Irish Examiner view: Fraying fabric of civil discourse

Charlie Kirk's killing could well be the tipping point that provokes a perilous period characterised by political reckonings and vengeance

Charlie Kirk’s killing cannot be allowed to be the touchstone where a spiralling cycle of violence becomes a foregone conclusion and where those at the extremities of political debate pull the rest of the country over the edge and into a vortex of even greater calamity. File picture: Lynne Sladky/AP

America’s descent into its political heart of darkness will be further accelerated by the assassination of Donald Trump acolyte and Maga poster boy Charlie Kirk on a university campus in Utah on Wednesday.

The value of shared understanding in US politics seems long to have been abandoned in favour of targeted polarisation, the coarsening of public debate, and the deliberate inflammation of people’s fears and insecurities. It has rocked the country to its foundations. Kirk’s murder, despicable and brutal as it was, is yet another indicator of the breakdown of normalcy across what used to be the greatest and proudest democracy the world had.