The Civility Trap: Why Being Nice Makes Things Worse

On September 10, 2025, Fox News host Brian Kilmeade suggested we should give homeless people "involuntary lethal injection" or, as he clarified, "just kill 'em." This happened on national television. During breakfast hours. While families got ready for work and school.

The response? Media outlets described it as "controversial remarks." Journalists asked whether he'd "gone too far." Four days later, Kilmeade offered what CNN called an "apology," and everyone moved on. He kept his job, his show continued, and the network issued no statement.

Now imagine if a homeless person had suggested on television that we should kill Fox News hosts. How long would that clip play on repeat? How many segments about "violent extremism" would follow? How quickly would law enforcement respond?

This asymmetry reveals something about how civility actually functions in a degraded information ecosystem: it flows in only one direction, protecting those who violate it while constraining those who might resist.

Every stable society depends on reciprocal agreements. You don't steal from me; I don't steal from you. You treat me with basic dignity; I return the courtesy. These agreements work because they're conditional. Cooperation continues only while both parties cooperate. Game theorists have studied this exhaustively through the prisoner's dilemma, and the conclusion is unambiguous: when facing a bad-faith actor, continuing to cooperate isn't virtuous. It's self-destructive. The optimal strategy, proven across thousands of iterations, is tit-for-tat. You begin cooperatively, but when someone defects, you must defect in response. Not from spite, but from necessity.

Consider what happens when one party abandons these norms while demanding others maintain them. A politician lies about election results, but journalists must remain "objective." A Supreme Court justice accepts luxury vacations from billionaires, but protesters must respect the "dignity of the court." A television host calls for mass murder, but critics must respond "constructively."

Here's what makes this trap so effective: your neurology is working against you. When you violate social norms, even in response to someone destroying those norms, your anterior cingulate cortex fires the same signals as physical pain. Being rude to someone advocating genocide literally hurts the brain of people who have functioning empathy capabilities.

This isn't a bug; it's an evolutionary feature. For 200,000 years, humans lived in small bands where reputation determined survival. Social violations meant exile, which meant death. We're wired to feel intense discomfort when breaking taboos, even when those taboos no longer serve their purpose.

Modern authoritarians exploit this systematically. They understand that most people would rather lose rights than lose propriety. So they frame every escalation as a test of your civility. Will you be "divisive"? Will you "sink to their level"? Will you be the one who "destroys discourse"?

Notice how the burden always falls on those responding to violations, never on those committing them. Kilmeade suggests murdering the homeless, and the question becomes whether critics are being too harsh. The framework itself is the trap.

A 2021 study by researchers at NYU and the Université Grenoble Alpes found that posts containing "out-group animosity,” content attacking perceived enemies received twice the engagement on Facebook and Twitter. The more extreme the rhetoric, the greater the amplification. Yet platforms and networks rarely enforce consequences. Kilmeade's comment fits this pattern perfectly: extreme statement, viral spread, zero professional penalties. The incentive structure is clear: extremism pays, civility doesn't.

Consider the neurological evidence. Molly Crockett's 2017 research at Yale identified what she calls outrage fatigue in the digital age. She argues that repeated exposure to moral violations online leads to habituation. What happens is our brains literally stop responding with the same intensity when norm violations become routine. But here's the critical insight: this desensitization is amplified when violations go unpunished. Social feedback shapes whether we maintain moral sensitivity or become numb to transgressions.

The implications are particularly meaningful for the U.S. right now. Every time someone calls for mass murder on television and faces only civil disagreement, we're training millions of brains to accept it.

History provides a natural experiment in the effectiveness of matching rhetorical force. When Senator Joseph McCarthy destroyed lives with baseless communist accusations, most senators maintained decorum, expressing "concerns" about his methods. McCarthy's power grew for four years. Then Edward R. Murrow abandoned journalistic neutrality and called McCarthy exactly what he was: a demagogue exploiting fear. Within months, McCarthy was censured and powerless. The key wasn't violence or law-breaking. It was the willingness to match aggressive lies with aggressive truth.

The psychological mechanism behind this is well-documented. Solomon Asch's conformity experiments showed that people will deny obvious reality when surrounded by others doing the same. But introducing just one dissenter who forcefully breaks consensus reduces conformity by 80%. The dissenter doesn't need to be polite; they need to be loud.

When Republicans In Tennessee expelled two Democratic lawmakers for protesting gun violence, the expelled representatives didn't issue statements about "disappointment." They called the expulsion "fascist," organized massive rallies, and turned their Republican colleagues into national pariahs. They were immediately re-elected with increased majorities. No violence. No property damage. Just the refusal to treat authoritarianism as legitimate, valid, or tolerable.

