Blood on the Quad: The Assassination of Charlie Kirk

We can be a nation governed by speech or a nation governed by fear, but not both.

The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world. In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.

—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Nothing ever ends poetically. It ends and we turn it into poetry. All that blood was never beautiful, it was just red.

—Kait Rokowski

In 1989, the Supreme Court decided Texas v. Johnson, upholding the right to burn the American flag. The point was not the flag, but that free speech only means anything when it protects speech you despise.

Earlier today, that bedrock belief bled out on a college quad in Utah. Conservative organizer Charlie Kirk was shot while doing what he does—arguing in public, in daylight, with people who disagree. It happened at Utah Valley University and Kirk died at the hospital shortly thereafter.

As of this writing, many important details remain unsettled. That’s the “fog of war” we now live in, rendered in 4K and autoplay. What follows is my attempt to make sense of my own sadness, confusion, and fear.

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This is not about liking or loathing Charlie Kirk. If anything, he was the least threatening version of a conservative public figure: an enjoyer of debates and microphone time; happy to sit beneath a tent and take questions from rooms that bristle at him; a young husband and father with two small children who expected Dad home for dinner.

Kirk’s entire project was Socratic confrontation—show up, take questions, defend your claims, let the crowd push back. And still he was shot dead.

That’s the public square muscle atrophying in America. When you try to exercise it and take a bullet, it tells us something terrifying about the body politic.

Strip the jersey off to see the stakes: the medium (i.e. standing in the open and answering anyone) is what’s under fire. A society that shoots at that is flirting with suicide.

Contingent DEI, Caricature Politics

America has quietly adopted a new social contract: you’re welcome inside the tent so long as your convictions echo the chorus. Sing a false note and you’re “problematic.” Sing louder and you’re cancelled. And if you’re very unlucky, like Kirk, you might even end up dead.

I call it contingent DEI: diversity of faces, yet uniformity of thought. The system loves difference, but only if the difference is cosmetic. True heterodoxy is handled like a contaminant.

This is personal for me. At Google, my Tourette syndrome made me a test case in “inclusive” spaces that weren’t sure what to do with a body and voice that didn’t conform. Inclusion meant acceptance until it was inconvenient. Then it meant paperwork, euphemisms, and distance. I don’t raise this to center myself, but to name the cultural weather system we’re in: we tolerate until we don’t. And when we don’t, we punish: by pink slip or pile on, and now, sometimes, by bullets.

Caricature politics completes the trap. If I can collapse you into one loud trait (MAGA; Pronouns; Evangelical; Atheist; Bitcoin; Vegan; Whatever), I don’t have to meet you as a person. I can swat a cardboard cutout or digital boogeyman. We license small moral shortcuts until they ossify into big ones. Eventually we forget how to argue with human beings and remember only how to dispose of enemies. We can only imagine Kirk’s caricature in the mind of his shooter.

The Hysteria Machine

There’s a crooked but traceable line from an outrage economy to stochastic violence. You can feel it in the way headlines perform righteousness instead of delivering information; in the way panels sell fear and certainty on tap; in the way your phone finds you with the worst possible video in the shortest possible time. (Upon opening X on my walk earlier today, I was quickly confronted with Kirk’s ruptured carotid artery.)

The incentives of our media diet reward heat over light. Given enough heat, guardrails soften and then melt entirely.

As the story broke, leaders of both parties condemned it. We should be grateful—that reflex is itself a civic lung. But notice the competing reflex: instant theorizing-before-facts. The “what fits my narrative?” reflex. It escalates everything, always.

The historian in me is tempted to invoke tipping points: Franz Ferdinand, the Lusitania. Maybe today is one. Hopefully it isn’t.

But it feels like a day that accelerates whatever comes next, which is enough to scare any reasonable person.

Of course, the simplest explanation may also be true: extreme mental illness. A person unmoored from reality can lash out in ways that are senseless and terrifying. But even if that’s the case here, it doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens in a culture that licenses caricature, rewards hysteria, and feeds ambient rage on loop.

The Great Distraction, Weaponized

In The Great Distraction, I argued that hyperconnectedness takes our attention hostage by the minute. The bill doesn’t just show up as wasted time, but thinner souls.

