Here is the headline that broke the internet: a Carnegie Mellon professor named Uju Anya celebrated the death of Queen Elizabeth II. She tweeted that she hoped the monarch's passing was "excruciating." She said the Queen presided over a regime of genocide and that she would not mourn a "thief" and a "colonizer."
The internet did what the internet does. It screamed. It canceled. It defended. It threatened. And in the middle of all that noise, something deeply American was happening—something we should all be worried about.
We have forgotten how to forgive. And we have replaced it with performance.
Let me be clear. Uju Anya had a right to her anger. She is a Nigerian-American scholar whose family lived through the brutal Biafran War, a conflict in which British-supplied weapons helped starve millions. Her rage is not abstract. It is generational. It is personal. And the First Amendment protects her right to speak it.
But here is where the story turns from politics to something more troubling. Anya didn't just express pain. She performed it. She curated it. She dressed it up in viral language designed to detonate across social media. "Excruciating." "Genocide." "Thief." Those are not the words of a grieving daughter. They are the words of a content creator who knows exactly how to trend.
And America rewarded her. Millions of clicks. Endless segments on cable news. A place in the cultural conversation she could never have earned through scholarship alone.
This is who we are now. We don't process grief. We publish it. We don't reconcile with history. We weaponize it for engagement. Every tragedy becomes a tweet. Every wound becomes a brand. Every dead monarch becomes a chance to go viral.
The old idea—that you could hate what someone did while still acknowledging their humanity—is dead. The new rule is simple: your pain is only valid if it is loud enough to hurt someone else. If you can't make the other side cry, you didn't really suffer.
This is not progress. This is collapse. It is the collapse of the public square into a coliseum. It is the collapse of forgiveness into weakness. It is the collapse of nuance into a single, brutal binary: you are with the colonizer or you are with the colonized. You are with the mourner or you are with the monster.
Uju Anya is not the villain of this story. She is a symptom. She is what happens when a society teaches its citizens that the only way to be heard is to be cruel. That the only way to matter is to make someone else bleed on the timeline.
The Queen is dead. The empire is mostly gone. But the war over who gets to be angry—and how loudly—is just getting started. And in that war, there are no winners. Only applause.
Our Take: We have created a culture that rewards rage over reflection and performance over peace. Uju Anya is not the problem—she is the mirror. If we don't like what we see, we need to stop clicking.