Excelente post.
What you’re seeing here is a description of a narrative break. Up until now, politics has been allowed to run on abstractions: “our side good, their side evil.”
The killing of Charlie Kirk - and more importantly, the celebration of it - drags that abstraction into raw visibility. People who aren’t political diehards, who live normal lives, suddenly see elites, teachers, journalists, and even friends cheering the death of a man who was killed not for violence, but for words.
That is a catastrophic optics event. It reframes the entire moral ledger. Normies - the broad middle - don’t see the political justifications. They see a foaming mob celebrating death. And once that image is fixed in their heads, the abstraction is broken. They can no longer tell themselves “these are the moral ones.”
This is how narrative collapses: not because the other side out-argues you, but because your own actions force ordinary people to see you as deranged and inhuman. The left, by celebrating this assassination, has accidentally moved itself from “flawed but moral” to “fanatical and bloodthirsty” in the eyes of people who weren’t paying close attention.
The danger for them is reflexive. The moment average Americans no longer trust them with basic moral authority - life and death, safety and danger - the entire scaffolding of their cultural legitimacy collapses. Politics isn’t run by the extremes, it’s run by how the middle perceives legitimacy. And once the middle perceives you as willing to celebrate killing, you’ve permanently broken trust.
Deep down, what this signals is that a fracture just opened. A eureka moment for millions of apolitical Americans who will now recoil from what they’ve seen. That recoil is not intellectual - it’s visceral. And once it happens, it doesn’t reverse.