omniharmonicOut In The Bloodshed
On the Assassination of Charlie Kirk and the Failure of Political Imagination
This essay is inspired, in part, by Jesse Welles’ song, from which the title is derived. If you haven’t yet listened to Jesse or followed him on social media, I highly encourage you to do so before reading this essay. I increasingly believe him to be the moral voice of our generation.
Introduction: A Death in the Feed
The news broke as all modern news does: abruptly and disembodied, a graphic 4K killshot pushed into the dissociative social media feeds of a restless nation, algorithmically sandwiched between influencer reels, clips of starving children facing genocide, and AI-generated slop. It was an image, a symbol, a meme, instantly loaded and ready for interpretation, its meaning to be determined by the pre-existing biases of its audience.
The act itself was finite, material—a trigger pulled, a bullet in flight, the crimson blood, a body falling. But its reception was infinite and immaterial. Before the blood had even begun to cool, the assassination of Charlie Kirk had ceased to be an event and had become a symbol. It arrived not as a shared national trauma, a moment of collective catharsis and grief like a Kennedy or a King or a 9/11, but as a piece of content, atomized and distributed into the slipstream of the digital agora.
It landed like a bitter vindication for some, the sudden, sharp end of a figure who had, in their eyes, weaponized cynicism and vitriol into a formidable cultural movement. For others, it was an immediate and profound tragedy: a martyr felled in the heat of a righteous political struggle, incontrovertible proof of persecution, the ultimate confirmation that America is at war with itself.
But for the vast, un-polled majority—those who neither adored nor despised him but simply endured his presence on the far horizon of their daily lives—the news was something else entirely: dark, unsettling, a percussive blow that punctured the metronomic rhythm of the familiar political theater. A voice that had been, for years, impossible to avoid was suddenly, irrevocably silenced. In that silence, which felt for a moment both deafening and vast, hung an uncomfortable, collective recognition: something larger and more foundational than one man had been touched. The spectacle had, for an instant, consumed one of its own, and the machinery of outrage felt an unfamiliar shudder.
The comedian Bo Burnham, in his prophetic 2021 special Inside, sang of the disorienting, recursive nature of modern life. “The backlash to the backlash to the thing that’s just begun,” he sings, capturing the dizzying speed at which culture now consumes, digests, and regurgitates itself. There could be no more fitting epitaph for this moment. The assassination was merely yet another “thing that’s just begun.” The real story, the one that tells us more about the terminal velocity of our democratic decay, is in the twin backlashes that erupted in its wake. The cultural symbolism of the event, regardless of your interpretation, marks a turning point for the United States of America, a significant historical inflection point in an empire’s long decay.
This essay is not an obituary for Charlie Kirk, nor is it a trial of his character. It is, rather, an autopsy of the reaction. For in that raw, immediate, and terrifyingly predictable response lies a portrait of a nation that has lost its political imagination. On one side, a celebratory Left, convinced that certain forms of speech are so inherently violent that they justify lethal force, rushed to lionize the assassin. The other, a reactionary Right, seeing its darkest prophecies fulfilled, immediately canonized Kirk as a martyr and began to beat the drums of retributive violence. Both responses, though born of opposing ideologies, spring from the same poisoned well: a profound and catastrophic collapse of faith in the democratic process. Both reveal a society that, when faced with a crisis, can no longer imagine a future forged through dialogue, pluralism, or consensus. Instead, it sees only two paths forward: the preemptive strike or the vengeful counterstrike. This is not politics. This is a prelude to a war of total self-annihilation, a grim fulfillment of the very future Kirk’s most strident opponents claim they wish to prevent. The true tragedy of Charlie Kirk’s death is not just that a man was murdered, but that in the aftermath, millions of Americans looked at the act of political violence and, in one way or another, saw a solution.
Part I: The Justification of Violence
The Spectacle of Celebration
Perhaps the most unsettling spectacle that unfolded almost instantaneously after the assassination was not the grief of Kirk’s followers, but the glee of his detractors. Across social media, particularly among young progressives, a grim festival erupted. Memes celebrating the killer proliferated. Jokes about the killing, dark and macabre, became a form of social currency, a way to signal one’s correct political alignment. To be appropriately anti-fascist, it seemed, was to find the public execution of a political opponent a righteous and even humorous occasion. This was not the sober satisfaction of seeing a dangerous ideology defeated; it was the ecstatic, almost giddy, fervor of a team that had just scored a decisive point.
