Punch, Judy and Charlie Kirk in the social media battle royal

Sketches from a Punch and Judy show, by George Cruikshank (British Museum)

     Punch and Judy is a traditional British puppet show, once found in 19th century seaside resorts. A tribute to chaos, with the anarchic Mr. Punch and his long-suffering wife Judy going at each other with bats. There was a policeman, and a baby, invariably ejected from the little curtained booth as the children in the audience shriek with delight. Plus, for exotic danger, a crocodile.
     Eventually, modern sensibilities caught up with Punch and Judy — all that violence — and they were toned down and largely disappeared, except for a festival or two.
     I'd like to offer Punch and Judy as a useful frame for understanding social media. We somehow still consider social media as news and debate. 

British Museum

     But it's neither. News is supposed to involve information that is reliably true. And debate involves parties bringing facts to the table to argue points in good faith.
     What we've got instead in social media is algorithm-fueled chaos, where malice and outrage top reason and accuracy, a battle royal, war of all against all.
     Or rather, the traditional political parties, Democrats and Republicans degraded into Mr. Blue and Mrs. Red, pounding the tar out of each other, using words as sticks, while the rest of us sit, cross-legged at their feet, whooping in delight and shock.
     This was very clear during the latest social media frenzy over the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and out of the billions of words expended over the past five days, I want to focus on the way my fellow liberals flooded social media with remarks Kirk made over the years.
     The unsaid implication being, I guess, that as a person who said this kind of thing, he somehow deserved death, which he certainly did not.
     I agree with policy analyst and media pundit Malcolm Nance, who immediately labeled the murder terrorism, adding, "No one had the right to take a life because you have a political disagreement in this country." Later, he tweeted that Kirk "was a vile, unapologetic racist & White supremacist. But he had a RIGHT to speak all the racist White supremacist twaddle he wanted without getting shot."
     This truth flew past a lot of Democrats, who preferred to focus on two statements of Kirk's, presented as particularly significant.
     First, regarding gun deaths:

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Photo courtesy of Howard Tullman