America’s Assassination
Michael King
Staff Writer
Now discourse has become death, the destroyer of America. Charlie Kirk’s assassination has become a nuclear detonation after a decade of verbal warfare. And the fallout is more than mourning; it’s sorting through the radiation embedded in our political culture. I speak, of course, of language and rhetoric and its weaponization on both sides. One side shouts, “They’re fascists!” the other retaliates, “They’re communists!” Along with those labels, comes the full packaging of history’s worst horrors: the Nazis’ Holocaust, Mao’s Great Leap Forward, Pol Pot’s re-education camps, horrific tragedies we’ve filed under “never again,” have now been reverse-engineered to greenlight hostility. Words begin the chain reaction, and the next step in escalation isn’t debate, it’s detonation.
Joseph Stalin is often credited with the chilling line: “The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of a million is a statistic.” Whether he actually said this or not is up for debate, but what is not is its implications. Mass labels create moral distance. Call someone fascist or socialist and you’re not arguing with a person; you’re designating a target. It’s the political equivalent of placing a bullseye on an entire city from thirty thousand feet. You’re not aiming at specific targets, military sites, supply depots, or command centers; you’re leveling everything. From the sky, it’s easy and efficient; from the ground, it’s indiscriminate. That’s what labels do: they blur individual people into one conglomerate and fail to distinguish between soldiers and civilians. And once the word “fascist” or “socialist” is thrown into the fray, we don’t differentiate between neighbor and enemy. Once people learn to think in terms of “millions” instead of individuals, the machinery of dehumanization is already in motion. And that is what causes the tragedy of one man’s death.
For the last 10 years, the left and right have operated in the same way, just with different masks. Now the mask is coming off, and what’s underneath is an ugly face. When moral identity combines with political identity, it creates what psychologists call “outgroup derogation,” or put more simply, the “us” vs. “them” mentality. It acts as a moral anesthesia that numbs us to commit and cheer on violence against “them.” Stalin’s “millions is a statistic” isn’t just a chilling reminder about numbers; it’s the psychology of reducing people to ideas. Campus talks, social media threads, and headline wars have been ideological trenches of the late 2010s and early 2020s in America. We no longer accuse an opponent of bad policy; instead, we label them enemies of the people. Once that happens, history shows us what comes next: moral outrage curdles into justification, and justification turns into action.
It’s the same logic that ignited Mao’s Cultural Revolution. The infamous Red August in Beijing in the summer of 1966: a month when mass campaigns of denunciation and purges were unleashed against teachers, intellectuals, and other “counter-revolutionaries.” The language of “reactionary,” “bourgeois,” and “rightist” was called out on school loudspeakers. It is a moment in history where slogans became shovels and labels became handcuffs. It’s the backdrop against which we’ll begin two overlapping scenes: the killing of Bian Zhongyun at a Beijing school and, later, the murder of Charlie Kirk on an American campus.
Beijing, 1966. At the beginning of Mao Zedong’s infamous Red August, 50-year-old vice principal Bian Zhongyun at Beijing Normal University is branded a reactionary. Students are encouraged to purge the “old” and “counter-revolutionary” teachers, who have been designated as class enemies.
Utah, 2025. 31-year-old political activist Charlie Kirk is speaking at a Turning Point USA event at Utah Valley University. On social media, the labels have already been chosen for him: fascist, bigot, enemy! The crowd doesn’t see a man; they see a symbol, and the language has already pulled the trigger before the shot is fired.
Back in Beijing, students force their way into Bian’s home, burning her books and chanting “rip out your dog heart, lop off your dog head!” She is dragged in shackles onto campus by students who barely understand the slogans they are saying, but believe that they’re saving the revolution. They chant “Down with the bourgeois!” as they drag her into the courtyard. The words come first: sharp and righteous. Then come the blows. Rifle butts. Boots. Silence. Back in America, the shooter lowers his gun, believing he is defending democracy. The chant becomes a bullet; the slogan becomes a death sentence.
In both scenes, the perpetrators are not monsters; they are anesthetized by ideology, convinced that violence is virtue. That is how language becomes violence, how labels become targets.
Yet, when we flip Stalin’s line, we find another truth. The death of one man, Charlie Kirk, is a profound tragedy because it forces us to confront the individual. His death is not a tragedy because of his beliefs, but because he chose to express those beliefs and paid the ultimate price. It serves as a reminder that every fascist, every socialist, the “other team,” they all have a heartbeat, a family, and a life just as much worth living as you or I. The first and only use of nuclear detonation forced us to realize the cost of power, and perhaps, within the wake of the mushroom cloud of Kirk’s death, we’ll realize the price of words. In the post-Kirk era, we will not be measured by how loudly we speak, but by how carefully we do so.
Contact Michael at michael.king2@student.shu.edu