The Killing Of Charlie Kirk

When Rhetoric Becomes a Weapon: Why America Must Step Back from the Brink

The killing of Charlie Kirk is not only a tragedy for his family and supporters, but also for all of us. On September 10, 2025, he was shot and killed during an event at Utah Valley University. Whether you agreed with his views or not, a human life has been lost, and our shared sense of community is diminished. We are living in a tense environment where divisions run deep, and words can easily ignite conflict. Today, we mourn with those who mourn, and we face the painful truth about the kind of people we are becoming.i

We all feel it. The kettle is hissing, the pressure is building, and many of us wonder if it’s about to boil over. After a season of political violence and deep division, our national conversation has become raw, and suspicion has grown. It takes barely anything, a headline, a comment online, a passing word, for the temperature to escalate.

Martha Nussbaum helps us put language to what we are living through. She says our public life is often ruled by fear, fear mixed with anger, blame, and envy. And it is not just abstract. Fear shows up in our bodies. It blocks our ability to think clearly, it robs us of hope, and it tempts us to look for someone to blame. We know this in our bones. When the dream of a better future feels lost, when jobs vanish, when education costs soar, when health and security falter, fear turns into suspicion: they took our place, they stole our future. Fear can turn neighbors into scapegoats.ii

But fear is not one-sided. Nussbaum reminds us that those on the right and the left alike feel democracy is fragile and under threat. For some, fear is tied to losing cultural ground. For others, fear is tied to the erosion of rights and freedoms. Either way, when fear takes over, it closes our eyes to history. It convinces us that the end is near when, in fact, the nation has weathered storms before. What fear blocks most of all is the work of listening, cooperating, and searching for solutions together.iii

What happens when fear mixes with anger? Anger tells us that payback will fix what was broken, but as Nussbaum points out, it never really does. The broken vase is not restored; the lost life is not returned. At best, anger may reveal that we care about dignity and self-respect, but left unchecked, it quickly poisons relationships and politics alike. Some, like Aristotle, argue that a measure of anger can guard respect and deter harm. That may be true at times. But as one walking alongside you, I hear Nussbaum’s caution: most often, anger leads us down paths of destruction rather than healing.³

René Girard gives us another image we recognize all too well. When societies are anxious and strained, they reach instinctively for a scapegoat. In past centuries, it was Jews who were blamed for plagues, or women who were accused of witchcraft. Today, it can be immigrants, minorities, or political opponents. The persecutors, Girard insists, are often sincere. They really believe the victim is guilty. And here is the sting: we all see other people’s scapegoats more clearly than our own. It is rare for anyone to admit, “We are doing it too.” Yet unless we confess this reflex in ourselves, we will keep repeating it.iv

Dehumanization always follows close behind scapegoating. We stop seeing the person across from us as a fellow human being. We reduce them either to animals, uncivilized, less than us, or to machines, objects without feelings. Once that mental shift takes hold, cruelty becomes easier to justify. The antidote is to resist the dimming of the other’s face. We must practice looking again, remembering the shared humanity that politics tries to erase.v

But there is another layer to this loss of sight. We have entered an era of reification, a long word that simply means turning people into things. Philosophers like Georg Lukács explained how social relations, which are human and alive, become frozen into objects.vi In everyday life, this appears when we “thing-ify” each other, treating people not as individuals but as functions, labels, or caricatures. It is what happens when someone becomes nothing more than “a conservative,” “a progressive,” “a threat,” “a victim,” or “a number in a poll.”

Psychologists have traced the development of this objectification. Studies show that when people are objectified, treated only as bodies or representatives of a group, they begin to see themselves as less capable, less moral, and less human. The wound is not just external; it sinks inward.vii Other research shows how we cognitively reduce others to parts, focusing only on traits that serve our purposes.² This is not an abstract problem. It is the real atmosphere of a culture shaped by narcissism and performance, where human beings are more easily consumed than encountered.viii

You and I know what this feels like because we have lived it. It is the sting of being dismissed with a label. It is the sense of invisibility when your story is flattened into a statistic. It is the hollowness of being treated as an object of suspicion, a body in a crowd, rather than a person with a name, a history, and a heart. Reification is not only a social practice. It is an inner experience of being made less than human, of being used, reduced, and dismissed.

This is why reification is so dangerous. When people are turned into things in our minds, it becomes easier to categorize them as enemies or discardables. It removes empathy. It speeds up polarization. And ultimately, it makes violence seem possible. To cool the tempers, we must resist not only scapegoating and dehumanization but also this gradual thing-ification. We need the courage to see again: not the label, not the role, not the caricature, but the whole person standing in front of us.

