Regulate Social Media or Reject the Moral Confusion of the Extreme Left. Choose Both.
A rare political post after an important week for our democracy
I’ve been reading and learning a lot about the root causes of the murder of Charlie Kirk over the past few days, and wow! It’s shocking we’re here as a society, but now it’s our job to fix it.
First, there’s the truth of Charlie’s message (which I haven’t listened to all of, so can’t completely endorse but I believe that we had some general alignment on certain things including his ideas on speech and freedom of religion). The biggest alignment I had with Charlie was his ideas around free speech. He just spoke, was never violent, and was reaching people who had very little access to opposing opinions. You didn’t have to 100% agree with him to admire that.
To start - violence of any kind like this is unacceptable. Speech is not violence. Violence is violence. Free speech is the bedrock of our society (literally the first rule they decided to write down was freedom of speech). Charlie clearly lived and died by that idea and should be an inspiration to many of us to speak the truth even when threatened.
As I’ve been digging, there are two emerging ideas that I’ve explored so far:
Social Media is Destroying a Generation
Below is a clip everyone should watch from Scott Galloway (popular left-leaning podcast host and author) - I agree with this wholeheartedly and seems to be the prevalent left leaning stance on this issu.
I couldn’t find a good youtube link and linkedin (where I found this) doesn’t have good embedding. Here’s instagram for the irony:
This is so obviously true - Trump needs to buck up and regulate X and Facebook, even if it means market impact. The long term viability of our future is at stake.
The Left is Increasingly Morally Confused
I am fundamentally a progressive, but have leaned more moderate, especially with the rise of extremism on the left. If you are progressive, you can’t ignore how justified violence has become in the name of “things being morally right“. I have a friend and founder who’s based in NYC who is in a similar spot who calls it moral confusion.
The murder of Charlie was moral confusion at it’s worst.
It’s very very common among young adults, where double digit percentages think violence is justified as a response to speech.
Somewhere somehow these people are fitting in their heads that violence is justified when others say things that you don’t like. The ends justify the means to these people. There’s a lot of confusion about God given rights - things that cannot be taken away from you like speech, and privileges which are things that require another human being to do something on your behalf (taxes for public spaces, emergency services, and free water when you walk into a restaurant and are homeless). Our society chooses to give us these privileges, but it’s a collective choice - not a right. I tend to lean towards giving the less fortunate more privileges than less and vote with my feet with time and money (I’ve done a lot of this on my own, and paid much more taxes than the average american), but do not think that we can justify violence to force every other part of our society to endow them - this is a democracy.
Although I personally believe social safety nets are the foundation of the American dream, we can’t mismanage our country completely to keep them afloat (we can, in fact, go bankrupt and mismanage our finances if we choose). Everyone has a right to make their own choices under their own freedoms within the bounds of society though, but you do not have right to choose violence to justify privileges that only benefit a select few
Concluding
The public murder of Charlie makes me sad (and angry), and just makes me more convicted in continuing to share these ideas and find a middleground in a world that has never been more extreme. It’s why I’m choosing to say something. Because I can.