To dismiss this as the fringe behavior of an anonymous online mob would be a comforting mistake. This sentiment bled into the real world, into conversations among educated, well-meaning people who, while perhaps stopping short of outright celebration, nonetheless expressed a kind of weary, shrugging acceptance. “He had it coming,” was the implicit, and often explicit, refrain. “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.” This reaction, so widespread and so immediate, demands a deeper analysis. It is the endpoint of an ideological journey, and to understand it, we must first understand the complicated figure at its center.
A Master of Debate
To those who only knew him through the selective clips they’ve seen online, please know that Charlie Kirk was not simply a villain. His public persona was a paradox, a carefully constructed duality that allowed different audiences to see in him exactly what they wanted to see. On the one hand, he presented himself as a champion of classical liberalism, a defender of free speech engaged in the noble project of public debate. His organization, Turning Point USA, staged events on college campuses that were, in form, exercises in dialogue. He would stand before hostile crowds of students, microphone in hand, and engage their arguments. In this framing, his work could be seen as a tonic for censorious campus culture, an attempt to use the tools of rhetoric and reason to have difficult conversations in the open. It was, by this light, a project aimed at strengthening the sinews of a free society.
But there was another, more cynical perspective, one that saw the entire enterprise not as dialogue but as content creation. In this view, Kirk was not a debater but a rage-bait industrialist, a master manipulator of the new media ecosystem. The campus events were not forums for genuine exchange; they were production sets designed to generate clips. The goal was not to persuade the student in front of him, but to “dunk on the libs” for the benefit of a vast, unseen audience online. The business model relied on finding the most inarticulate, emotional, or ill-prepared student, goading them into a rhetorical trap, and then packaging the resulting exchange into a viral video. These clips, selectively edited and algorithmically amplified, served to create a caricature of the Left as hysterical, uneducated, and incapable of debate—all while driving engagement and radicalizing a new generation of young conservatives.
He was, in short, both a free speech advocate and a free speech arsonist. He used the principles of open dialogue to create a media machine that made open dialogue increasingly impossible. He exploited the very platforms whose censorious tendencies he decried, harnessing the outrage economy to build a movement. The Left saw this contradiction clearly. They pointed to his staunch advocacy for the Second Amendment and his rhetoric about the potential for “casualties” in the culture war. In his death, they saw a dark, cosmic irony: the man who warned of conflict had himself become a casualty. He had, in their eyes, created a climate of hate and violence, and it had finally consumed him. But this conclusion rests on a far more fundamental and deeply contentious premise.
Is Speech Violence?
The celebration of Kirk’s murder is not simply a matter of bad taste or political animus. It is the logical conclusion of a specific ideological belief that has taken root within a significant segment of the modern Left: the belief that speech itself can be a form of violence. This is not the traditional liberal understanding, which holds that speech is protected until it directly incites imminent lawless action. This is a newer, more expansive definition, in which words, ideas, and rhetoric that are deemed to uphold oppressive systems or cause psychological harm are not merely offensive, but are acts of violence in and of themselves.
In this framework, refusing to use someone’s preferred pronouns, as the psychologist Jordan Peterson famously did, is not a matter of grammatical principle or protected speech; it is an act of rhetorical violence that negates a person’s existence. By this same logic, Charlie Kirk’s rhetoric—his questioning of climate science, his stance on transgender issues, his critique of Black Lives Matter—was not simply objectionable political discourse. It was, to his detractors, a form of active, ongoing violence against marginalized communities. His words were bullets. His speeches were assaults. He was seen not as a political opponent to be debated, but as a violent figure perpetuating harm.
This re-categorization of speech as violence has profound consequences. First, it allows the Left to sidestep the difficult work of structural change in favor of the more immediate gratification of policing language. It becomes easier to de-platform a campus speaker than to organize for economic justice. It feels more virtuous to condemn a man for his words than to build a political coalition capable of winning elections and implementing policy. The obsession with linguistic purity becomes a substitute for political efficacy.
Second, and far more dangerously, if speech is violence, then responding with physical violence becomes an act of self-defense. This is the crucial ideological leap that allows a peaceful, progressive student to become an assassin, and for his peers to celebrate him as a hero. If you genuinely believe that Charlie Kirk was committing violence every time he spoke into a microphone, then killing him is not murder. It is stopping a violent crime in progress. It is a preemptive strike to prevent the greater structural and physical violence of a fascist takeover that his words would inevitably bring about. The killer is no longer an assassin; he is an anti-fascist soldier on the front lines of a war that has already begun.
The Nihilism of the Preemptive Strike
This strategy, however emotionally and morally satisfying it may be for its adherents, is ultimately a catastrophic miscalculation born of a deep and corrosive nihilism. It is shortsighted for three fundamental reasons.
