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

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.

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:

“ I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”

This was presented as smirking irony: Aha! Hoisted with his own petard!

The second was intended to blunt the human temptation to feel sorry for the violent death of any young man, a husband and father of two.

“I can’t stand the word empathy, actually,” Kirk said in 2022. “I think empathy is a made-up, new-age term that does a lot of damage.”

The unspoken logic being: You don’t like empathy? Fine! No empathy for you!

The key consideration regarding both statements is this: Kirk was wrong. Completely mistaken. His being killed doesn’t affect the wrongness, and it is a startling reminder of how the left, too, can be blinded by venom that they’d ignore this to pick up Mr. Punch’s bat and get in a few whacks.

Gun deaths are an American folk illness. Most nations don’t suffer from this. Guns don’t boost freedom, they constrain it. If you can’t send your kids to school without worrying they’ll be shot, you’re not free. Guns don’t allow Americans to “defend…. against a tyrannical government” as Kirk put it.

We’re seeing that right now. As our government becomes steadily more tyrannical, gun owners generally applaud because the right to bear arms is never among the rights being shredded.

And empathy is key to any decent society. It’s what makes you wait in line, give to charity, leave a tip, hear the other side.

Without empathy, you have a government raiding factories and exiling desperately needed workers overseas. Without empathy, we put an erratic science denier in charge of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and let him rip apart medical research and health care. Without empathy, academic funding is throttled. Without empathy, soldiers are dispatched as props.

Abandonment of empathy is a very dangerous road to go down. We are busy constructing camps, out of sight — to handle deportees, now. But can you be confident what other uses they’ll ultimately be put to? I can’t.

The warning signs flash by. On a recent episode of “Fox & Friends,” longtime host Brian Kilmeade, during a discussion of what to do about mentally ill homeless people who refuse help, suggested this solution: “Or involuntary lethal injection… or something. Just kill ‘em.”