the erosion of a shared reality, 30 days later.

It’s been a month since the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and I keep circling back to a moment so fleeting it almost doesn’t deserve to be called a meeting. My first CPAC — a crowded hallway, a passing handshake, a nod, and then he was gone. At the time, it barely registered. I knew of Turning Point — then just a name, little more than an idea — but I wrote him off as some ambitious kid making the rounds.

Looking back, I see it differently. He wasn’t lingering with strangers; he was laying groundwork for a coalition. There was no speaking tour, no social media empire — just audacity, conviction, and the will to act. I crossed paths with him at the very beginning of what would become his life’s defining project.

“the danger here isn’t only the violence itself, as shocking as it is — it’s the erosion of a shared reality in which the obvious can still be recognized as obvious.”

Which is why, a month ago, watching his assassination unfold across multiple screens felt so surreal. That moment had long faded into the background, until suddenly, the same figure was at the center of national shock — his final moments replayed from every angle in real time.

In the weeks since, I’ve found myself changed. I’ve thought a lot about how we respond to tragedy, and how easy it is to let anger or fear harden us. If we approached these moments with radical empathy — the way Christ did — maybe we’d see more clearly. I think, in his own way, that’s how Charlie intended to live too. But realities are complicated. I wouldn’t expect an evangelical from Illinois to see the world the same way an on-again, off-again Catholic from the Northeast does. We all come from different theological frameworks, different cultural contexts. Some of his views struck me as misguided, others seemed to beg for dialogue, and a few felt, to my eyes, at odds with the teachings he professed. But that’s precisely why conversation matters — real conversation, not the algorithmic kind. It’s where differences are clarified instead of calcified.

“none of that changes the moral clarity of his death. Assassination is heinous. It should not need caveats”

And that’s what makes what followed all the more unsettling.

a man with no state power, shot mid-dialogue, Something so plainly heinous — should have united us in condemnation. Instead, it fractured us even more. Half the nation mourned Kirk as a martyr; the other half treated his death as a kind of victory. Conspiracies swirled. Church pews filled. Opportunists on the far right quickly moved to redirect grief and anger toward their own ends.

Then came the clips. Some out of context, some not. His sharpest, harshest, or most mocking moments were replayed endlessly — a kind of moral prosecution by algorithm. They spread like evidence in a courtroom, as if a reel of soundbites could somehow justify the execution of a man in cold blood for engaging in a dialogue. If where we’re at as a culture is that a life can be distilled into a highlight reel and judged expendable, then that says more about us than it does about him.

The Charlie Kirk I saw online was sharp and ambitious, rallying young conservatives. I also saw someone who loved the “gotcha” moment — the quick dismantling of an opponent’s argument in a way that played well on camera. Others saw someone combative, trafficking in provocation. All of these versions existed — but no one saw the whole person. Algorithms don’t deliver balance; they deliver engagement. One audience was fed the highlight reel, another the lowlights, and both were told this was reality. Over time, those portrayals hardened into truth. the danger here isn’t only the violence itself, as shocking as it is — it’s the erosion of a shared reality in which the obvious can still be recognized as obvious.

His legacy, like any public figure’s, is complicated. I had my critiques of his style — the reliance on outrage, the heavy-handed rhetoric — but none of that changes the moral clarity of his death. Assassination is heinous. It should not need caveats. Though we can climb the mountain of ideas to see which figureheads are standing at the top, it’s the algorithms — the invisible architectures of technology — that keep us divided. They don’t just amplify division; they normalize it. They turn tragedy into a Rorschach test, fracturing our moral baseline and stripping us of the ability to agree on the most fundamental truths.

A month later, that’s what lingers. Not just the act itself, but what it revealed: a culture increasingly unable to recognize the obvious. that’s the real crisis.