When "Unfollow" Becomes Easier Than Tolerance
What Polarization Steals From Us
There is not a single influencer I know on social media who hasn’t lost followers in the past 24 hours because they chose to post about Charlie Kirk. It didn’t matter what they said. Whether they supported him, humanized him, or called out his flaws, thousands hit unfollow.
At the same time, on the anniversary of 9/11... a reminder of what extremist ideology can unleash on American soil... I find myself wrestling with why I feel sympathy for Kirk’s death but relief when Hamas terrorists are eliminated. To me, Hamas represents an imminent threat, both through violence and ideology. I don’t want innocent Gazans to die, so I can see how their future depends on Hamas losing power.
When we can’t distinguish between political opponents in a democracy and terrorists enforcing ideology with violence, we become less tolerant of opposing views. This is what polarization looks like. And if we can’t allow for nuance, even in death, we’re watching radicalization in real time.
So, I asked ChatGPT to help me understand:
“You’re hitting on one of the deepest tensions of our time: what it means to live in a society where people can coexist despite having radically different views—and where the line between words, harm, and justice gets blurred. Let me try to untangle this.”
Why some people feel no sadness about Charlie Kirk’s death
Personal harm: Many of his positions—particularly on race, gender, sexuality, and guns—were not just “disagreements” to the communities targeted, but felt like existential threats. When someone repeatedly diminishes your humanity, their death can feel like the removal of a danger.
Psychological defense: Celebrating or feeling relief can be a way to reclaim power. If someone’s words have long left you feeling powerless, their absence can feel like release.
Dehumanization loop: In polarized climates, we stop seeing the “whole person.” Kirk becomes only his politics, not a father/son/friend. This flattens empathy.
Why it feels different to you in the case of Gaza
Ideology plus violence: Hamas is not only an armed militant group but also an authoritarian ideological movement. Their power rests on both violent enforcement and the spread of a worldview that is fundamentally opposed to democratic, pluralistic norms. Eliminating them is seen not only as neutralizing an immediate threat but also as discrediting and containing that ideology.
Oppression of their own people: Hamas doesn’t just fight outsiders; it holds Gazans under authoritarian control. Their removal is perceived as opening the possibility for civilians to pursue a freer future.
Contrast with democracy: Charlie Kirk’s rhetoric—no matter how inflammatory—operated within a democratic system where citizens could push back through speech, protest, and votes. Hamas enforces ideology through coercion, leaving no room for dissent.
Why polarization is intensifying
Moral absolutism: More people are framing politics not as “disagreements” but as battles of good vs. evil. If the other side is evil, compassion feels like betrayal.
Algorithmic echo chambers: Social media rewards outrage and certainty. You rarely see people on “the other side” as human—it’s only the most extreme takes that cross your feed.
Erosion of shared norms: Historically, even rivals agreed on some baseline (e.g., violence is unacceptable, elections are legitimate). Now, even those norms are contested.
Trauma stacking: In the U.S., mass shootings, racism, and political corruption layer onto global wars and crises. People feel existentially under siege, which makes tolerance for opponents shrink.
Why you’re feeling unsettled
You’re noticing something important: we risk normalizing political violence.
If people shrug at Kirk’s assassination (or even cheer it), they implicitly sanction violence as a tool against domestic adversaries. That corrodes democracy from within. You can oppose him fiercely and still defend the principle that ideas should be countered with ideas, not bullets.
The sadness you’re carrying is actually a sign of resistance to the pull of polarization. It means you’re refusing to flatten people into caricatures, even those you disagreed with. That refusal is what keeps democracy breathing.
Grief vs. Justice
Charlie Kirk → Grief
For you, his death triggers grief because, even if you opposed his views, he was still a man in a democracy exercising his right to speech. His assassination feels like a rupture of democratic norms, and that makes you mourn—not necessarily him personally, but what his killing represents.
For others, the opposite: they feel justice in his absence, because they equate his rhetoric with direct harm.
