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No more games, Imma change what you call rage
Tear this motherfuckin roof off like two dogs caged
I was playin in the beginning, the mood all changed— Eminem, “Lose Yourself”
I’ve been trying to figure out how to write about this for the past two days.
My brain feels like old soup, left on the stove for too long without reheating.
There’s simply too much going on, too fast. Too many pieces in play. Too many layers. Narratives within narratives like Russian nesting dolls.
At the core of it all is that core, unshakeable feeling that once again, everything has just changed — and not for the better.
We felt it, 24 years ago this week, when 9/11 happened. We felt it again when the would-be assassin’s bullet ripped through President Trump’s ear following an uncannily-timed (and some say miraculous) turn of his head.
And we’re feeling it again now, with the horrifying public assassination of Charlie Kirk.
I tweeted out my first impression, seconds after hearing the news, nearly an hour before it was announced that Kirk was dead: “Gut feeling: this is the catalyst of something that's going to get much bigger.”
In the past couple of days, that gut feeling has proven more prophetic than I would have liked.
There’s no coherent way to tell this story. There’s no easy way to get your arms around an emergent, metaphenomenon.
By that I mean, the response to this is bigger than the sum of its parts. And it can be summed up rather simply in one important respect:
This is a cumulative effect. Last week it was the trans shooter that killed kids at a Catholic school Mass. Then it was the young Ukranian woman brutally murdered on public transit in Charlotte, North Carolina, by a black man simply because she was white. She never even interacted with him. (He was literally caught on camera saying, “I got that white girl. I got that white girl.”) A man who has been imprisoned and released far too many times, and this time it resulted in absolute savagery.
The country was reeling from both of those events when the Charlie Kirk assassination happened. The video has been getting pulled from social media, but I saw it before it disappeared. It was horrifying. The spray of arterial blood from his neck was instantaneous.
There are reports that his three-year-old daughter, who was present in the crowd, instinctually ran towards the stage because she was frightened by the noise of the gunshot.
Let yourself feel that one for a minute, because as a father…I just can’t handle it.
When news came that he died from his wound, I started describing it as an “Archduke Ferdinand” moment. Not because I think it will start a world war, but because a single, calculated act of violence can set a chain of events in motion that cannot be called back, and the results may very well be catastrophic.
Allow me to briefly set the historical scene, for context:
The Black Hand — the Serbian Nationalist group responsible for taking out the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne that fateful June morning in 1914 — wanted to start a war. They wanted independence. They wanted Russia to come to their aid and for the Slavs to rise up together to shrug off the yoke of perceived oppression from a foreign ruler.
But what they got was something so much worse. 5 million Russian war deaths, rising famine and inflation, and loss of confidence in the Tsar directly led to the success of the Bolshevik revolt and the rise of Communism in Russia, and its later spread. American interventionism and a policy of making the world “safe for democracy” shaped the next century of foreign policy. The collapse of the German monarchy and the rise of the Weimar Republic and its capitulation to the harsh penalties imposed by the Treaty of Versailles led directly to crippling inflation and German national humiliation, which propelled Hitler and the Nazi party to power 14 years later in 1933 — directly setting the stage for World War II.
By the end of both wars, both inextricably connected to that single assassin’s bullet in Sarajevo in 1914, 85-105 million people were dead — nearly 5% of the global population — and the entire world has been reeling from the aftermath ever since.
I’m not saying the same thing is going to happen here. I’m only saying that you never know how far the ripple effects will go when you take drastic action in a socio-political context that is already at the brink.
Charlie Kirk was, by most reckonings, the best man conservatism had to offer. He believed in respectful, compassionate dialogue with his ideological enemies. He went into the proverbial lion’s den again and again, trying to win people over not by violence, but with words.
And for that, he was brutally killed in front of his own wife and children and countless witnesses in person and online.
And the worst thing? The number of absolute moral degenerates who are out there celebrating what happened to him. People in the crowd stood up and cheered. People on TikTok started recording victory dances. Countless reports like this one have come in of “So many ‘normal’ liberals such as teachers, nurses, friends, family members” who are “taking a great deal of joy in Charlie’s death.” College professors making approving comments in classes or posting online. College students doing the same.
In the US House of Representatives, before Kirk’s death was announced, a stunning scene unfolded:
An unbelievable moment on the House floor.
Rep. Lauren Boebert requests a moment of prayer for Charlie Kirk.
Democrats can be heard shouting "no!"
Then, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna shouts back "y'all caused this!"
Here’s the video (the audio is a bit hard to hear):
With all of this having been said, I’m worried about where we’re heading.
A number of people, including some of my friends, have echoed the exact same sentiment:
“I can’t believe how personally I’m taking this.”
I felt that too, and I was never even a follower of Kirk. I saw an observation about this that really resonated with me, and it zeroed in on this exact sentiment:
Among all the justifiable outrage over the years, Charlie Kirk has consistently been one the calmest and most polite among us.
Someone shot him and the entire scope of the Left is celebrating.
If we do not act accordingly we might as well surrender now.
I've seen several people saying something along the lines of "I don't know why this is affecting me so personally."
