First — my deepest condolences to the family of Charlie Kirk. Whatever your politics, whatever you thought of the man, whatever he said or believed — what happened to him was wrong. Full stop.
And I find myself needing to say that out loud, because in the hours after his death I watched a portion of social media celebrate. Cheer. Laugh. And that — more than the act itself — told me something about where we are as a society.
"Killing someone...because of what they say, what they believe, who they support? That's not protest. That's not change. That's madness."
The Pattern We Keep Ignoring
History has an ugly habit of repeating itself, and political assassination is one of its most reliable loops. We have seen it in Rome. We have seen it in the Balkans. We have seen it in the Arab Spring. And the outcome is almost never the one the killers hoped for.
Violence aimed at ideas does not kill the ideas. It supercharges them. A man with a platform becomes a martyr. A movement that was losing momentum finds its fuel. The people who were on the fence — and there are always people on the fence — pick a side. And they rarely pick the side of the people who celebrated.
What This Reveals
We have been building toward this for years. The rhetoric has escalated on every side. The language has dehumanised. The algorithms reward outrage. The media profits from division. And somewhere along the way, a portion of the population decided that the other side is not just wrong — they are evil. And once someone is evil, violence becomes justifiable in the mind of the committed.
That is a very dangerous place to be as a civilisation.
Where This Goes
I have written about civil unrest before, about the patterns that precede societal collapse. And the pattern I am watching right now makes me deeply uneasy. Not because one man died. But because of who cheered. And who will now respond. And who will respond to that response.
Cycles of political violence do not end themselves. They escalate until something — usually something catastrophic — forces a reset. History is not subtle about this.
What We Choose Now
I am not a political writer. I am a fiction author who spends a lot of time thinking about how societies collapse — because that is the backdrop of the world I write in. And I can tell you that the early chapters of every collapse story look a lot like this.
So I am asking — whatever side of the political divide you sit on — reject the celebration. Reject the dehumanisation. Disagree loudly, argue fiercely, vote with everything you have. But hold the line on this: we do not kill each other for our politics.
Stay human. Stay grounded. Don't let rage write the next chapter.
