I had a different column planned for this week — on the same topic that’s in the title, as it so happens. But not five minutes before I sat down to write it, I heard that conservative commentator and speaker Charlie Kirk had been shot in the neck at a speaking event in Utah.

Before I could get even a few paragraphs completed, it was announced that he had died.

Charlie’s murder is just the latest example in a long litany of horrific examples that explain why America is so polarized. And it comes down to this:

The division in America is, at its core, between those who want the truth — want to know it and want to be able to say it — and those who believe that with power comes the right to decide what the truth is, and to substitute a “narrative,” if that suits their purposes.

America is polarized because Americans have been betrayed and manipulated and exploited and lied to by the most important cultural institutions we have — government, the medical profession, the justice system, the educational system, the media, the entertainment industry.

I could write a book with examples, but here are just a few:

— We were lied to about the origins of COVID-19.

— We were lied to about the safety of the mRNA shots, which were never vaccines.

— We were manipulated and forced by the government, employers and educational institutions into taking those injections, shutting down our businesses, closing our schools and masking our children. We are still trying to discover the health risks of those shots and to calculate the economic and educational losses caused by those decisions.

— In fact, it now appears that we’ve not been told the truth about the safety of the childhood vaccines generally — at least with the current scheduled amount of them.

— During the 2016 presidential election, our government was actively using social media corporations to censor us, and only Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter (now X) exposed that vile conspiracy.

— We were lied to about Joe Biden’s mental capacity and actual engagement not only while he was running for reelection in 2024 but throughout his entire term as president of the United States.

— We continue to be told by medical professionals, school administrators, teachers and others that men can become women, and vice versa, by force of will.

— We have been told that retail theft on a widespread scale is “reparations,” that rioting and burning are “mostly peaceful protests,” that keeping criminals incarcerated is “racist,” that allowing the homeless, the mentally ill and those with addictions to live out their horrors on public streets is “compassionate,” and that opposing illegal immigration is selfish and xenophobic.

— We have watched as the death of a drug addict is celebrated with thousands of news articles, elaborate funerals, a gold casket and weeping politicians, but an innocent young Ukrainian woman stabbed to death by a repeat felon on public transit doesn’t even warrant a single story.

America is polarized because the people and institutions we should be able to trust lie to us as a matter of course for their own benefit, and because anyone who tries to get to the truth and bring it to the attention of the public — in fact, anyone with an opinion that runs counter to that of the elites is this country — is denounced as a conspiracy theorist, a kook, a threat to “our democracy,” to “public health” and to some people’s very existence.

That inflammatory rhetoric is completely detached from reality and encourages violence. That’s why America is so polarized. That’s why social media is filled with posts proclaiming that conservatives and Trump supporters deserve to die. And I won’t be surprised if it turns out that that’s why Charlie Kirk was shot and killed.