In On Trump, Truth, and Telling It Like It Is, I argued that our civic language has become performative, not persuasive, that we’ve traded truth-seeking for team-signaling.

Put those together and you get a society that’s permanently primed and on edge: more anxious, more certain, less persuadable, and less human with each other. In that environment, an attack on a man debating on campus is not only an attack on a person, but also an attack on the medium of self-government.

We stream our tragedies now. Thirty seconds of horror, looped and cropped. In a previous era, you wouldn’t see it until tomorrow’s paper; now you see it before the blood clots. The effect is ambient trauma and reactive rage,

Everything We Want, Nothing We Need

Fight Club prophesied the spiritual vacancy of late modern life:

We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.

We bought the toys and misplaced the telos. The shelves are full but our souls are empty.

“Nothing settles so stubbornly as work left undone.” And our civic work is massively undone: rebuilding trust, relearning persuasion, recommitting to procedural fairness, restraining our appetite for enemies. That list is heavy enough that we procrastinate as a nation. We doomscroll to avoid facing it. Then we wake up to a quad roped off with police tape and tell ourselves the story was written by extremists, not by each and every one of us.

But cultures are written by daily habits, compounded. The elbows get sharper because we’ve trained them that way, online and off. A line often attributed to Kissinger says university politics are vicious because the stakes are small; today the stakes do not feel small. But the habits honed in low-stakes brawls graduate into high-stakes violence all the same.

At minimum, it is fascistic logic to answer words with bullets. Liberalism’s core bet is that speech prevents violence by giving us a non-murderous way to settle our differences. Short circuit that, and the power game rushes back in.

We are stacking cases of political murder and attempted murder—from CEOs to candidates to campus speakers—faster than we can metabolize them. Different perpetrators, different motives, same civilizational message: the permission structure for violence is widening.

Eucatastrophe

Let me try to end on a hopeful note. Tolkien coined a word for the impossible good turn: eucatastrophe—the sudden, piercing reversal where grace cuts across doom. The Resurrection is the master pattern. Every lesser turn borrows its light.

If there’s a eucatastrophe available to us today, it’s this: that the sight of blood on a campus stage shocks us back to the first principles upon which this nation was founded; that it resets our appetites and whets our palate for decency and kindness.

Tiny? Yes. But compound tiny over a nation and you get culture.

A House Divided (2025)

On June 16, 1858, Abraham Lincoln stood in the Illinois capitol and warned that a house divided cannot stand. If I were advising the president to calm the nation, I’d borrow heavily from Lincoln and say something like this:

A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this nation cannot endure, permanently half-governed by speech and half-governed by fear. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.

Either the defenders of free expression will arrest the spread of punitive orthodoxy and restore the public mind to the belief that speech is the instrument of peace; or the advocates of enforced conformity will push forward until silence—by shame, by firing, by exile, by fists, by bullets—becomes the law of every state, campus, and platform.

We must choose the language of citizens over the logic of enemies. We must choose debate over spectacle, persons over caricatures, truth over teams. We must choose it not once but daily, in timelines and classrooms and city halls, until the habits of freedom re-knit themselves into muscle memory.

If that sounds naïve against the grain of our reality, good. Eucatastrophes are always naïve until they happen. How else could a tiny hobbit save Middle Earth?

God works in mysterious ways. The only thing left is to trust Him and to act like a people worthy of a miracle.

Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord,

and let perpetual light shine upon him.

May his soul and the souls of all the faithful departed,

through the mercy of God, rest in peace.

Amen.

Thanks to R.W. Ritchey and JOB for their invaluable feedback on this.

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Per my about page, White Noise is a work of experimentation. I view it as a sort of thinking aloud, a stress testing of my nascent ideas. Through it, I hope to sharpen my opinions against the whetstone of other people’s feedback, commentary, and input.

If you want to discuss any of the ideas or musings mentioned above or have any books, papers, or links that you think would be interesting to share on a future edition of White Noise, please reach out to me by replying to this email or following me on Twitter X.

With sincere gratitude,

Tom