
But message boards and social media feeds are a poisonous substitute for engagement with the real world, and the anonymity they grant is a dehumanizing force. Fringe viewpoints propagate online as vulnerable people discover them, become indoctrinated, and then share them among their peers. X and other platforms reward aggressive put-downs with virality. And impersonal chatrooms — such as the Discord server where Tyler Robinson reportedly wrote that his “doppelganger” had murdered Charlie Kirk after the assassination — absorb people into a virtual culture far removed from the norms of real life, where whoever can produce the most offensive meme or ugliest remark enjoys the highest social capital. Young men are particularly drawn to these counterfeit communities, and when they lose themselves in cyberspace, the results are often deleterious.
On the internet, behavior without guardrails has become a viral spectacle. Robberies and harassment are filmed for “prank videos” and distributed to millions of impressionable viewers on YouTube and TikTok. Those same platforms are replete with footage of “public freakouts” and incidents of antisocial behavior, all shared by bystanders who felt more compelled to record than intervene in the hope of garnering e-fame. Most horrifically, death itself has become a currency of online attention. Mere moments after Kirk was shot, a close-up video of the tragedy was shared online. The graphic footage, indelible in the most odious sense, spread rapidly across multiple platforms. A culture so taken with violence and public degradation has drifted far from its most basic moral restraints.
Daniel Henninger wrote “No Guardrails” to encourage a rethink of the status quo. But since 1993, the status quo has diminished. Now more than ever, it is time to heed his warning, before the likes of Tyler Robinson and Luigi Mangione become cultural progenitors rather than anomalies. America’s institutions exist to resist evil, teach virtue, and instill purpose in all of us. If we can nurture and dedicate ourselves to them once again, then the guardrails of our civilization can be rebuilt. The alternative is to continue a slow, painful march toward collapse.