September 10, 2025. Today. The day Charlie Kirk—far-right political activist, champion of hate, and defender of a world ruled by rich white men—was shot in the neck and killed as he spewed division from a stage in Utah. Ironically, he was speaking about gun violence moments before taking a shot to the neck. Moments before enforcing a lie about the statistics of trans shooters. The same man who also stated in February 2024 that children should watch public executions, was executed. Publicly. In front of college students.
Be careful what you ask for, folks.
Some might call this Karma. I might be one of them.
At nearly the same time, yet another school shooting ripped through students in Denver, Colorado. Three children remain critically injured.
We are told to condemn the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Meanwhile, children lie bleeding—collateral damage in a nation that refuses to break its addiction to guns.
Why is one act of violence elevated as tragedy while the other is normalized?
We live in a country where political violence is condemned only when it threatens the powerful. When it rises from below, when it is the rage of the poor, the silenced, the exploited, it’s called terrorism.
And then we are condemned for showing no empathy for the exploiters by the very people who call empathy “weak.” When it comes from the top—war, police killings, kidnapping immigrants, pipelines rammed through native land—it’s called order.
A couple of weeks ago, the mass shooter was trans. Now the headlines are full of “trans shooters” and calls to strip trans people of their rights to self-defense. That’s the propaganda machine at work.
Men commit over 97.7% of mass shootings in America and 52.3% of shooters are white. The next highest demographic is 20.9%. That’s not a gap. That’s a chasm.
White male violence is always treated as tragic and misunderstood, as a “mental health” struggle. When someone outside that category pulls a trigger, it becomes a weapon to criminalize an entire community. One trans shooter becomes proof of a threat of all trans people. Hundreds of white men with AR-15s? Excused. That’s how fascism defines violence—not by the act, but by who commits it.
History shows political violence has never been absent. Revolutions. Labor uprisings. Anti-colonial struggles. Every one of them left its mark. You don’t get to condemn political violence in principle when the state leans on it every single day. What this country calls “peace” is nothing but daily violence. Poverty is violence. Racism is violence. Taking away healthcare, food, housing, clean water—violence. And through it all, people are told: stay calm. Sit tight. Trust the system, as the system keeps eating you alive.
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It’s not chaos, it’s by design. Political violence shows up wearing a suit. It passes through Congress. It sits on the bench. It hides behind the flag. So why are we shocked when someone pushed to the edge finally shows up with a gun?
The self-righteous indignation is nauseating.
The right understands this better than anyone. That’s why they twist every moment to fit their narrative.
Charlie Kirk is shot, and instantly they point the finger. They scream that “liberals” spread the hate. They flood the airwaves with propaganda, spinning the story before the truth can even breathe. It doesn’t matter who pulled the trigger. The act itself is secondary. What matters is how quickly it can be weaponized.
And the narrative is always the same. They posture as the victims. Those who oppose them are deemed the threat.
Violence born from their dangerous rhetoric is immediately erased. Violence against one of their own becomes proof that the public must accept more control, more fear.
When does political violence by the people begin to erupt? When daily violence from above leaves people with nothing left. When every so-called peaceful path is sealed shut.
When elections are bought. When courts are captured. When both parties bend the knee to corporate power. When the three branches of government no longer serve the people but serve the wealth that owns them.
At that point, politics itself becomes violence. It’s the slow asphyxiation of entire communities dressed up as law and order.
Violence from the bottom becomes inevitable when people are left with no other defense. When survival is at stake. When the choice is submission or resistance. History shows this again and again.
Enslaved people revolting. Workers striking and fighting back. Indigenous nations defending their land. None of it was granted by asking nicely.
Why? Because power never concedes without force. Ever.
The power structure is built on violence. It enforces itself with guns, prisons, hunger, and debt. To expect it to fall to moral appeals is to mistake the nature of the beast.
Political violence from the people is not about cruelty or domination, or even revenge. It is about survival. It is about breaking the grip of a system that would rather watch the people starve than loosen its hold.
Not all violence is the same. Some violence resists. Some violence oppresses. The latter is reactionary—it protects the order of hate and hierarchy. That’s the violence of fascists, militias, and authoritarians.
But when violence rises to defend the people, when it breaks chains instead of forging them, it cannot be condemned in the same breath.
And they know this. That’s why they are deliberately pushing things to a tipping point. Both sides cater to performative rhetoric while nothing changes for the better—only more people, more children, dying. More struggle. More starvation.
They point to the past like it’s scripture. “Our founding fathers believed…” As if those men didn’t build a system designed to serve rich, white landowners and no one else. As if quoting them is enough to quiet hunger, poverty, and collapse.
We’re told to be angry, but only at the ballot box. Not when we are starved daily. Not when we are worked to the edge of collapse to keep a machine running that only serves them. Not when our lives are treated as expendable, while theirs are treated as sacred.
This is why political violence cannot be dismissed as aberration—it is baked into the order we live under. The power structure thrives on violence already—and they demand obedience while they feed it. Political violence by the people is the natural outcome of exploitation. Decades of betrayal, greed running unchecked, people squeezed until nothing is left.
That’s why no one should be surprised when violence turns upward, striking at the very voices that built their careers on hate. Sympathy is not owed to those who profit from cruelty—to the politicians, the profiteers, the corporate warlords who normalize violence from above. When you build your career on dehumanization, when you champion policies that strip people of their rights, when you normalize violence from above, you should expect it might come back around and bite you.
Because when you push human beings to the edge, our instincts begin to surface. Hunger. Rage. Desperation. Those instincts are not polite. They are not civil. They are raw, and they are real. To pretend otherwise is to lie about what it means to survive—what it means to be human.
It’s how our own military operates around the world. Political violence is our main export. And it’s done daily in the name of “freedom.” Drone strikes. Occupations. Coups dressed up as “liberation.” Entire nations pushed to the edge. Their people starved, broken, bombed—all to protect the same power structure that profits from our pain here at home.
Why would it be any different inside our own borders? If political violence is justified abroad to protect empire, then it should be no surprise when it erupts here against the very voices and systems that sustain that empire.
The question isn’t whether violence will happen. It will. The question is who it serves. Violence from above serves profit and control. Violence from below is the language of survival. One enforces chains. The other breaks them.
Charlie Kirk should not be celebrated as a patriot. He should be condemned for his acts against humanity. But those children shot today—three teenagers going about their day at school, living their lives, working to survive—they should be celebrated. And the gun that tore through them should be removed from our streets and melted down to nothing. The people who build those guns, who flood this country with weapons only to advance power and control, they are the ones who should be held accountable.
America was born in blood and is sustained by blood. The only real question is whose blood it takes to keep the machine alive—and whose blood will finally break it.
Political violence is not the exception.
It is the rule.
It is the American brand.
And it serves power until the people refuse to keep feeding it.
Update: Since publication, it has been reported that one of the three injured was indeed the shooter who was injured by a self-inflicted gun shot wound, and later died. The other two injured students will recover, one critically injured and facing a very long recovery. It has also been reported that the 16-year-old shooter was a radicalized neo-Nazi.