“It’s Not What You Said, It’s When You Said It.”

I’ve heard this particular criticism from well-meaning individuals more times than I can count: It wasn’t the content of my September 12th post that was my unforgivable sin, it was the timing. I “capitalized on tragedy.” I was “tone deaf.” I was “reckless” and “irrational.” It was “deranged ranting.”

Hold that thought for a minute and let’s rewind to two weeks before Charlie Kirk was assassinated. On August 30th I posted what I called my “Foment Genocide Bingo Card.” Three boxes checked: they’re stealing our jobs, they’re eating our pets, they’re raping our daughters. The pattern is unmistakable to anyone who’s studied how dehumanizing rhetoric escalates. I wasn’t making predictions. I was documenting what was already happening.

One week before Kirk died, I published an analysis of the “Sophie Braveheart” incident—documenting the third checkbox in real-time. A twelve-year-old girl had been falsely transformed into a viral symbol of “migrants trying to sexually assault” Scottish girls. The “they’re raping our daughters” narrative had arrived, spread virally across conservative social media with Elon Musk amplifying it to 225 million followers, while police corrections stating they found “no evidence to substantiate claims” got algorithmically buried. This wasn’t hyperbole. I was documenting the escalation pattern as it happened.

Fast forward to the forty-eight hours following Kirk’s assassination. What we were witnessing wasn’t grief. It was rage fueled by a false narrative that half the country wanted conservative blood—a narrative built and amplified before the shooter was even identified. I watched it unfold in real-time across conservative media and social platforms, and I recognized it for what it was: mass hysteria threatening to justify preemptive violence against people like my neighbors, my coworkers, my family.

On the evening of September 12, I posted an observation about the fundamental difference between left-leaning and right-leaning dehumanizing rhetoric. I’ve been told repeatedly since then that my timing was terrible, that I was exploiting tragedy, that I was overreacting to understandable grief.

The stark reality of that moment in time suggests otherwise.

Within hours of Kirk’s death—before Tyler Robinson was identified as the shooter—Fox News host Jesse Watters declared on The Five, his network’s most-watched program: “They are at war with us! Whether we want to accept it or not, they are at war with us!” He added: “Everybody’s accountable. And we’re watching what they are saying on television.”

Elon Musk posted to his 226 million X followers: “The Left is the party of murder.”

Far-right influencer Libs of TikTok, with over 4 million followers, posted: “THIS IS WAR.” Andrew Tate, Ian Miles Cheong, and multiple other conservative commentators echoed the same two words: “Civil war.”

Actor James Woods: “It’s not gun violence. It’s Democrat violence. The left says they want ‘national conversations.’ Charlie Kirk actually did just that… And they murdered him for it.”

This wasn’t scattered reaction from fringe accounts. This was coordinated messaging from major conservative media figures and Trump administration officials before anyone knew who pulled the trigger or why.

President Trump’s September 10 Oval Office address blamed “radical left political violence,” calling Kirk “a martyr for truth and freedom.” He accused the left of comparing “wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis” and declared: “This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now. My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity.”

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller alleged “a vast terrorist network” on the left was responsible and promised the federal government would devote “every resource at its disposal to vengeance” in “Charlie’s name.”

This wasn’t mourning. This was the systematic construction of justification for government-backed retaliation against political opponents.

My liberal friends, neighbors, and family sure as fuck weren’t celebrating. They were terrified.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez postponed public events in North Carolina citing safety concerns. Representative Jared Moskowitz stated: “People are scared to death in this building. I mean, not many of them will say it publicly, but they’re running to the Speaker talking about security.”

During a closed-door House meeting about a resolution honoring Kirk, multiple Democrats expressed fears that voting against it could make them targets. One senior Democrat described it as “the ugliest meeting I’ve ever seen,” with members leaving “visibly upset.”

Everyone in my community who votes blue (and that’s essentially everyone) were keeping their heads down. The cashier at my local grocery store who’d been wearing her pride pin for years quietly removed it.

The people conservatives were claiming “wanted their blood” were terrified of conservative reprisals.

And legitimately so.

The hysteria claimed leftist violence was surging and systematic. But the truth was dramatically different.

Just three months earlier, in June 2025, right-wing extremist Vance Boelter had assassinated Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, wounding another Democratic legislator and his wife. Boelter, a Trump voter who opposed abortion and LGBTQ rights, carried a death list of Democrats including Governor Tim Walz and Representative Ilhan Omar.

There was no national day of mourning. No calls for Republicans to prove their opposition to violence. No firing campaigns. No FCC threats. No visa revocations.