Hamas → Justice
For you, their elimination feels like justice because they are not only a militant force but an ideological one. You see their removal as both neutralizing an imminent threat and opening possibilities for Gazans outside their control.
For others, it stirs grief—either because they see ordinary Gazans bearing the brunt, or because they interpret military actions as oppression itself.
Recognizing that contradiction is powerful—it means you’re not falling into the trap of one-dimensional thinking. You’re holding space for both grief and justice to be valid human responses, even if you don’t feel them in the same order as others.
When we talk about grief for Hamas, there are really two different things at play:
Grief for the individual fighters or leaders
If someone’s mission, identity, and choices are tied to killing Jews or oppressing Gazans, it’s understandable not to feel grief for them. Their deaths may feel like justice or even relief. That doesn’t make you heartless—it means you’re seeing them as agents of harm.
Grief for the human potential that’s been lost
Some people choose to grieve because each Hamas member was once a child, and their life path was warped by indoctrination, poverty, or trauma. That grief isn’t about excusing them—it’s about mourning the brokenness that produced them.
Grief for the consequences their ideology causes
Even if we don’t grieve the individuals, we might grieve what their existence perpetuates: more cycles of war, more dead civilians, more distrust.
This same concept of grief can apply to those who are feeling justice in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s death.
Political polarization
This moment exposes just how deep polarization runs. Social media has stripped away the quiet tolerance people once had for differing opinions. In earlier eras, you might have disagreed silently, or talked it out over a dinner table. Now, with feeds functioning as identity markers, a single post that clashes with your group’s narrative can feel like betrayal. The fastest way to signal loyalty is to hit “unfollow.”
Grief vs. justice reactions feed into this. If someone expresses grief for Kirk, they may be accused of ignoring his harm. If someone expresses justice in Hamas’s elimination, they may be accused of callousness toward Palestinian suffering. The complexity—that you can feel both grief and justice, but applied differently depending on the situation—doesn’t survive in a polarized climate.
That’s where radicalization creeps in. The more we treat any deviation from our in-group’s stance as intolerable, the more we collapse people into caricatures: “pro-Kirk” or “anti-Kirk,” “pro-Palestinian” or “pro-Israel.” The unfollow button becomes a weapon of purity testing, narrowing the range of what’s acceptable to say. And once nuance is gone, extremism fills the vacuum.
What you’re noticing is a symptom of radicalization, and it’s heartbreaking because it shows how little room there is for shared humanity anymore. Here’s a way to frame it clearly:
When someone dies, we should be able to sit with the complexity of their legacy—good, bad, and everything in between. But instead of nuance, we’re watching people rush to extremes. If you show humanity, you risk being unfollowed. If you speak ill, you risk being fired. This all-or-nothing response is exactly how polarization hardens into radicalization.
No tolerance for gray. People increasingly demand a “with us or against us” posture. Nuance feels like betrayal.
Moral absolutism. Death doesn’t soften divides; it magnifies them, because people see acknowledging humanity as erasing harm, or acknowledging harm as erasing humanity.
Social media dynamics. Platforms reward outrage and purity tests. Saying something compassionate—or critical—becomes a signal of what camp you belong to.
This is what radicalization looks like: the inability to recognize the humanity in someone who disagrees with you, and the instinct to cut off anyone who does.
The tragedy is that polarization is eroding not just politics but the very rituals that should bring us together in moments of death and violence.
Here are ways people can step out of the polarized spiral and back toward healthy discourse:
Lead with curiosity, not conclusions.
Instead of “You’re wrong,” try “Can you tell me why you see it that way?” It shifts the conversation from a fight to an exploration.
Separate people from positions.
Disagree with ideas without erasing the humanity of the person behind them. Critique the viewpoint, not the individual’s worth.
Practice the “pause before post.”
Before hitting publish, ask: Is this fueling division, or inviting conversation? A 30-second pause can turn a reactive comment into a bridge.
I hope these personal reflection prompts encourage all of us to dig a little deeper and never lose our humanity.