When There Are No Easy Solutions

Friday, September 26, 2025

There is a planting patch next to my back door.  When we bought the place it was overgrown, the shrubs and flowers consumed by an ivy.  I hired a crew to clean out the bed completely and replanted a few day lilies and a red bud tree.  Only one problem – the ivy resprouts every few days.  I have to spray the bed with a mild herbicide almost continuously to keep the ivy in check.  The stuff is persistent, and I find myself struggling to know what to do..  The problem is deeper than I thought.  So it is with our problems of political violence.  It is going to take new and novel effort to eradicate them. 

Yesterday Jim Geraghty pointed out that it is in the best interest of our political leadership to keep stoking the fires.  I might point out there is a difference between hyperbole and incitement – but he does have a point – today’s politics thrive on demonization of the opponent.

Over at Instapundit, Ed Driscoll quotes Christopher Rufo on how this current wave of political violence is different than what we suffered in the late 60’s and early 70’s.  Rufo:

In the 1960s and 1970s, America witnessed a wave of political terrorism. Left-wing radicals hijacked airplanes, set bombs in government buildings, and assassinated police officers in service of political goals. The perpetrators were almost always organized, belonging to groups like the Weathermen or the Black Liberation Army….In recent years, a new form of terror has emerged: decentralized, digitally driven violence organized not around coherent ideologies but around memes, fantasies, and nihilistic impulses. The perpetrators of this low-grade terror campaign do not belong to hierarchical organizations or pursue concrete political aims. More often, they come from ordinary families and lash out in acts of violence without discernible purpose.

So, the whole “permission structure” picture is starting to take shape.  What most people hear as hyperbolic political rhetoric, when heard by some individuals is heard as a call to or permission to violence.  But there is something even deeper at play here:

The mass adoption of large language model (LLM) chatbots is resulting in large numbers of mental health crises centered around AI use, in which people share delusional or paranoid thoughts with a product like ChatGPT — and the bot, instead of recommending that the user get help, affirms the unbalanced thoughts, often spiraling into marathon chat sessions that can end in tragedy or even death.

The internet is new factor here.  Even if AI reinforced psychosis is not the issue, the internet amplifies and warps – like a game of “telephone” – until the hyperbole becomes an actual call to violence.  Further, the internet enables small communities to form around that warped-to-reality hyperbole, creating a pressure to act.

Now, let’s step back just a bit.  The internet has created a self-reinforcing double helix that we need to find a way out of.  On the one hand it has caused our rhetoric to get ever closer to the extremes simply to be heard over the noise.  On the other hand it has overridden many of the normal mechanisms that our culture traditionally used to keep the violence prone among us in check.

Put simply, the internet has exposed in new and novel ways the darkness that hides in our hearts – what Christians like to call “sin.”

How many politicians have you heard talk about Jesus this week?  I have heard at least a handful say they talked about Christ more publicly this week than in the rest of their career combined.  Why?  It is not just because Charlie Kirk talked about Jesus a lot.  It is because the assassination of Charlie Kirk has made it plain that in this new, internet-driven age, we cannot paper over the darkness in our hearts with a mere civil order.  We have to excise that darkness completely.

And thus the message and ministry and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ becomes the most essential message of our time.  It is the only the message the promises to remove the darkness entirely – not merely keep it in check.