The American Holy War Begins

Stephen Miller stands before cameras, voice trembling with righteous fury: "With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource at the Department of Justice and Homeland Security to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks. We will do it in Charlie's name."

A free speech advocate was murdered; his death was immediately branded an 'assassination' to justify criminalizing speech. An anti-government voice is becoming the excuse for maximum government expansion. The irony would be perfect if it weren't so predictable.

We've seen this movie before. A tragic event occurs. Leaders declare vast conspiracies. Emergency powers activate. Yesterday's dissent becomes today's terrorism. The machinery of state power expands to meet the manufactured threat. All in the name of the martyred dead who can no longer object to how their memory is used.

What we're witnessing isn't grief or justice. It's the reflexive response of a hollow authority structure that knows only one move: transform tragedy into authoritarian opportunity. When your only tool is state violence, every death becomes a reason to use it.

Miller's promise to "go nuclear" on "violent radical leftist groups" reveals the playbook. Watch how quickly that definition expands. First, it's the shooter and any direct accomplices. Then it's anyone who posted criticism of Kirk online. Next, the protesters who opposed him. Then the journalists who questioned him. The circle widens until half the country finds itself designated as a "terror network."

This isn't speculation, it's a historical pattern. The Patriot Act was supposed to catch foreign terrorists. It ultimately surveilled journalists, activists, and ordinary Americans. The drug war was supposed to stop cartels. It imprisoned millions of nonviolent citizens. Every expansion of state power in response to a crisis becomes permanent, turned inevitably against the population it claims to protect.

This pattern runs deeper than politics. It's embedded in the Abrahamic framework that underlies Western civilization: divide the world into absolute good and absolute evil, claim exclusive ownership of good, then commit any atrocity to defend it.

The Crusades weren't an aberration; they were the logical conclusion of a worldview that cannot hold paradox. The Inquisition wasn't excessive zeal; it was the system working as designed. When you split reality into saved and damned, someone has to enforce the boundary. When you create absolute evil in the Other, any violence against them becomes justified.

We see this now in the perfect horseshoe where extremes meet. The Christian nationalist and the secular fundamentalist become indistinguishable in method. Both claim absolute righteousness. Both dehumanize opponents. Both justify violence through moral superiority. They're not opposites; they're the same shadow wearing different masks.

The mechanism is simple: when populations project their values onto external authorities, both become hollow simultaneously. The authority, The Hollow Senex, is hollow because it's pure performance: power without substance. The followers are hollow because they've externalized their own agency, creating a vacuum where their center should be.

This double emptiness creates a feedback loop. The hollow authority needs increasingly dramatic enemies to maintain relevance. The hollow followers need increasingly absolute Others to define themselves against. Each feeds the other's emptiness while calling it righteousness.

The right will sanctify Kirk as their MLK, killed by "leftist oppression," proof of their victimhood, justification for their response. The left will deny any shadow that contributed to this violence, any rhetoric that dehumanized, and any projection that created the conditions. Both sides will deepen the split that produces more martyrs.

The solution isn't defeating one side; that perpetuates the cycle. It's recognizing that the entire framework is diseased. When you need an enemy to know who you are, you've already lost yourself. When you require Others to project your shadow onto, you've abandoned the possibility of wholeness.

This isn't about moral equivalence. Kirk and MLK aren't the same; one challenged power structures, the other performed them. But both deaths get weaponized by the same mechanism: the need for martyrs to justify violence, for victims to claim righteousness, for blood to sanctify the cause.

What would it look like to refuse this entire framework? To recognize that the splitting itself, not the Other, is the disease? To understand that every designation of absolute evil creates the violence it claims to prevent?

As Miller prepares his crackdown, as the surveillance state expands, as dissent gets reframed as terrorism, we face a choice. We can play our assigned roles in this ancient drama, pick our side, project our shadows, and await our martyrs. Or we can step outside the theater entirely.

This doesn't mean disengagement or false neutrality. It means recognizing that real resistance isn't joining the opposite team but refusing to play the game. It means reclaiming our projected authority instead of seeking new masters. It means integrating our own capacity for violence rather than locating it entirely in Others.

The populations themselves have become unconscious performers in this theater of splitting. But consciousness is the exit. When enough people see the mechanism. How tragedy becomes an authoritarian opportunity, how martyrdom justifies violence, how we create the very enemies we claim to fight, the play ends, not through victory but through abandoned attendance.

Kirk's death is being used to destroy what Kirk claimed to defend. In his name, free speech will be criminalized, the government will expand, and more violence will be justified. The only way to honor any of the dead, Kirk, MLK, or the unnamed millions, is to stop feeding the machine that killed them.

The hollow empire always strikes back. But it strikes at shadows, at projections, at its own reflection in the Other. When we stop providing those shadows, stop maintaining those projections, stop being the Other it needs to exist, the empire reveals what it always was: a hollow performance that required our participation to continue.

The choice isn't between right and left, Kirk and his critics, order and chaos. It's between continuing to perform our roles in this death cult or walking off the stage entirely, between maintaining the split that produces martyrs or choosing the difficult work of wholeness.

They'll call this moral equivalence. They'll say we must choose sides. They'll insist the enemy is real and must be destroyed. But we've seen where that leads, to Miller's podium, promising to use Charlie's name to justify the surveillance state Charlie would have opposed.

The only winning move is not to play; our acquiescence is consent.