A Dark Prophecy for the Republic
If you want to understand how we got here, you can't just look at the gunman or the other side you dislike. You have to look at the rest of us—all of us,
I don't usually write about national politics or the endless deluge of cultural outrage. My focus and comfort zone is closer to home: state and local issues, grassroots politics, school boards, county commissions, tax rates, local battles for accountability, all the everyday but consequential decisions that actually shape lives more than people ever realize. But the events of September 10, 2025, demands a pause to say something more.
Charlie Kirk was shot and killed while speaking to students at a University in Utah on September 10th 2025. A man set out for him and decided that bullets, not arguments, would win the day. The immediate results are obvious: a man dead, a family broken, an audience and many across the nation traumatized saddened and devastated. The longer results are harder to determine but easier to feel, and this feels like a significant but yet another fracture in a country that more often feels like its coming apart at the seams.
It’s been hard to think about, for me at least.
But I keep thinking about Robert Kennedy in 1968. He stood on the back of a flatbed truck in Indianapolis and told a stunned crowd that Martin Luther King Jr. had been murdered. He didn't give them platitudes or a polished statement vetted by speech writers. He told them the truth and what he felt: that grief, if left unchecked, can turn into violence. He begged them not to answer killing with more killing. That moment of raw honesty may have kept Indianapolis from burning like so many other cities that night.
But here's where we are now: the United States of 2025 is a place where leadership like that is not just rare, it's practically extinct. Our politics are hollowed out. Our institutions at all levels are brittle or broken. And our national conversation is built less on persuasion than performance, less on truth than manipulation.
The rot isn't just in the violence we see, it's in the lies we all silently ignore.
We live in a country where falsehood and dishonesty are no longer embarrassments but are tactics and strategy. Where leaders on both sides will say whatever serves the moment, and the people cheering them on don't even demand consistency, much less honesty. A lie told boldly or with enough bravado is treated as good politics. A lie told often enough becomes a tribal chant for our side. And every time we shrug at it, or laugh at it, or excuse it because "the other side is worse," the center gets a little weaker.
You've seen it clearly: president after president of the United States has looked straight at the camera and lied, and millions chose to believe him anyway. The lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which dragged the country into decades of war. Lies about the Patriot Act, or the NSA spying, or the financial system and the bailouts that followed. More recently, lies about election results, lies about public health, lies about inflation, lies about education. Lies dressed up as optimism, lies disguised as outrage, lies so constant that truth itself feels unattainable at times.
And it isn't just Washington or national politics. The same pattern plays out in every corner of the country. Local governments hold meetings behind closed doors and insist nothing is being hidden. School boards and superintendents bend the rules for inflated stats or to claim it's not nepotism if you change a few job titles. County and city governments promise limited government then spend year after year or feign their belief in transparency and then frustrate any attempt to obtain the public's records. And the “public comment” periods where citizens are treated as nuisances, not owners. Each one of these examples is its own proof that we aren’t immune here or in any quiet corner of America.
We all know these things happen, and yet too often the individually and the public shrugs, because we've grown accustomed to lies, from leaders and from the people “just doing their job” down below.
This is the corrosion and rot that sets the stage for days like September 10. Violence is shocking, but it doesn't emerge from nowhere. It emerges from a culture where honesty is optional, where deception is rewarded, and where something called a “widening gyre” or expanding vortex of chaos was first written as a metaphor for a world of uncertainty and chaos.
In 1919, the poet William Butler Yeats wrote about the world after the First World War. After the great war had gutted Europe's faith in order, Yeats wrote:
"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world."
The metaphor is simple and stark: the falcon circles further and further until it no longer hears the voice that calls it home. That’s us. Citizens tuning out their leaders. Leaders deaf to citizens. Neighbors losing the ability to hear one another at all. That falcon spinning out of earshot, like us. Citizens circling further from the truth, further from one another, further from any kind of accountability. And the falconer (any voice of honesty, of restraint, of reason) can barely be heard above the noise
.Yeats went on: "The ceremony of innocence is drowned."
Is that not what you see if you Look around after tragedy now? Even the way we process tragedy have been corrupted. A man is shot and killed, and within hours the story is turned into hashtags, fundraising emails, partisan talking points, and another round of outrage dujour. Innocence, dignity, and honesty are drowned out by the scramble to…do what?
If you want to understand how we got here, you can't just look at the gunman or the other side you dislike. You have to look at the rest of us—all of us: the people who have allowed dishonesty to become the default language of public life. We tolerate lies because they comfort us. We defend lies because they come from "our side." We normalize lies because calling them out means we might lose friends, jobs, or status. And so the center rots from neglect.
Yeats continued his poem with a line that has outlived a century of chaos:
"The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."
If that doesn't describe America today, nothing does. The people who value honesty often retreat in exhaustion, afraid to speak or convinced it won't matter. Meanwhile, the loudest liars drown out everything with their passionate intensity. We've reached the point where sincerity is mocked as weakness, and deception and blatant lying is praised as what it takes to win or survive. Dishonesty made normal.
That isn’t by chance and it isn't random. Not by design but it's the model of our institutions, our politics, our society. And every time we accept it, excuse it, or normalize it, we march one step further into Yeats' prophecy.
So no, the center isn't holding. Every dishonest quote and press release, every manipulative post or headline, every elected official or cog in the machine employee who knows better but says or does otherwise:, every lie each of us accept despite knowing them to be untrue, these are all little tears in the fabric. Left unchecked, they add up to days and nights like September 10, when someone decides even the most fantastic lies aren't enough anymore.
Another American is dead. A hero to many, a villian to others. Another line has been crossed. This one feels different (especially if you ask a person under 30). In any event, we are left with Yeats' words, which sound less and less like poetry and more like a dark prophecy for our republic:
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.