And Amartya Sen shows us another snare of our age. Violence flourishes when we reduce one another to a single identity. You are nothing but your party, nothing but your race, nothing but your stance on a single issue. That flattening denies the truth that each of us carries many identities at once—parent, worker, neighbor, believer, citizen, friend. When we meet each other as whole people, we cool the kettle. When we insist on the single label, we add more heat.ix

So here we are. Fear blocks our imagination. Anger tempts us to retaliate. Scapegoating offers false relief at someone else’s expense, and dehumanization strips away the face of the other. Single-story identities erase the richness of our everyday lives. And the kettle whistles louder.

I don't write these things as an outsider looking in. I write as someone standing right next to you, feeling the same heat. We name these patterns not to give up but to understand them for what they are. Naming is part of healing. Practice will do the rest.

You and I know that words matter. They don't just float in the air and disappear. They take root. They shape imaginations. And too often, they lay the groundwork for violence.

James Piazza has demonstrated how this occurs in our own country. When people repeatedly hear that the “other side” is dangerous and enemies of the nation, many begin to believe that violence is justified.x The surveys he examined show a sobering reality: as hostility toward opponents grows, people become more receptive to using violence as a political tool. That should concern us, because we all know how easily hostile words are repeated, on talk shows, in pulpits, and across social media feeds.

Nathan Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason follow the same pattern. They’ve listened to everyday Americans and observed how the acceptability of political violence gradually increases, little by little, as hostile speech becomes commonplace.xi It doesn’t require a fiery manifesto. A steady stream of talk about enemies and traitors, repeated until it sounds familiar, is enough to desensitize us. Eventually, the jump from words to actions feels smaller.

We’ve seen this before. During the civil rights era, language describing Black Americans as “troublemakers” or “outside agitators” helped create an environment where bombings of churches and lynchings could be tolerated or even justified. Historians like Leon Litwack show how words set the stage for violence, which was then rationalized as a way to protect the “social order.”xii Or consider Rwanda, where radio broadcasts on RTLM called Tutsis “cockroaches.” David Yanagizawa-Drott’s detailed research shows that areas with stronger broadcast signals experienced higher levels of killing.xiii When neighbors turned against each other, it was often because the words had already prepared the ground.

I don’t share these memories to sensationalize but to remind us of a simple truth: speech is never neutral. It can heal, or it can wound. It can restrain, or it can ignite. Speech doesn’t just reflect violence; it normalizes it, justifies it, prepares a moral framework in which cruelty no longer feels like cruelty but like duty.

Kalmoe and Mason warn that many people now even expect a day when “patriotic Americans must take the law into their own hands.”xiv That expectation doesn’t spring out of thin air. It grows in the soil of repeated rhetoric. It grows where words have already turned neighbors into enemies.

Walking through this moment with you, I feel the weight of how fragile our shared life can be when words are used as weapons. We can argue passionately, we can disagree fiercely, but once our speech begins to strip away another’s humanity, we start building a runway for violence. Our challenge, yours and mine, is to resist that drift, not just in how we talk, but in what we will and will not cheer when others do.

We are living through a national sickness. It runs deeper than party politics. It is a cultural illness that has turned rhetoric into a battlefield. Both the left and right participate. Both accuse, caricature, and condemn. Both have learned how to demonize. On one side, conservatives are mocked as ignorant or hateful; on the other, progressives are portrayed as enemies of the nation. We hear this language on talk shows, at rallies, and across social media feeds. And if we are honest, we have all been tempted to repeat it.

But not all speech carries the same weight. Some forms of rhetoric, dehumanizing, conspiratorial, and grievance-driven, tilt the scales toward violence more quickly. When immigrants are described as an “invasion” or as “poisoning the blood of the nation,” those words strip away human dignity and prepare the imagination for violence.xv When conspiracy theories like QAnon or the so-called “great replacement” accuse neighbors, leaders, or minorities of plotting against the people, they transform political opponents into existential threats.xvi Language like this does not simply reflect disagreement. It stirs grievance into rage and makes violence feel like protection. This is where our national sickness shows its most dangerous symptoms.

René Girard provides language to diagnose our experiences. He says we are living in a cultural schizophrenia. We no longer interpret texts, or events, for what they truly are, but for their superficial trappings, their “commercial wrapping.”xvii Truth is confused with branding. Spectacle replaces discernment. This schizophrenia also manifests in our rhetoric: a lack of differentiation, where lines blur until opposites mirror each other.

