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Nate Silver is best known for his numbers. A statistician who founded the website FiveThirtyEight (regrettably shuttered by ABC), he now writes on Substack where he has broadened the topics he addresses.
This week he wrote from the heart about the Charlie Kirk murder and its aftermath. It was a message that a lot of people needed to hear prior to Sept. 10.
Its essence was this: You don’t have to say something about every terrible thing that happens.
Silver clarified that he wasn’t talking about people whose job is to comment on terrible things, such as opinion journalists. Instead he was talking about those who use social media and publishing platforms as a way to vent, or attract new followers, and who do so quickly, before all the facts have come in.
“Generally speaking, bad news happens quickly while good news happens slowly. Good news, in fact, is often just the absence of bad news: that the terrible thing that happened yesterday didn’t happen again,” Silver wrote.
“In any sort of long-term relationship — with a spouse, or a coworker, or a friend — giving things time to settle down is an essential coping strategy. When people are on a knife-edge, even what you think are the most carefully-selected words can spark an adverse, fight-or-flight reaction and provide a rationalization to escalate. We wouldn’t survive for very long as a civilization if we didn’t provide for cooling-off periods."
Social media rewards hot takes with attention, but those rewards come with real-world consequences, as many people who have lost their jobs in the past week now know. This has ignited a new debate over what constitutes free speech and what constitutes cancellation, and that’s a debate we will continue to have.
Silver quotes from the famous William Butler Yeats poem “The Second Coming” when he writes “The worst are full of passionate intensity” and says, yes, there’s a danger in ceding the social-media field to the authors of hot takes. (Utah Gov. Spencer Cox calls them “conflict engineers.”) And, he says, we are all entitled to have “a messy human reaction.”
But a messy human reaction can get you fired or expelled when it seems to celebrate a murder and thus condone violence, which is something that some Americans seemed shocked to learn this week.
When terrible things happen, often the best thing to say is “I am deeply sorry this terrible thing happened.” Kudos to actress Jamie Lee Curtis for showing how that’s done.
‘We could use a little church right now’
As my colleague Mariya Manzhos writes in her “State of Faith” newsletter this week, there is talk of a religious revival in the aftermath of Kirk’s death.
But completely unrelated to that, this Sunday happens to be National Back to Church Day, an event that’s being heavily promoted by the hundreds of radio stations in the K-LOVE network that plays contemporary Christian music, and also by individual churches.
Back to Church Sunday, according to the website by that name, was launched 16 years ago and promoted by Outreach, a Colorado Springs-based marketing company that serves churches. From the looks of the various churches promoting it across the U.S., the initiative spans a wide range of denominations.
It couldn’t come at a better time.
Amid all the recent conversation about the usefulness of “thoughts and prayers" in times of tragedy, I noticed this tweet from commentator Sasha Stone the afternoon that Kirk was shot.
The comments on X can be pretty vile, but in this case, there was an outpouring of heartfelt advice, from people posting The Lord’s Prayer to a video of Ben Shapiro reading Psalm 23.
Another person on X last week asked for advice about literally how to attend a church service.
This is what the secularization of America hath wrought: we live among people who don’t know how to pray, who don’t even know how to attend a service, who raise their children without an understanding of sin.
More than ever, we could all use “a lil church” right now, in the words of Christian singer TobyMac, whose hit song extols the comfort found within a house of worship.
Then again, I’m not sure a little church is going to do it. We might need a lot.
Recommended reading
Dennis Romboy reflected on the bright spots in a dark week. And yes, there were many.
An excerpt:
“Heroes emerged in the tumultuous minutes after Kirk went down. No one knew if more gunshots were coming. Witnesses described some people hugging strangers and helping them up, others providing rides away from campus and even shelter. A group of men formed a circle around a woman and her very young children to keep them from being knocked down as terrified attendees scrambled to get away from what they thought would be a mass shooting.”
Read the whole piece here: Through tragedy there is humanity
Valerie Hudson says she has a three-word fighting slogan: “Stop the algorithm.” She argues that young men who are chronically online are being led down rabbit holes to rabbit warrens where they marinate in toxic philosophies.
“It is the tech companies’ algorithms that push the ever-more extreme content on us so that we wind up in group echo chamber where our emotions are continually inflamed. These are, by and large, brute-force algorithms with no safeguards.”
In the wake of the Charlie Kirk shooting, it’s time for a national conversation about algorithms
And finally, the Deseret News editorial board weighed in on where we go from here.
“Earlier this year, the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science published two studies examining how many Americans have friends who hold opposite political views. One, studying friends in New York and Boston, was slanted more toward liberal Democrats and found only 3% had friendship across party lines. The second group was surveyed online and offered more balance. It found that 8% of those surveyed had friendships with people of the opposite party. The nation will never end the escalation of violence with its people isolated in silos or echo chambers.”
How to turn this dark moment into a hopeful light
Endnotes
The humble T-shirt is simultaneously a staple of the American wardrobe, a lucrative venture for entrepreneurs and a billboard for political ideas.
It was not surprising, therefore, to see two types of T-shirts crop up last week: one jeering Kirk’s death, another celebrating his life and message.
Both kinds of shirt were already being sold online the day after Kirk died; by Friday, the Charlie Kirk Show store was offering its own “Freedom” shirt, similar to the one that Kirk was wearing when he was shot, only with 9/10/25 on the sleeve.
They’re already being spotted in the wild.
As always, thank you for reading and being part of the Right to the Point community. You can email me at Jgraham@deseret.com, or send me a DM on X, where I’m @grahamtoday.