Charlie Kirk’s death is heartbreaking. Any loss of life to gun violence is. But what strikes me most is not only the grief, but the imbalance. In the weeks ahead, his story will dominate the headlines, the panels, the airwaves. His face will be on every screen, his legacy dissected endlessly. And yet, just two weeks ago, two children at Annunciation Catholic School were shot and killed, and already their names are already fading from memory.

It is all one and the same: lives ended by bullets in a country where violence has become routine. But we will act as if one life mattered more — not because he was more important than those children, but because his death was louder. That is the spectacle of political violence.

This is not to say Charlie Kirk deserved this fate. He did not. Violence is never justified. But we cannot ignore that his death fits neatly into the narrative of America’s culture wars. He was on the front lines of many of the issues that divided us. He thrived in the friction of division, even if his intentions were pure. And in today’s America, populism is met with populism. That is the dangerous cycle we are living through.

Make no mistake, the left has not been innocent in this. Democrats, too, have greatly contributed to the cycle of division. But this is not about tallying blame or keeping score. It’s about survival of civil society itself, where political conflict must stay in the realm of speech, not bloodshed.

This is no different from what we have already seen. Just recently,

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