Girard demonstrates that in myths of persecution, distinctions break down. Day and night blur, heaven and earth merge, gods and humans, even brothers and enemies, become indistinguishable twins.xviii This “lack of differentiation” is disastrous. When everyone starts to look the same in their fury, behavior slips into a reciprocal cycle. Each side reflects the other in escalation. He calls this “evil reciprocity,” a state where rivalry sustains itself until it spirals out of control.xix

This is what we are experiencing. The rhetoric of both the left and right, though dressed in different disguises, has started to sound the same. Each side claims to defend truth, while both engage in scapegoating. Each insists it alone is righteous, yet both imitate the hostility of the other. We are trapped in the cycle of sibling enemies; brothers united by rivalry but blind to their similarity.

Martha Nussbaum emphasizes that philosophy at its best is not about pronouncements, threats, or mockery. Instead, it is about the examined life, characterized by humility and dialogue.xx Socrates questioned both generals and slaves, not to ridicule, but to awaken understanding. He believed everyone, regardless of their social status, possessed the capacity for reasoned thought. That humility bestowed dignity on the listener.

Compare that vision with our current climate. What passes for public speech today is not true dialogue but assertion; not real argument but soundbites. Leaders mock their opponents, pundits use sarcasm as a weapon, and citizens spread outrage instead of understanding. We have replaced the Socratic gadfly, designed to awaken democracy, with a swarm of rhetorical hornets, each sting meant to paralyze rather than provoke thought. This is one of the clearest signs of the national sickness: the death of dialogue.

James Hollis takes us deeper, into the psychology of the Shadow. The Shadow is all we refuse to acknowledge in ourselves. It contains not only our darkest motives, but also instincts and energies we fear to admit.xxi Denied, the Shadow leaks into our lives in projections. What we cannot bear in ourselves, we hurl at others.

Our politics today are saturated with Shadow projection. What is repressed inwardly is shouted outwardly. Accusations of corruption, weakness, greed, or malice often say as much about the accuser as about the accused. We see this in the fevered tone of our discourse. Sarcasm, suspicion, contempt, these are the voice of a culture refusing to own its darker self. Hollis calls this the collective Shadow.xxii It is what happens when a people represses its flaws, rationalizes its grievances, and projects all blame outward. Until we confess our complicity, the Shadow will keep roaring through our rhetoric.

The ancients understood the power and risk of rhetoric. As Michael MacDonald shows, Pericles once inspired Athenians to emulate the bravery of their ancestors, while Demosthenes urged them to defend Rhodes and Cos in the name of former glory.xxiii Yet Isocrates warned them not to follow ancestors who launched them into destructive wars, but those who sought peace. Even in classical Athens, appeals to grievance and nostalgia could inspire courage or cause devastation.

We face the same peril. Our leaders appeal to the greatness of the past, urging us to live up to our fathers’ achievements. But appeals to grievance can just as easily fuel rage as inspire virtue. The classical warnings are timely: rhetoric can honor the past in ways that steady a people, or weaponize the past in ways that drive them to ruin.

Let's speak plainly. This sickness is not only political but also moral. It erodes dignity, denies responsibility, and refuses restraint. Girard warns that myths of persecution always exaggerate the victim's crime, always label them as guilty, and always justify violence as righteous.xxiv We see this same pattern now. Each side portrays the other as monstrous. Each side justifies its rhetoric as necessary for survival.

The first step forward is to name things honestly. Demonization is not leadership. Conspiracy is not the truth. Grievance is not justice. The only remedy for the national ailment is to reclaim the moral high ground of dignity, responsibility, and restraint. Without these, rhetoric will continue to foster the environment for violence, and the cycle of brotherly conflict will never cease.

We’ve identified the disease in our national life, the boiling kettle of fear, the way words turn into weapons, and the cultural schizophrenia that blurs friend and enemy into twins. But the story isn’t finished. We still have a choice ahead.

One option is escalation. We understand where it leads. We've already seen signs of it in our headlines and neighborhoods. Political scientists like Nathan Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason warn that unchecked hostile rhetoric makes political violence feel inevitable.xxv James Piazza’s data shows that when citizens see the opposing party as a threat to the country’s survival, support for violence increases significantly.xxvi If we choose that path, rage upon rage, words turned into weapons, politics will become a battlefield where human lives are considered expendable.

The other path is restraint. History shows it is possible. Martha Nussbaum reminds us that philosophy at its best teaches the examined life, lived with humility and openness to dialogue.xxvii Democracy breathes when we assume our neighbor is worthy of hearing, when disagreement sharpens thought instead of silencing it. Restraint is not passivity. It is the hard work of refusing the easy slide into contempt. It is the discipline of seeing the human face before us, not the caricature.

