The following email snippets are from a member of my debate club, taken from an exchange she started last summer, with the subject line “Elon Musk Deserves to Die”:

Everyone involved in the decision to dismantle the USAID program had a choice, and it would have personally cost them very little to do it in a way that minimized or even avoided unnecessary deaths. 

Musk made a premeditated, unprovoked decision to remove institutions and processes that were saving thousands of lives. Even killing one person in those circumstances could be justification for capital punishment. [bold in original]

As his unarmed accomplice, Trump could also be subject to the death penalty, but that's a whole other kettle of fish…

I'm going to stipulate that Musk did have the power and did take or cause to be taken the fatal actions, because to do otherwise would be delusional. 

Withholding aid that results in death must be considered murder…In this situation, unnecessary deaths are those that have occurred or will occur due to the dismantling of USAID.

There are two factors involved: the fact that it was shut down at all, and the way it was shut down. I hold Musk responsible for the deaths caused by the latter, but he also could have chosen not to get involved with it at all. 

My only argument would be that it's immoral for the world's richest man to take food from the world's poorest people for no good reason. 

Most of the problems in the world are caused by psychopaths… Not all psychopaths are bad people who do terrible things, but those who are should be separated from society. Instead they are running countries…. 

Over the multi-month exchange, this individual mocked and misrepresented counter-arguments and never budged from her original position. Nothing could penetrate her fortress of moral certainty or widen her perspective beyond a narrow moral reasoning. She repeatedly brushed off considerations such as evidence of culpability and constitutional protections as nothing but a smokescreen used by bad people to hide their bad values.

I’ve often encountered this sort of impervious moralism online and in-person, especially among Democrats. As The Economist recently pointed out, “Democrats have a …problem: they turn complex policy disputes into vicious moral ones.” Of course, Republicans have moral convictions too, but Democrats (and others on the left) seem more narrowly moralistic about more things than Republicans. That is, they tend to reduce the principles of good governance to a list of non-negotiable moral imperatives. Housing is a right! Republicans not so much, with the exception of pro-life activists. Perhaps, as a group, Republicans are more sensitive to the limitations on what government can accomplish, given scarce resources and inevitable trade-offs, making them less susceptible to easily sloganized demands. That’s a guess.

Despite their differences, Democrats and Republicans generally agree that the other is morally depraved. As noted by anthropologist Manvir Singh (The New Yorker, October 27, 2025),  

[In a November 2022 survey], more than thirty per cent of American respondents said that their political opponents were not fully human. In a survey conducted just after the 2024 Presidential election, the figure had climbed to nearly fifty per cent— with almost no difference between the parties.  

These findings echo a broader pattern political scientists call affective polarization: the replacement of disagreement with abhorrence… Each camp, in other words, sees the other as monstrously bloodthirsty.  

What begins as vigilance curdles into caricature. Another study published last year found that each side wildly overestimates its opponents’ approval of all sorts of moral wrongs…Political opponents become monsterized—transmuted into villains beyond redemption.

 God help us all.