Robert Sapolsky's primate research offers an evolutionary perspective. In baboon troops, when subordinate males consistently defer to aggressive males, the aggressive behavior intensifies. But when subordinates match aggressive displays with equally aggressive counter-displays, dominant males moderate their behavior within days. The key variable isn't violence; it's the social cost of aggression.

Apply this framework to contemporary discourse. When Tucker Carlson promotes the "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory to millions of viewers, media critics wrote thoughtful rebuttals. When the same theory motivated the Buffalo shooter who killed ten Black shoppers, those same critics wrote more thoughtful pieces about the dangers of extremist rhetoric. Carlson faced no consequences. The thoughtful rebuttals changed nothing.

Contrast this with the response to Rush Limbaugh calling Sandra Fluke a "slut" for advocating birth control coverage. Women's groups didn't write concerned letters. They organized an advertiser boycott and made executives' lives miserable with coordinated calling campaigns. They made supporting Limbaugh socially and financially toxic. He lost 140 advertisers and never recovered his influence.

The philosopher Karl Popper identified this dynamic in 1945, arguing that unlimited tolerance leads to the disappearance of tolerance itself. But Popper's formulation was incomplete. He focused on tolerating intolerance rather than the mechanism by which intolerance spreads: the exploitation of asymmetric civility norms.

Christina Bicchieri's research on social norms at the University of Pennsylvania explains why this asymmetry persists. She distinguishes between "descriptive norms" (what people actually do) and "injunctive norms" (what people think they should do). When these diverge, people follow descriptive norms while professing injunctive ones. Everyone says we should be civil, but those who abandon civility gain power, creating a system where civility becomes a performance by the powerless for an audience of the powerful.

The historical record is unambiguous. The labor movement won the eight-hour workday through strikes and refusing to treat robber barons as respectable businessmen. They called them parasites and thieves, full stop. ACT UP saved lives during the AIDS crisis by refusing to let politicians who enabled mass death maintain their comfortable respectability. They threw ashes on the White House lawn and blood on the FDA steps. These movements didn't succeed by being civil. They succeeded by making the status quo socially untenable for those in power.

In 2021, when someone at Charlie Kirk's Turning Point USA event asked 'when do we get to use the guns' to kill political opponents, Kirk responded by discussing 'exhausting peaceful options first' rather than 'we don't murder people.' His civil response normalized political violence as a debatable timeline question.

The audience of thousands heard political assassination discussed as a matter of 'when,' not 'if.' The psychological principle of the 'mere exposure effect,' first documented by Robert Zajonc, shows that repeated exposure to an idea, even without endorsement, gradually increases acceptance and reduces aversion. By discussing political murder civilly, they're manufacturing consent for it.

The alternative isn't random violence or purposeless rage. Strategic incivility follows clear principles: impose social costs on norm violation, demonstrate that resistance is possible, and make the continuation of oppression more embarrassing than reform. When Kilmeade suggests killing the homeless, you don't debate. You make his position professionally untenable through coordinated campaigns of economic pressure and public accountability.

This conclusion is uncomfortable for many because because we've been neurologically and culturally programmed to value civility above justice. Moreso, they’re terrified of the reality we live in right now; they hope that if they keep acting “normal” then things will just go back to how they were. That time has passed.

The evidence is clear: in asymmetric conflicts where one side exploits civility while violating it, maintaining civility ensures defeat. This isn't a metaphorical defeat. It's real defeat, measured in rights lost, lives destroyed, and democracies collapsed.

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References

Asch, S. E. (1956). Studies of independence and conformity: I. A minority of one against a unanimous majority. *Psychological Monographs: General and Applied*, 70(9), 1-70.

Axelrod, R. (1984). *The evolution of cooperation*. Basic Books.

Bicchieri, C. (2006). *The grammar of society: The nature and dynamics of social norms*. Cambridge University Press.

CNN. (2025, September 14). Fox News' Brian Kilmeade says comment about killing mentally ill homeless people an 'extremely callous remark.' *CNN Business*. https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/14/business/brian-kilmeade-fox-news-apology-homeless

Crockett, M. J. (2017). Moral outrage in the digital age. *Nature Human Behaviour*, 1, 769-771. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-017-0213-3

Kirk, C. (2021, October 25). *Exposing critical racism tour* [Public event]. Turning Point USA, Nampa Civic Center, Idaho.

Murrow, E. R. (1954, March 9). A report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy [Television broadcast]. *See It Now*. CBS.

Popper, K. R. (1945). *The open society and its enemies* (Vols. 1-2). Routledge.

Rathje, S., Van Bavel, J. J., & van der Linden, S. (2021). Out-group animosity drives engagement on social media. *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences*, 118(26), e2024292118. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2024292118

Sapolsky, R. M. (2017). *Behave: The biology of humans at our best and worst*. Penguin Press.

Zajonc, R. B. (1968). Attitudinal effects of mere exposure. *Journal of Personality and Social Psychology*, 9(2), 1-27.