Murders as Content

Once upon a time, a murder caught on camera was so shocking, so rare, that it stopped the nation cold.

People argued about it for weeks. There were hearings. There were vigils. There was that collective hush where everyone realized something terrible had happened.

Now it’s becoming commonplace. “Did you see the video?” followed by “Yeah, I couldn’t finish it,” followed by “Anyway, did you want Thai or pizza?”

This is not an accident. This is not a coincidence. This is what happens when a country is lectured, over and over, that cruelty is strength and spectacle is truth.

Trump didn’t invent violence. America has had a long history of it.

But Trump has turned up the volume until the speakers blew.

We are now a nation of amateur forensic "experts," pausing grainy footage, squinting at pixels like they might reveal something new if we glare hard enough. We analyze angles. We argue about frames. We debate whether a death “counts” as homicide based on camera quality.

The corpse becomes a Rorschach test for whatever you already believe. (If you haven't deleted TikTok yet -- and you should -- you'll see MAGA morons celebrating these murders. Sickening.)

And here’s the sickest part: Trump stood at the podium and trained us like pigeons. Rage pellet. Outrage pellet. Shock pellet. Repeat until numbness sets in. Repeat until the footage barely registers as human suffering and more as content.

He normalized the idea that public cruelty is entertainment. That humiliation is leadership. That watching someone get destroyed is participation in democracy.

So now, when a real person is killed on camera, some of us no longer ask “How do we stop this?”

We ask “Which side is going to weaponize this better?”

Others scroll past a murder the way we scroll past cat videos.

This is what degradation looks like. It’s not sudden. It’s not dramatic. It’s the moment when your realize the unthinkable is become our reality.

Trump didn’t just degrade politics. He is degrading us.

He's degraded our nervous systems. He's rewiring our reactions so that horror is an everyday occurence, that each murder has to be even more appalling than the last to capture attention.

How much more will he degrade us?

How much more will we accept before we notice what we’ve become?

Because here we are, a country that can watch a killing on tape and now debate whether it deserves concern. A country that confuses being desensitized with being tough.

A country that is paying taxes so that ICE can murder and terrorize without supervision or punishment.

There’s a difference between witnessing injustice and soaking in it. Between documentation and consumption.

Between refusing to look away and refusing to look human.

Trump blurred those lines until they are almost invisible.

And the price for that degradation isn’t paid by him. (He's already soul-less.) It’s paid by us, every time we flinch a bit less than we used to, every time we watch something unspeakable and immediately click "Share."

We are not broken beyond repair. But we are bloodied and bruised. And the bruise keeps getting pushed.

The question isn’t whether Trump can sink lower. He can. He will.

The question is whether we’re willing to stop telling ourselves this is just how things are now.

Because it doesn’t have to be. It cannot be.

Because a society that refuses to be entertained by death is not naive. It’s sane.

A culture that demands more than spectacle is not weak. It’s awake.

If that sounds radical, consider how far we’ve already fallen to make basic decency feel like a bold new idea.

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