I came home from Ukraine, where the lines of division were drawn in blood and artillery. When I left, America’s politics were already fractured; when I returned, they felt unrecognizable. The assassination of Charlie Kirk—whatever one thinks of his ideas—didn’t emerge in a vacuum. It was the culmination of years of manufactured battles, exaggerated crises, and partisan trench warfare that made violence seem inevitable.
The dynamic reminds me of Donbas in 2014. The war there did not begin with tank columns and missile strikes; it began with corrosive mistrust, rival camps convinced of the other’s illegitimacy, and a political class that preferred weaponized outrage over compromise. America is not Donbas, but the parallels are hard to miss.
What follows is a running list—not comprehensive, but telling—of the false fights and exaggerated dramas that hollowed out our public square and brought us to this point.
1. Trump’s demand for Barack Obama’s birth certificate. A racially charged conspiracy that sought to delegitimize a sitting president.
2. The inflation of “cultural appropriation” into a culture-war hammer, obscuring any reasonable critique of exploitation.
3. The trans bathroom debate—a non-issue in practice, but turned into a national hysteria.
4. Gender pronouns framed as a civilization crisis, rather than acknowledging the tension between personal identity and biological reality.
5. Republicans’ scorched-earth attacks on Roe v. Wade, transforming abortion into a permanent weapon.
6. The push to outsource conversations about sex and identity to schools, turning classrooms into battlegrounds.
7. Trump’s refusal to treat rivals as legitimate opponents, corroding norms his predecessors—Reagan, Bush, even Nixon—respected.
8. Liberal arrogance: the reflex to dismiss dissent as ignorance, branding themselves as an elite class apart.
9. Benghazi, dragged from tragedy into years of partisan theater.
10. Russian interference in 2016, real but inflated into a partisan cudgel rather than a sober recognition of a long-standing threat.
11. Immigration: a festering problem both parties exploited but neither solved.
12. The polarized framing of immigrants as criminals or saints, never people in need of policy and dignity.
13. The panic over Critical Race Theory, a niche academic framework ballooned into a national moral crisis.
14. The global Left’s reflexive disdain for Western history and heritage, reducing pride in identity to shame.
15. Revenge politics—the cycle of sabotage that left Americans disillusioned and openly wondering whether a one-party system might at least deliver stability.
Each of these episodes left scars, not solutions. They created a politics of spectacle, where outrage eclipses governance. The result is a society so polarized that to some twisted individuals, assassination no longer shocks as unthinkable, but instead feels like the next logical step.
I saw in Donbas how corrosion of trust opens the door to hard men and authoritarian temptations. The United States is not there yet, but it is closer than most want to admit. If we don’t reckon openly with how these pseudo-crises hollowed out democracy, we may find that the cracks in our politics widen into something far darker.