I was holding a mug of coffee the morning the headline broke—its rim still warm against my cold hands. The aroma was nutty, almost burnt, sharp enough to sting my nose. My phone pulsed with updates: first the fact, then the outrage, then the memes. Charlie Kirk, the enfant terrible of America’s hard right, had been murdered at a Utah university event. The noise spread fast, but underneath all of it I felt something quieter, heavier: grief.
And here’s the part many don’t want to hear. Grief doesn’t ask whether you liked the man. Grief doesn’t check party affiliation. It just arrives, blunt and undebated. Kirk’s murder was brutal. His killer confessed. And still, some rushed to turn even that death into a talking point, a cudgel. The smell of politics in moments like this is acrid—like fresh petrol on hot pavement.
Let me start with three lies I refuse to swallow. Violence resets politics. Hate-filled speech is just words. Dehumanising your enemies is the way you win. They sound tough. They sound inevitable. And they are dead wrong. One story, one number, one lesson proves it. The story is Kirk’s murder. The number? Nearly a mass shooting every single day in America. The lesson? A culture built on contempt can only breed more contempt—until the spiral finally explodes.
Who Kirk Was, and Why He Mattered
Charlie Kirk was not a neutral figure. He was a professional polemicist, a culture warrior who turned cruelty into applause lines. He argued that guns save lives. He said enslaved Black people “committed fewer crimes.” He insisted even rape survivors should be denied abortions. These weren’t slips. They were his brand.
He built an empire around that brand. College campuses became his hunting ground, his arena, his stage. Turning Point USA was his megaphone, and millions tuned in. To his supporters, he was a hero who dared say what others were too polite to. To his critics, he was an arsonist throwing matches into already parched grass.
Now he’s dead. And here’s where honesty hurts: condemning his murder does not mean endorsing his ideas. Critiquing his ideas does not mean excusing his murder. Both can be true at once. But in today’s binary circus, nuance is treated as betrayal.
The Killer in Context
His killer, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, had no criminal record. He lived in St. George, Utah, wore a flag-printed shirt, and used a bolt-action rifle scrawled with slogans—some mocking, some antifascist. He struck once, at Kirk’s throat, and the shot was fatal.
His family told investigators he had recently become “more interested in politics.” He left messages on Discord planning the attack, and he dressed in ways designed to confuse investigators.
But what haunts me is not just his confession—it’s the climate. He lived in a world where tribal dogmas left no room for deviation. The woke versus anti-woke battles that consumed campuses left whispers feeling like gravel, dialogue replaced by clangs of dogma. Kirk thrived in that world. But when contempt is the air, everyone breathes it. Even those who eventually choke on it.
The Smell of Violence
There’s a sensory weight to this age. You can smell the smoke of violence before the flames break out. You can feel the air grow metallic when fear spikes. You can taste the bitterness of contempt, tinny on the tongue.
And here’s the most dangerous lie we keep buying: that force is natural in politics. That strong hands bring order. That crushing enemies is righteous. That idea smells like petrol. It promises speed, but it burns everything. You see admiration for autocrats growing in that smoke. And you see democracies crumbling.
That’s the atmosphere where bullets become arguments. Where funerals replace forums. Where silence spreads because people decide it’s safer not to speak at all.
The Left’s Warning and the Right’s Spin
Even the socialist magazine Jacobin—never a friend to Kirk—called his assassination a tragedy and a disaster. Not because he was right, but because violence silences dissent, fuels repression, and narrows democracy. They warned that his death could become a pretext for Trump and his allies to crack down harder, to equate all left-wing activism with terrorism. History is clear: violence has never freed the left. It has only brought more repression.
Meanwhile, politicians like Giorgia Meloni grabbed at the lowest-hanging fruit: a vile fringe meme mocking Kirk’s death. She used it to smear the entire antifascist tradition, turning grief into weaponised propaganda. That’s how contempt metastasises. Isolated stupidity becomes universal indictment. And suddenly, the mourning isn’t about the dead—it’s about scoring points.
The Only Exit: Respect
So where does this leave us? Respect. Not the PR-smile kind, but the stubborn, everyday practice of restraint. Respect is not agreement. It’s the pause before you hit “post.” It’s refusing to reduce people to hashtags. It’s letting one insult die in your throat instead of on someone’s screen.
In astrophysics, I think of respect as negative feedback in a chaotic system. It dampens the wild oscillations before they shatter the instrument. Galaxies stabilise through feedback loops. Civilisations do, too. Without it, everything collapses.
And here’s my aha moment: respect is cheaper than revenge and infinitely more radical. Revenge escalates. Respect interrupts. One insult unsent. One room cooled. One moment when the loop breaks. You can feel the temperature drop when it happens, like evening shade over concrete.
Blunt Truths About Kirk—and About Us
Let me be clear about Kirk. His rhetoric normalised contempt. He made democracy feel like a brawl. He made cruelty sound like courage. That deserves criticism—clear, specific, unsparing. But bullets are not critiques. A gunshot is not an argument. The bang deafens, the smoke stings, and nothing grows in that air.
And let me be blunt about us. If you cheer because your enemy is dead, you’ve already lost something vital. You’ve lost the moral floor under your own house. You can hear it creak, splintery underfoot. That’s not where a free society can stand.
Closing Reflection
Charlie Kirk is gone. Tyler Robinson will spend his life in prison. The rest of us are left with the aftermath. The world can either collapse deeper into its contempt, or we can resist it.
As President of FreeAstroScience, I make this promise: we will keep turning heat into light. We will explain complex forces in human terms. And we will insist, always, that only a culture of respect can save us. Not because it sounds nice. But because it’s the only thing that works.
So, what now? Speak less like a hammer, more like a bridge. Listen for the quiet before you post. Touch the grain of the moment and choose care. The future can smell like rain when we do. It can sound like breath returning. It can look, at last, like daylight.
Written for you by Gerd of FreeAstroScience—where big ideas are made simple, and respect rules.
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