Flash Point
Cooler heads or a darker road: the choice is arriving. We can step off this path. But we have to choose it on purpose.
On September 10th, 2025, conservative influencer and founder of Turning Point USA Charlie Kirk was assassinated during a campus event in Utah. It's left the nation shocked, but unfortunately unsurprised. We're living through a flash point in American history, where fury and polarization are rapidly beginning to spill into bloodshed. The question now isn't abstract or academic. It's what this climate is producing in real time.
Political violence in America has been escalating; Kirk's murder is one more rung up that ladder. He was a close ally of Donald Trump and, admittedly, a polarizing figure. None of that makes a bullet an acceptable rebuttal. A sniper's shot cut him down mid-debate, and the crowd fled in panic. I unfortunately watched the videos of the shooting. It was horrific. Almost immediately some celebrated online while others stoked the flames with talk of vengeance. Whether you agreed with Kirk or not, tossing fuel on a fire that's close to jumping containment lines is more than reckless.
We Needed Leadership in this Moment
What we needed in the aftermath was leadership that lowered the temperature. We didn't get it. The President of the United States could have used the largest platform in the world to not only condemn the violence full stop, but to model restraint – including his own (significant) contributions to divisive rhetoric. Instead, predictably, he could not bring himself to be the bigger person even in this moment. He blamed "the radical left," before investigators had even identified a suspect or motive. The contrast with his response to the June assassination of Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman, her husband Mark, and their dog is hard to ignore; the rhetoric then was subdued at best, and there was certainly no national half-staff order.
The loudest online right-wing reactions went further. Chaya Raichik, the founder of the anti-LGBTQ group "LibsOfTikTok" posted, "THIS IS WAR." Elon Musk called the left "the party of murder." Laura Loomer, a conservative influencer who is considered an unofficial advisor to the President, said that the administration should "shut down, defund, and prosecute every single Leftist organization." Andrew Tate, another high-profile conservative voice, called for civil war. Even Stephen Miller, the President's Deputy Chief of Staff, chimed in. These aren't anonymous troll accounts; these are people with real megaphones and power. What they're exhibiting isn't leadership in this moment – it's pouring gasoline on the fire.
High-profile figures on the left have almost universally denounced the murder, in direct contrast to the picture being painted by these influential provocateurs. To be clear, I don't think that any of the extreme reactions we see online (from either side) are indicative of how the average American feels about any of this. No one should be celebrating a politically motivated murder. No one should be fanning the flames and attempting to prime an otherwise reasonable public to believe that the "other side" wants to kill them.
The "exhausted majority?" We hate that this happened, whether they agreed with Charlie or despised him for the things he did and said. Not because his life was more or less valuable than anyone else's, but because we keep watching as political violence continues to escalate, our babies are slaughtered in schools, inflammatory rhetoric gets ratcheted up, and our leaders refuse to suck it up, take responsibility for their rhetoric, and set a new tone in pursuit of political unity. And why would they? That would be politically disadvantageous.
Normalized Cruelty
Here's the conflict in me that I won't pretend isn't there. Kirk relentlessly pushed rhetoric that directly endangered people like me – transgender people. As a parent, my heart aches for his family. I gain nothing from his death. I take no joy in it. I'm angry it came to this at all. We should be arguing in public, not burying our dead. Whatever our disagreements, he was a human being, a fellow American, and a builder of a formidable political machine. He didn't deserve to be gunned down, his kids don't deserve to grow up without their dad, and his family doesn't deserve to have to live with the fact that they lost a husband, a parent, and a child.
But crises like this don't appear out of thin air. They're the predictable outcome of treating politics as warfare and each other as subhuman. Cruelty has been normalized – sometimes turned into spectacle. The White House even posted a video of shackled immigrants boarding a deportation flight tagged as "ASMR."
In Florida, a migrant detention camp built in alligator-infested swampland – nicknamed "Alligator Alcatraz" – has become a political brand, complete with merch and photo-ops.
When you train people to laugh at suffering and see not only opponents, but other human beings, as monsters, violence starts to feel permissible to a small – but incredibly dangerous – few. Conspiracy mills, political grifters, and algorithmic echo chambers continually pour fuel on that fire. And it's priming people not just to strike first, but to strike back. That's how tit-for-tat hatred accelerates.
If we don't interrupt this cycle, it points somewhere we absolutely don't want to go: civil war. That's not melodrama. We're laying the groundwork brick by brick – an assassination here, a foiled plot there, each side citing the other's excesses to justify the next escalation. We're quickly approaching the edge of the cliff – and if we step off, we've passed the point of no return. What comes afterward will be a vicious spiral.
Pulling back from that edge isn't naïve. It's survival. We desperately need an off-ramp from lethal polarization: cooler heads, fewer dopamine hits from rage, and a politics that prizes persuasion over humiliation. That won't just mean changing who holds power – it will mean changing how we fight for our values.
It's beyond devastating that we are here. I want the country my generation was promised: freedom paired with basic decency; neighbors who disagree but still see each other as neighbors; a nation my son will never have to defend against his own.
We can step off this path. But we have to choose it on purpose.