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In the dim glow of a Charlotte light rail car on August 22nd 2025, Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee who had fled war for a chance at American safety, sat listening to music through her headphones.
Surveillance footage captured the horror that unfolded next: an unprovoked knife attack from behind, fellow passengers ignoring her in her last moments as she cried, bleeding out, before she slumped on the to the dirty floor and died. Her assailant, Decarlos Brown, a 34-year-old man with a history of mental illness and arrests, had stabbed her repeatedly, before fleeing.
Zarutska's death was not just a tragedy; it became a symbol of a nation unraveling, where vulnerability meets indifference.
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This incident, unfolding in the tail end of the summer of 2025, was merely the prelude to a cascade of events that exposed the fractures in America's social fabric. Just weeks later, on September 10, conservative activist Charlie Kirk was fatally shot in the neck during a campus event in Orem, Utah. The 31-year-old founder of Turning Point USA, a vocal Trump ally, described by some as a future presidential candidate fell doing what he had always done, talking to people who disagreed with him. His killer, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, a self-described radicalized leftist from a middle-class background, later confessed to family members, citing Kirk's “hateful” rhetoric as provocation.
Social media erupted, not with universal mourning, but with cheers from some corners—posts celebrating his death that led to firings, though hardly enough to stem the tide.
These stories, raw and unrelenting, point to a deeper malaise. The progressive argument—once a beacon of empathy, equity, and reform—has faltered, breeding not unity but a toxic polarization that normalizes inhumane cruelty. In an era where daily headlines chronicle unprovoked violence and gleeful schadenfreude, we must ask: How did a movement rooted in compassion contribute to this darkness? The answer lies in the unintended consequences of ideological purity the left always suffers from, where nuance erodes and hatred festers.
The progressive vision, born well before the civil rights struggles of the mid-20th century and invigorated by the Obama era, promised a more just society. It championed criminal justice reform, mental health awareness, and protections for the marginalized. Yet, by 2025, these ideals have curdled into something unrecognizable.
Consider the Zarutska killing. In Charlotte, a city governed by progressive policies emphasizing decriminalization and community policing, Brown's prior offenses—including assaults—had resulted in lenient sentences under "soft-on-crime" reforms. Critics, including Trump administration officials, decried these as emblematic of progressive failures. The release of the video surveillance footage on September the 5th put a face to the story and fueled the outrage to new levels. The bystanders' inaction, captured on video, echoed a societal desensitization: progressive calls for "defund the police" had, in some views, eroded communal responsibility, leaving individuals isolated in the face of peril. Despite championing “womens rights” the progressive left had very little to say when it came to Iryna.
Kirk's assassination amplified this rift. Robinson, described in court documents as "poisoned by online radicalization," had immersed himself in leftist forums decrying Kirk as a fascist enabler. The shooting, from a rooftop during Kirk's "American Comeback Tour," was no isolated act. It followed a pattern: the suspect's bullet casings bore engravings like "Bella Ciao," an anti-fascist anthem co-opted by online extremists. Online, the response was swift and vicious. Thousands of posts on X celebrated Kirk's death, with users from progressive circles labeling him a "threat to democracy" as justification for his slaying. Employers fired hundreds, but the viral glee persisted, revealing how echo chambers—nurtured by progressive activism's focus on "punching up" against perceived “oppressors”—had blurred into outright malice and dehumanization.
Not content with plumbing the craven depths of humanity, this dehumanization now extends to the young. A viral video from early September [ [link removed] ] showed two sisters, indoctrinated either by society or their parents (or both), being asked to guess what “the best news ever” was.
The clip, shared widely, [ [link removed] ] captured their wide-eyed youthful excitement and hope as they tried to guess what the good news was.
Child: “Donald Trump died?
*Off Screen Adult Laughter* - “Uhhh Second best news.”
Child: “The Vice President died?”
*Off Screen Adult* - “Ok, third best news.”
Child: “That Elon Musk died?”
It is highly unlikely that children of their ages have any real grasp of the gravity of what they were saying. They are just repeating what they have heard. Given that they volunteered the shocking answers so freely to a parent with no fear of consequence, it's likely that we can guess with some accuracy who they heard it from.
That the mother of the two girls is a pre-school teacher and the father a member of the National Guard [ [link removed] ] should give anyone pause before they say that this progressive rot is the preserve simply of the blue haired pronoun brigade.
The video is a stark indictment of “progressive attitudes” in homes and classrooms. What was once meant to foster empathy has now supplanted critical thinking, has been twisted into narratives of “systemic” evil sowing seeds of generational hate and turning children into unwitting partisans.
Even in the courts, this toxicity manifests. On September 16, 2025, Luigi Mangione, accused of murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December 2024, saw his state terrorism charges dismissed for insufficient evidence of intent to intimidate a population leaving the second degree murder charge.
(Quite how stalking a specific individual on the streets of New York with a loaded handgun before executing them from behind does not count as pre-meditated murder one is something that the New York Justice system has yet to make clear.)
Mangione, portrayed by supporters as a Robin Hood-esque folk hero against corporate greed, drew cheers from crowds outside the Manhattan courthouse, some clad in "Free Luigi" shirts.
Progressive critiques of healthcare profiteering, a very valid concern and one noble in its intent, had radicalized into vigilante justice, where killing an executive becomes a cause célèbre. The judge may have upheld the second-degree murder charges, but the celebration outside underscored a moral inversion: violence as redemption.
These vignettes are not isolated anomalies but symptoms of a failed progressive paradigm. The movement's emphasis on identity and grievance has found a home online. Something that social media algorithms amplify, creating silos of ever increasing extremism and recommending ever more extreme communities where empathy eventually atrophies. What began as a fight against injustice has morphed into a culture where the "other" is not just wrong but evil—deserving of death or derision because they are not human.
Historically, America has weathered polarization: the Gilded Age's robber barons met Progressive Era reforms, tempering excess with pragmatism. Yet today's divide, fueled by 24-hour outrage cycles, resists such correction. Emotional hatred threatens democracy more than ideological differences, correlating with rising violence. Kirk's assassination, Zarutska’s murder and Thompson’s execution, following two attempts on Trump himself, exemplifies this.
As these events cascade, the progressive argument's failure becomes more apparent. Try as the Left might to create a moral equivalence between acts by the Right (J6 is a favored reference) to the acts perpetrated by the Left. It is the Left's absolutism—framing any act of dissent against their world view as bigotry—that has eroded our humanity. It is all too easy to paper over the divisions and say both sides are to blame. This is simply not true. Consider this:
Iryna was murdered in an unprovoked attack by a dangerous man who should not have been allowed to be walking the streets. Soft on crime is not a right wing position and never has been.
There is no Left wing person who so openly debated their political adversaries as Charlie Kirk did - (and if there is one that we haven’t heard of, they certainly have not been shot in the middle of a debate.)
In classrooms the next generation inherits not hope but hostility. The shocking fact that came in to focus amidst the online glee over Kirk’s death and the resultant firings was quite how many of the people, just like the mother of the two girls in the video above, were educators, the people teaching the next generation, away from the prying eyes of concerned parents.
America in 2025 feels like a darkening theater, where applause follows tragedy. To reclaim the light, progressives must rediscover nuance: reform without radicalism, justice without joy in suffering.
The alternative is to become a movement where cruelty is currency, and unity a relic. The callous bile that we have witnessed expressed in the last few weeks by the “Progressive Left” is not sustainable for the country.
Progressives need to look in the mirror and see what they have become, and they need to do it sooner rather than later, because they are on the cusp of becoming so obsessed with their warped sense of moral piety, that they risk detaching completely from reality.
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