Posts Tagged ‘faith’

🗣 Culture War as Distraction: What’s Being Lost After Charlie Kirk’s Murder 📰

Posted: September 19, 2025 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional
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We’ve just been through another moment: Charlie Kirk dead, an American provocateur murdered during a public event.

Immediately, the gears of outrage, social media spectacle, and moral posturing started turning. But underneath the noise, ask yourself: how much of what’s going on is politics as usual? And how much is a vivid distraction from what really holds power in this country?

“If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.” — The Charlie Kirk Show, January 23, 2024 The Guardian

The Spectacle & Response

If you scroll through social media or listen to pundits, a few things become crystal:

  • Charlie Kirk has been more than “just another right-wing podcaster”; for many on the Right, he is being elevated to martyr, symbol, hero. This is intentional. It fuels identity, animus, and grievance.
  • Meanwhile, the Left is also practicing its version of virtue displays: denunciations, calls for “free speech,” arguments over who is more morally responsible. Sometimes these are sincere; often they are performative.

Then there’s the machinery of suppression/support. Jimmy Kimmel gets pulled off the air indefinitely for his remarks about the killing. Platforms scramble. Lawmakers issue statements. Some people are fired, suspended, disowned for social media posts judged too flippant, too critical, too celebratory (or even just insufficiently mournful).

“You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won’t have a single gun death. That is nonsense. It’s drivel. But I am — I think it’s worth it.” — Charlie Kirk

Lost in the Frenzy: What Actually Matters

While we lock into tribal alignment over “Is X more to blame?” or “Did Y censor free speech?”, real decisions continue to be made elsewhere—decisions that hurt or help ordinary lives.

  • Income inequality: Since 1980, the bottom 90% of U.S. earners have seen incomes rise ~36%, while the top 1% shot up ~162% and the top 0.1% exploded by ~301%.
  • Wage stagnation: Median weekly earnings for full-time workers in mid-2025 are ~$1,196. For women, it’s ~$1,078. Adjusted for inflation, most wages haven’t moved much in decades.
  • Medical debt: 40% of adults report bills they can’t pay. Roughly 20 million Americans owe medical debt, totaling at least $220 billion.
  • Bankruptcies: 2024 saw over 517,000 filings, up 14% from the year before. Medical bills remain a top driver.
  • Life expectancy: Americans in the wealthiest counties live about 7–10 years longer than those in the poorest. Poverty literally shortens life.

These are not abstractions. They are the ground we stand on, and they’re being ignored while we fight over who disrespected whose memory.

“Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.” — The Charlie Kirk Show, May 19, 2023 The Guardian

The Trap of Left vs Right

This is the pattern: tragedy or provocation → political polarization → spectacle → distraction. And the Left vs Right framing helps elites on both sides:

  • Right-wing media gets a martyr, a rallying cry, an excuse to push further culture war rhetoric.
  • Left-wing media and centrist commentators get to critique, outraged, safe inside their media bubbles, while pointing fingers.
  • Neither side is forced to substantially challenge the power structures: the economic inequality, corporate control of media, tech platform power, the role of political money.

““Keep America free … You should be allowed to say outrageous things … There’s ugly speech. There’s gross speech. There’s evil speech. And all of it’s protected by the First Amendment.” — earlier in 2025, in remarks pushing back against limits on free speech. The Santa Barbara Independent

Class War, Not Culture War

Here’s what we lose when class war is displaced:

  • People who could be allies don’t realize their shared stakes. Someone working a low-wage job and voting for the Right may still suffer under the same rent inflation, the same healthcare inaccessibility as someone voting for the Left. But because symbols and culture dominate, they are told to hate each other instead.
  • Policies that could improve life—universal health care, affordable housing, stronger unions, more equitable taxation, campaign finance reform—are sidelined as too “political” or unsexy amid culture war spectacle.
  • Elites (corporations, wealthy donors, political insiders, media conglomerates) are mostly unaffected by the noise. Their power increases because scandal, outrage, fear allow for more regulation of dissent (or selective enforcement), more control over narrative, and more justification for reinforcing the “security” apparatus.

“America was at its peak when we halted immigration for 40 years and we dropped our foreign-born percentage to its lowest level ever. We should be unafraid to do that.” — The Charlie Kirk Show, August 22, 2025 The Guardian

What We Should Be Looking Up At

If we want to shift the ground, here’s what it means to look up not sideways:

  • Hold powerful institutions accountable: Big tech, media conglomerates, regulatory agencies, secret lobbying networks.
  • Shift public focus to material conditions: how many people cannot afford medical care; how many are one paycheck from eviction; how wealth is concentrated.
  • Build movements oriented around economic justice, not just identity or ideology. Worker organizing, co-ops, mutual aid, housing justice.
  • Demolish or weaken the structures that enforce class inequality: tax loopholes, corporate welfare, deregulated finance, and campaign finance that amplifies elite voices.