When CBS challenged Trump about the Hortman assassination, he claimed to be “not familiar” with it.

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro—whose own residence was firebombed in April 2025 while his family slept—directly rebutted Trump’s narrative: “The political violence has impacted Democrats and Republicans, and the rhetoric of vengeance and the language that has created division has come from both sides of the political divide.”

The Center for Strategic and International Studies report conservatives cited to justify the crackdown found five left-wing terrorist incidents in 2025—with zero fatalities (Kirk excluded). Over the prior decade, right-wing extremism had killed 112 people compared to 13 deaths from left-wing attacks.

On September 12, I was watching the temperature rise by the hour. “Lock and load” rhetoric. Comparisons to “October 7th”—as if one man’s death equated to 1,200 Israelis massacred. Claims that “they” wanted “our” blood. Calls for civil war.

I knew what actual liberals were experiencing: fear. Not joy. Not bloodlust. Fear.

I had comprehensive data showing that the claimed surge in leftist violence didn’t exist. I had weeks of prior documentation tracking escalating rhetoric already assembled before Kirk died. And I had a clear understanding—from years of studying genocide and democratic backsliding—of what happens when mass hysteria is allowed to build unchecked during moments of national trauma.

So I posted an observation on X about different kinds of dehumanizing rhetoric that I’d already been making privately for ages, and genocide scholars have made for decades. You all know The Post by now. It’s simply about why rhetoric that attacks who you are is historically more dangerous than attacking what you believe. The former is more commonly employed by the Right, the latter by the Left. Both can be harmful, but one is historically more deadly. Disagree if you want. I didn’t make this up. It’s well-documented and researched. It’s an empirically validated pattern in the research literature. It’s just facts.

And facts, as they say, don’t care about your feelings.

The CEO of my then-publisher replied publicly, “This is a bad take.” A longtime close friend of mine agreed, “Yup, shame.”

No attempt to engage. No evidence provided to counter my observation. No debate.

“Bad take.”

“Shame.”

From men I’ve known and worked with closely for years. Men who know me better than most. Men who refuse to admit there could possibly be a problem in their tribe.

So, obviously, the problem is me.

Shame. Shame. Shame.

In the days that followed, over 600 Americans were fired from their jobs for social media comments about Kirk’s assassination. The FCC chairman threatened ABC over Jimmy Kimmel’s criticism, leading the network to pull his show indefinitely. The State Department revoked visas for six foreigners over Kirk-related speech. The Defense Secretary ordered military purges of anyone who posted negatively about Kirk.

A website called “Celebrate”—later renamed the Charlie Kirk Data Foundation—collected over 30,000 submissions of people allegedly celebrating Kirk’s death, publishing their names, employment details, and social media accounts. Uninvolved individuals with similar names reported receiving threats and fleeing their homes.

The ACLU called it “beyond McCarthyism.” Historians compared it to Stalin’s purges. Even Senator Ted Cruz—no moderate—called the FCC’s actions “dangerous as hell,” comparing them to mafia intimidation.

This wasn’t a few isolated firings. This was systematic government-backed political retaliation, justified by claims of surging leftist violence that the data prove didn’t exist.

But people still ask: Why post that on September 12? Why not wait?

Because the escalation was happening in real-time. Because the hysteria was building toward something dangerous. Because people I knew personally were scared—not celebrating, not plotting violence, but scared of what was coming.

And frankly, when would have been a “better” time? Wait a week and I’m still “exploiting grief.” Wait a month and I’ve “missed the moment.” Wait until God forbid it escalated into bloodshed and I’ve “failed to warn anyone.”

The truth is there was no acceptable time to say what I said, because what I said challenged a narrative that powerful people were actively constructing for specific political purposes.

I wasn’t overreacting. I wasn’t reckless. I certainly wasn’t irrational or unhinged.

I’d been tracking the escalation and normalization of dehumanizing rhetoric on the Right for months. I posted my first warning two weeks before Kirk died. When the assassination happened and I watched conservative media immediately frame it as justification for treating half the country as enemies in a war, I attempted to intervene with a factual observation about rhetoric and which kind is legitimately more dangerous. Because it isn’t the Left disproportionately spilling blood by an order of magnitude. It’s the Right. And the death of one man, no matter how beloved, doesn’t change that reality. The true enemy isn’t “them.” It’s in our ranks. It’s the extremists who’ve been enabled by the man you elected.

That’s the real threat.

And saying so out loud isn’t exploitation. It’s not poor timing. It’s documentation in real-time of a pattern I’d already identified, at the moment when it mattered most.

And I’d do it again.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​