Its because in Charlie you see yourself, the most polite version of yourself, the most articulate, the most charitable to your enemies.
And even that wouldn't be enough to save you from them.
It is because you are seeing that the marketplace of ideas you grew up believing as sacred is now a war zone that will get you killed and you're struggling to reconcile the world you live in with the world you grew up in.
You are struggling to comprehend and incorporate the irrefutable evidence that this political divide isn't one solved by polite exchange of ideas and that we are in a nation at war with itself.
Podcaster and commentator Konstantin Kisin echoes what I’ve been thinking and feeling:
I hope I'm wrong.
But tonight feels like some sort of invisible line has been crossed that we didn't even know was there. The last time I felt like this was 9/11 when it was clear, without knowing the how and the what, that the world was about to change forever.
Like the rules of the game had been permanently altered and there was simply no going to back to the innocent, peaceful past.
I didn't feel like this when an attempt was made on President Trump's life. If I had to rationalise why I didn't, I guess it's because several US Presidents have been shot at and even assassinated. Somehow it was within the realms of the possible, no matter how awful.
But to murder a young father simply for doing debates and mobilising young people to vote for a party that represents half of America? This is something else.
Charlie's death is a tragedy for his wife, his children and his family. I don't pray often. I am praying for them tonight. But I fear his murder will be a tragedy for all of us in ways we will only understand as time unfolds.
I hope I'm wrong.
The killer has supposedly been caught. His name is Tyler Robinson. His father, a longtime Sheriff’s deputy, allegedly made him turn himself in. We’ve learned a few things about him. 22 years old. White. University student on a scholarship. Studying engineering. Likely radicalized on campus, like so many young men and women are these days.
But there are gaps in the story. Like the fact that there are Discord messages indicating the possibility of an accomplice in hiding/retrieving the weapon. Like Thomas Matthew Crooks, Trump’s would-be assassin, these were both young men with no history of violence who grew increasingly radicalized. And it seems that there are indications of more going on than meets the eye.
Perhaps the fact that I just finished reading Jonathan Marks’ very detailed book, The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate”: The CIA and Mind Control, is coloring my view. But the desire that intelligence agencies have to find “patsies” who can be manipulated into performing political assassinations is fresh in my mind.
Still, I don’t buy the official narratives. I think we owe it to ourselves to ask the question: “Who benefits most from this?”
It’s not the American Left. They’re already on their heels. Their policies and ideological pet causes are wildly unpopular.
But the Right, which is fomenting power, federalizing policing in cities facing major problems with violent crime (arguably justifiably), and playing fast and loose with the Constitution in the attempt to expel an overwhelming number of illegal immigrants?
They are the only ones who stand to gain.
Why would the kind of person who hated Charlie Kirk give so much firepower to his side?
The fact is: people are overwhelmingly angry and fed up. There is a feeling that the Left has become so violent that we cannot coexist. The assassination of one man, no matter how influential, might not be a sufficient cause for concern. But the fact of a large portion of the populace gleefully celebrating his assassination?
That’s another matter entirely.
As the one commenter above said, “You are struggling to comprehend and incorporate the irrefutable evidence that this political divide isn't one solved by polite exchange of ideas and that we are in a nation at war with itself.”
We’ve been talking about this for years. It isn’t getting better.
The last man who spoke to Charlie Kirk in the audience of the event just before the assassination said, "The point that I was trying to make was how peaceful the Left was...right before he got shot."
You can only call people “racists” and “fascists” and “Nazis” for so long before impressionable people begin acting as though those who are so labeled are existential threats, and that a moral justification for eliminating them must exist.
Meanwhile, it feels like you can’t comment on any issue these days without actual Nazi sympathizers chiming in. I had someone tell me yesterday that “if the Nazis ruled Europe, we wouldn’t be in this mess.” There has been a dangerous rise in antisemitism over the past year. Public discourse these days often feels like 1930s Germany.
We all know this can’t continue as it is. Perhaps this furor will die down, and our modern bread and circuses — our comfortable lives and screen addictions and so on — will keep us placated.
But many of us are now facing economic and personal hardships that make such distractions thin gruel indeed. New data shows that there are more unemployed Americans than there are job openings, and according to a recent lawsuit, many of those jobs are being given only to people under 40 — usually women or minorities. I’ve been unable to find full time work since I started looking last summer. I stopped paying for all my streaming services. We never go out to eat except on major family occasions. We don’t go on vacations. We buy the most inexpensive food we can. Both of our cars have 100K miles on them.
I don’t think we’re alone.
We are seeing revolutionary sentiments echo across the world. It’s happening in Asia. It’s happening in the UK.
As the tensions grow, and the downward pressures increase, where do we wind up as a nation? We are a civilization in decline.
The future is very much in question, and no, it’s not just you. We’re all feeling it these days.
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I wonder what will happen. One of my first childhood memories was seeing the cops in our dining room, with broken glass all over the place. It turns out that MLK had just been shot, and a bullet came through our window from the direction of a mostly black apartment complex in the neighborhood. Several years later, I delivered newspapers to that complex, and always had cordial relations with the tenants. But you never know what will happen when times get strange.
I agree with you. The outcome of this is going to be ugly.