The Mask Is Off, and My Heart Is Broken

I’ve spent the past week trying to hold two things in my mind at once, and I feel like it’s tearing me apart. The first is the knowledge that the man who murdered Charlie Kirk came from the same soil I did. As a Utahn, and an ex-Mormon, there’s a specific kind of nausea that comes from seeing the culture you were raised in produce something so monstrous. It’s a feeling of betrayal, a sickening sense that a rot you tried to escape has now metastasized into a national horror. I am disgusted by him. Disgusted that we share a home state, disgusted that we walked away from the same faith.

But the sickness of one man, as profound as it is, is not the story that will define this moment. The story is the reaction of millions. And that’s the second thing I can’t get out of my head: the image of Charlie Kirk’s children.

As a person with young kids in my life, my heart is utterly shattered for that family. I can’t stop picturing the terror in their eyes, the lifelong trauma seared into their minds. And while I was trying to process that unimaginable pain, my screen filled with something else: celebration.

The most damning indictment of this moment didn't come from the political right. It came from within the left itself. The political commentator 'sh0eonhead' captured the shock perfectly, writing of seeing “people i thought were friends, people i thought were normal people celebrating the gruesome public execution of a father… because he politically does not agree with them.”

Her words hit me like a physical blow, because they articulated the horror I was witnessing. Teachers, healthcare workers, people who fill their bios with slogans of tolerance, were publicly cheering for the brutal murder of a man in front of his kids. All I could picture were his children, who will now grow up not only without a father, but with the knowledge that strangers, people who claim to stand for compassion, cheered for their family’s destruction. Sh0eonhead called it what it was: “shitlib mask was ripped off.”

This is where my personal heartbreak collides with a terrifying political reality. When a vocal contingent of a political movement celebrates murder, it ceases to be a political movement. It becomes a death cult. It forfeits any claim to the moral high ground. And the fact that this alarm is being sounded by people within the left confirms it’s not an attack from the outside; it is a diagnosis of a sickness from within.

This is why we are witnessing the end of the progressive movement as we know it. It has poisoned itself. Mainstream, rational people, including those on the left who haven’t lost their souls, are looking at this display of casual brutality and are recoiling in horror.

And this ideological sickness is already metastasizing globally. In the United Kingdom, the "Unite the Kingdom" rally, a far-right protest, saw tens of thousands take to the streets. The violent rhetoric and actions of a faction on the far-left are not destroying their opponents; they are creating them. They are feeding a powerful backlash that empowers the very forces they claim to be fighting against. This public celebration of death is the greatest gift the far-left could ever give the far-right.

I started this week disgusted by the actions of one man who shared my background. I end it terrified by the actions of millions who do not. The mask is off. And standing here, as a Utahn who feels shame and a human being who feels a father’s loss, I’m just not sure I want to see what’s underneath.