“If we would have said that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative action picks, we would have been called racists. Now they’re coming out and they’re saying it for us … You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.” — The Charlie Kirk Show, July 13, 2023 The Guardian

Defend free speech. Don’t confuse theater with truth. Don’t let the spectacle steal the stage from power.

Culture war is a powerful machine. It divides communities, drains energy into rage, and channels anger toward the wrong targets—often toward each other. Meanwhile, the people who really control the levers of economic power, of media control, of policy-making, carry on largely unchallenged.

The class war may not feel dramatic; it may feel slower, like moving tectonic plates. But its consequences are far deeper and more pervasive than the latest outrage.

And if we don’t shift our attention, the cycle will keep repeating: event → sides drawn up → outraged tweets and show cancellations → temporary appeasement → next event. Without meaningful structural change, nothing really gets better for most people.

Breaking Free of Judgement & Going Beyond Blame

Posted: September 28, 2024 in Stimulus Space Response
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Photo by Tom Chrostek on Unsplash

“To judge another is to judge oneself.” — Wayne Dyer

One of the things we all have in common is that we are constantly judging. We judge ourselves. We judge other people. We judge our environment. We judge our past. We judge our potential future. We judge our actions. We judge our bodies. We judge our minds. We judge our failures. We judge our successes. We judge effort. We judge results. We judge our intentions.

We judge what has happened, what could have happened, what is happening, what we think will happen, what we think should happen. We judge. It’s hard-wired into us as a species. It’s part of why we have survived. However, we continue to learn that so much of how we have been hard-wired to survive and thrive in the past, is hindering us with hidden suffering in the modern world.

“Most of our unhappiness comes from our own thoughts, not from our circumstances.” — Dalai Lama

Hard-wired is a very fitting term for our unconscious habit of constantly judging ourselves and others. Many days, if not most days, in any situation regardless of the perception of positive or negative, we instantly, without knowing or choosing, slip into a state of judging. We all do it. It’s not a one-time occurrence and isn’t a one-time fix to stop doing it. That’s the thing with habits. For better and for worse, we do them automatically.

Why do we constantly, unconsciously judge ourselves and others? Why is it hard-wired into us? Like so many things that cause problems for humans in the modern world, our brains haven’t evolved much since we were cavemen. Our judging helped us survive as hunter-gatherers outside of our tribe(s) and helped us to build communities within our tribe(s).

“True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It is remembering that everyone deserves compassion.” — Jack Kornfield

Our brains are hard-wired for quick categorization and evaluation. This is more commonly known as the fight or flight (or freeze) response. Fight or flight response can wreak havoc on our lives by creating an unreasonable internal reaction to a reasonable external situation. It has for me and likely has for you as well. Our unreasonable internal reaction is a cognitive bias shaped by our past. When fight or flight kicks in, we aren’t actually reacting or interacting with the present moment, we are having a trauma response and are reacting to the past in the present.

Living in the past and reacting to the past in the present is the opposite of positive, productive, or beneficial. Yet that is our default way of thinking, perceiving, and living. We have to be made aware of it and then taught a better way, then practice that way consistently until it is habitualized. That seems more valuable to me than learning algebra or the periodic table, but oh, there I go judging again.

With evolutionary roots and psychological purpose, how can judging be so detrimental to us? Well, it’s not judging itself that’s bad, it’s negative judgments that are severely counterproductive. Negative judgments about ourselves are a straight path to low self-esteem. Negative judgments about others create social barriers and kill the potential to develop empathy. Positive judgments are helpful and constructive but take a look around, does it look like the world has a surplus of positive judgment going on?

Mindfulness and meditation practices have been life savers for me. I have been my own worst critic for my entire life. Negative self-talk was a big problem for me for a very long time. Guided meditation practices (specifically from the Calm app) helped introduce me to mindfulness in short, simple, easy-to-do ways. Reading and studying Stoic philosophy and spirituality teachers like Eckhart Tolle, Wayne Dyer, and Alan Watts helped me change my paradigm and perception of life.

“Let go of the need to always be right.” — Eckhart Tolle

Paradigms shift slowly. It has taken a long time and is an ongoing practice to be a true friend to myself instead of a critic. Just this year I emphasized and have seen success in shifting my self-talk to that of a friend. Referring to myself as a “friend” internally has been very beneficial because doing so defaults to self-compassion instead of self-criticism.

Compassion for ourselves and empathy for others are mandatory for trying to turn the rutter of our unconscious habit of negative judging. Rutters don’t do quick, sharp turns. It’s slow moving heavy mass. But even a slight change can chart a whole new course if one persists. That’s how change works in life.

Choose to focus on the positive rather than the negative. Choose curiosity instead of criticism. Not once or twice. Not only out in the light of the public eye. But again and again when we are alone in the dark. That’s the real test. That’s when our habits are made. That’s when we’re living. That’s when we’re choosing who we are, by what we do, for better and for worse.

“To understand everything is to forgive everything.” — Alexander Pope