Has our country hit a turning point?
Charlie Kirk was assassinated at a campus event at Utah Valley University on September 10, 2025. In the months since, grief and rage have been processed through content creation machines that prioritize and/or monetize attention, loyalty, and retaliation. Some people have even been punished or fired for what they posted afterward, which tells you something grim and a bit dystopian about the hunger for moral theater on all sides.
In light of his passing and the tumultuous aftermath that is following, you may feel disillusioned. Your faith, politics, ideologies are the center of so many online discussions, debates, and grifts. You are not alone if you’ve been fed messaging from prominent figures and authorities in your life that should you ever feel disillusioned, you are to seek remedy immediately.
But disillusionment is not a failure. Saddled properly, this can be your call to discernment.
There’s a fallacy in so many of us that we should win at all costs. That life is a zero sum game, and not winning means you’re losing. But a movement, or even just a thought, can be wrong without your enemies being right. An institution can disappoint you without the ideas it stands for turning invalid. A political party might pivot away from checking all of your values’ boxes, but this doesn’t mean the opposite party is your savior.
This world certainly has good in it, but this can lead us to the polarization that everything outside of the good is obviously evil. This is a trap: thinking you must replace one thing, one stance, one take with another, quickly, before you feel the chill of being wrong… or standing alone.
So let’s talk about resisting one of the most predictable conversion attempts you will ever face.
The martyr narrative is a tool
Death creates something of a … meaning pressure. We don’t tolerate randomness well at all, so we reach for stories that make suffering “worth it.” Sometimes those stories are true enough to heal. Sometimes they are engineered to recruit.
A martyr narrative is neither inherently good nor evil. It can produce courage, loyalty, and present as a real sacrifice. It can also create a permission structure for cruelty, or make dissent feel like betrayal. It can turn grief into a weapon and then call that weapon “righteous.”
If you feel something within accelerating toward—or away from—the converting forces surrounding the epilogue to someone’s passing, consider what is informing you. Is it more likely to be your conscience? Or social gravity?