First, it presumes the existence of a universal, objective body capable of determining which speech is “permissible” and which is “violent.” This is a terrifying concentration of power. The very reason the American Founders enshrined freedom of speech so centrally in the Bill of Rights was their profound understanding that no single institution—be it a government, a university, or a popular movement—could be trusted with the authority to legislate thought. To grant anyone this power is to build a weapon that will inevitably be turned against you the moment the political winds shift. The Left, in its eagerness to silence its enemies, seems to have forgotten that the apparatus of censorship established during the Biden administration is now being controlled and expanded by those very enemies.
Second, it reveals a stunning lack of political imagination. It presumes that American democracy is so utterly broken, so completely captured by nascent fascist elements, that the only recourse left is the bullet. This is a counsel of despair. It writes off the possibility of democratic renewal before the fight has even been truly lost. It overlooks the vast and storied tradition of non-lethal direct action and civil disobedience. One can believe that the state is enacting fascist policies—like the ICE raids many on the Left point to—and still choose a path of resistance that does not lead to assassination. One can engage in property destruction, freeing people from custody, mass strikes, and a thousand other forms of disruptive, even illegal, protest that fall short of murder. To leap directly from “his speech is harmful” to “he must be killed” is to skip every difficult, creative, and potentially effective step in between. It is an admission of political impotence, a confession that one has no strategy to win the battle of ideas and must therefore resort to eliminating the ideologue.
Finally, this strategy is nihilistic because it implicitly accepts the core premise of the fascists themselves: that politics is not a realm of negotiation, but a zero-sum war of extermination. It meets the specter of political violence with more political violence, ensuring a cycle of endless retribution. It validates the Right’s darkest claims about a bloodthirsty, intolerant Left, and in doing so, it becomes the chief recruiting agent for the very movement it claims to despise.
Part II: The Reactionary Right and the Call for Retribution
The Martyr’s Harvest
If the Left’s response was a spectacle of celebration, the Right’s was a masterclass in martyrdom. For a movement steeped in a narrative of persecution, the assassination was not a tragedy but a consummation. It was the ultimate vindication, the bloody proof that their struggle was not merely political, but existential. Charlie Kirk, the living, breathing, often-contradictory man, was gone. In his place stood Saint Charlie of the Righteous Cause, a martyr felled not by a lone, disturbed individual, but by the disembodied, malevolent spirit of “The Left” itself.
The machinery of canonization whirred to life with breathtaking speed. The talk was not of gun control or the dangers of heated rhetoric, but of holy war. Kirk was remembered not as a political operative, but as a warrior for truth. His most divisive statements were recast as brave prophecies. His death was framed as a sacred sacrifice, an indictment of an entire half of the country. This narrative serves a crucial political purpose. It forecloses any possibility of introspection or shared grief. It transforms a moment of potential national reflection into an opportunity for tribal consolidation. The call was not for justice, but for vengeance. The question was not “How did we get here?” but “Who will pay for this?”
The Radicalization Engine
The gravest danger of this response lies in whom it empowers. The assassination of a relatively mainstream conservative figure like Kirk does not chasten the Right; it emboldens its most extreme elements. Figures like Nick Fuentes, who traffic in explicit white nationalism and anti-Semitism, are the primary beneficiaries. The murder provides them with the ultimate “I told you so.” It validates their core message: that politics is a charade, that the Left is not a political opposition but a demonic, irredeemable force, and that dialogue is a fool’s errand. Violence, they can now argue with renewed conviction, is the only language our enemies understand.
This event acts as a powerful radicalization engine, pushing mainstream conservatives further into extremist white nationalist views and movements. The moderate Republican who may have found Kirk’s style abrasive but agreed with his general principles is now confronted with what appears to be proof that the Left is, in fact, murderous. The carefully constructed firewall between mainstream conservatism and the far-right fringe begins to crumble. The assassination becomes a unifying event, drawing a hard, bright red line in the sand. You are either with the martyr or you are with the murderers.
This dynamic guarantees an escalating cycle of violence. The Right, convinced of the Left’s inherent evil, sees any future political violence on its own part as justified retribution. The dehumanization of their opponents, already well underway, becomes complete. When your enemy is no longer a fellow citizen with a different point of view, but a member of a depraved cabal that murders its opponents in broad daylight, then any action taken against them, no matter how extreme, can be framed as a righteous and necessary defense of civilization itself. The Right’s failure of political imagination is the mirror image of the Left’s: it too can no longer envision a future of pluralistic coexistence. It sees only a battlefield.
