When I first heard the news of Charlie Kirk’s death, I waited a day before writing my piece, Malice in a Megaphone. That pause is typical for me. It always takes time to sift through emotion, to make sure I’m not writing from pure reaction. At the time, I thought relief was what I felt. And maybe it was.
But then I stumbled across a video that pierced deeper. Not because it was exciting or joyous, but because it was raw. It picked at a thread I didn’t even know was there, and as it unraveled, I saw that Charlie Kirk’s voice was nowhere near silenced. The system isn’t built for that. It feeds on voices like his, like a parasite, until it takes over. It spreads like mold — from invisible spores to an engulfing rot.
If you celebrate, you fuel the machine.
If you perform grief, you fuel the machine.
Either way, the system wins, because it knows how to turn both reactions into power.
Charlie Kirk was, and still is, a vector for cruelty and fear in a system where the demand was already waiting. And now, that same machine will use his death as intended: parading it as proof, as martyrdom, as justification for more division.
So I find myself in a different place than I began, with neither relief nor mourning. What I feel most is disdain for the cycle itself, for how easily death gets conscripted into the service of power.
The work isn’t to react to him, alive or dead. The work is to stay focused on the machine that created him, and that is already finding new ways to use him still.
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