René Girard presses us with a warning and a hope. Escalation means feeding the cycle of reciprocity until it consumes us. Restraint means interrupting the cycle, refusing the logic of the crowd, refusing the scapegoat mechanism that always demands another victim.xxviii He reminds us that myths exaggerate the crime of the victim and justify their punishment. We have a choice: will we keep living inside that myth, or will we step outside it into truth?

James Hollis states that restraint also requires courage to confront the Shadow.xxix Escalation is a form of projection; we project our hidden darkness onto others. Restraint starts with confession. We acknowledge what exists within us, and we refuse to disguise it with outrage. Healing begins when we take responsibility for our inner life.

In a time like this, we cannot stay silent. Leaders, media voices, and ordinary citizens alike share responsibility for the atmosphere of our common life. Words matter. Choices matter. And conscience must not be outsourced to party, platform, or tribe.

Thomas Jefferson would remind us that liberty is fragile. He believed that the health of the republic depends on an educated citizenry and a free press. He once wrote that, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. If we are to guard against ignorance and remain free, it is the responsibility of every American to be informed."xxx To us today, he might say, ‘Do not surrender your reason to factions.’ Guard against both the tyranny of government and the tyranny of opinion. A free people must nurture truth and resist the chains of ignorance. If we exchange education, deliberation, and vigilance for soundbites and slogans, we will give up liberty itself.

Benjamin Franklin, with his knack for wisdom clothed in wit, would warn us against arrogance and partisanship. He told the Constitutional Convention, “The older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment, and to pay more respect to the judgment of others.”xxxi In a climate where certainty is weaponized and humility is mocked, Franklin would remind us that laughter, modesty, and mutual respect are not weaknesses. They are the glue of common life.

John Adams was no stranger to conflict, but his courage was grounded in conscience. When he defended British soldiers after the Boston Massacre, he declared, “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”xxxii He would say to us now: do not sacrifice truth on the altar of passion. To yield to falsehood is to poison the republic. Justice demands integrity, even when it is unpopular.

Alexander Hamilton wielded words like a craftsman of steel. In the Federalist Papers he argued tirelessly for unity, warning against factions that would tear the new nation apart. “The passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.”xxxiii Hamilton would urge us now: if we give free rein to resentment, factions will consume us. Reason, order, and responsibility are not optional, they are the only guardrails against chaos.

George Washington, in his Farewell Address, urged the nation to beware of “the baneful effects of the spirit of party.”xxxiv He understood that factions would split the republic into rival camps, each demonizing the other and forgetting the bonds of common interest. Today, he might say: unity is not uniformity, but it is essential for survival. A people consumed by faction cannot govern themselves. Restraint is not weakness; it is the discipline of those who care more about the republic than about victory.

The chorus of their words still echoes. Liberty depends on vigilance. Humility steadies judgment. Integrity guards justice. Responsibility restrains passion. Unity holds the republic together. Their counsel is not for some distant age, it is for us, now. And their voices converge into one question: what path will we choose?

These voices do not erase our divisions, but they cut through them. Jefferson calls us to vigilance, Franklin to humility, Adams to integrity, Hamilton to responsibility, and Washington to unity. Together, they remind us that the republic is not upheld by slogans or scapegoats, but by conscience.

So, the question remains: Will we allow politics to become a battlefield where human lives are expendable? Or will we reclaim our shared humanity, and with it, the dignity, restraint, and responsibility that liberty requires?
The choice is before us: escalation or restraint, rivalry or unity, contempt or conscience. The road we walk will not only determine our present, but also the memory we leave for generations yet to come.

We can't change that Charlie Kirk is no longer with us. However, we can choose how to respond to this moment. If we opt for revenge, the cycle will only worsen. If we take the more difficult route, the route of conscience, restraint, and dignity, we might still avoid the brink.

Dr. Mark Chironna is a public scholar, executive and personal coach, and thought leader with five decades of experience in leadership development, cultural analysis, and future-focused strategies. With advanced degrees in Psychology, Applied Semiotics and Futures Studies, and Theology, he brings a unique interdisciplinary approach to helping individuals and organizations navigate complexity, unlock potential, and craft innovative solutions.

As a Board Certified Coach with over 30,000 hours of experience, he empowers leaders and teams to thrive through resilience, foresight, and actionable strategies. Passionate about human flourishing, he integrates psychological insight and cultural trends to inspire growth and transformation.

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