Part III: The Fascist Superposition
The Ambiguity of Modern Authoritarianism
To fully grasp the dynamics at play, we must move beyond the simple binary of Left and Right and analyze the specific nature of the modern authoritarian personality. Charlie Kirk was a uniquely contemporary figure, a product of an era where ideology is performed on social media and irony is the ultimate rhetorical shield. He was a master of what might be called ideological superposition. Like the particle in quantum mechanics that is both a wave and a particle until it is measured, Kirk existed in a state of being both a mainstream conservative and a potential fascist at the same time. He was, for lack of a better term, a “meta-Nazi.”
The term is not meant to be a literal accusation, but a description of a political strategy. A meta-Nazi is a public figure who flirts with fascist rhetoric, winks at white nationalist tropes, and amplifies extremist voices, but does so from behind a carefully constructed veil of plausible deniability. They never explicitly endorse the darkest conclusions of their own logic. They maintain an ironic distance, allowing them to retreat from any position the moment it becomes politically inconvenient.
Dog Whistles and Ironic Gaslighting
This strategy is executed through two primary tactics: the dog whistle and ironic gaslighting. The dog whistle is the use of coded language that is understood by a specific in-group but sounds innocuous to outsiders. The meta-Nazi can speak of “Western civilization” or “taking back our country,” and the message is received by their radical flank as a clear affirmation of white identity politics, while the mainstream media can be plausibly accused of reading too much into it.
The second, and more insidious, tactic is ironic gaslighting. When confronted with their use of extremist rhetoric, the meta-Nazi feigns outrage and claims it was “just a joke.” They accuse their critics of being humorless, of suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” of being unable to take a joke. This serves a dual purpose. It solidifies the bond with their base, who are now in on the “joke,” and it psychologically destabilizes their opponents, forcing them into a maddening debate about the speaker’s true intentions. The Left is left sputtering, “But the joke is the cover for his actual fascist beliefs!” while the meta-Nazi and his followers laugh at the Left’s frantic, “un-ironic” hysteria. Figures like Elon Musk with his “roman salute” are masters of this art. They occupy a superposition, simultaneously promoting fascism and claiming to be its staunchest opponent.
Cause or Symptom?
This brings us to the central, unanswerable question at the heart of Kirk’s legacy. Was he an active agent in the dismantling of American democracy, a cynical operator knowingly pushing the country toward fascism? Or was he merely a symptom of a political system already in an advanced state of decay?
The truth, unsatisfying as it may be, is that he was likely both. He was a savvy entrepreneur who recognized the profound sense of cultural dispossession and alienation felt by a large segment of the population and built a powerful brand by monetizing their resentment. He did not create the conditions for his own success, but he exploited them with ruthless efficiency. It is uncertain whether he was actively working to destroy democracy or simply working to advance his own career within a democratic context that increasingly rewards the very behaviors that threaten to destroy it. But in a system as fragile as ours, the distinction between cause and symptom begins to lose its meaning.
Conclusion: The Narrowing Path of Pluralism
The assassination of Charlie Kirk and the furious, layered backlashes that followed have dangerously narrowed the path forward for American democracy. Both the Left’s justification of violence and the Right’s thirst for retribution are expressions of the same catastrophic failure of political imagination. They represent a surrender to the belief that the other side is not merely wrong, but irredeemably evil, and that the tools of democratic engagement—dialogue, debate, compromise—are no longer viable.
The fundamental promise of a pluralistic democracy is that a society can contain profound, even irreconcilable, contradictions without tearing itself apart. It is the belief that we do not all have to agree on God, or language, or even the nature of reality in order to share a country. It is a system built not on the hope of eventual consensus, but on the management of perpetual dialogue. This promise has always been fragile, an audacious and perhaps naive bet on humanity’s better angels. Today, that promise feels more distant than ever.
The Left, in celebrating Kirk’s death, argues that his advocacy was fundamentally anti-pluralistic, that he was working to create a society where their existence would be impossible. They may even have been right. But in resorting to the assassin’s veto, they abandoned the very principle of pluralism they claimed to be defending. They decided that the risk of his ideas was so great that the democratic experiment itself had to be short-circuited. The Right, in its grief and rage, now seeks to build a world where the Left is not just defeated, but purged.
We are left in a terrifying loop of our own making, a political Mobius strip where each side’s actions perfectly justify the other’s deepest fears. The path forward is not a line, but a tightening circle. The death of one man has become a mirror, reflecting our own collective exhaustion with the difficult, frustrating, and indispensable work of living together. It has revealed a nation that has forgotten the core principle of its own founding: that the answer to speech you hate is not violence, but more speech. The tragedy of this moment is not that a man is dead. The tragedy is that we are losing the ability to imagine that there is any other way.