Author: Ryan Williamson

I’m losing my publisher’s audience. Former allies are calling for my cancellation. Friends are abandoning me. Not because I attacked them—but because I pointed out alarming patterns of dehumanizing rhetoric within the conservative movement I’ve belonged to my entire adult life. When people use eliminationist language about my gay son, my immigrant family, I can’t stay quiet. Even when speaking up costs me everything. Even when it feels like I’m the only one in my circles willing to say it. This is about what happens when you refuse to be silent—and what it costs to be a witness when no one’s listening.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

When tragedy strikes, we face a fundamental choice: do we use it to build bridges or burn them? Do we distinguish between extremists and ordinary people, or do we use extremists to justify viewing entire populations as enemies? I wasn’t being tone deaf when I called for de-escalation. I was watching the early stages of how democracies die—when grief becomes grievance, grievance becomes dehumanization, and dehumanization enables atrocities. When “gentle grandmothers” start contemplating violence, we’ve crossed a line that’s very difficult to uncross. The people celebrating Kirk’s death deserve condemnation and consequences. But using their moral bankruptcy to justify viewing half the country as enemies worthy of violence is exactly what the bad actors want—be they social media firebrands, algorithmic amplification, partisan operatives, or foreign agents provocateur. They profit from chaos, division, and conflict. They want us to see neighbors as threats, coworkers as enemies, fellow Americans as foreigners. Charlie Kirk deserved far better than assassination. He also deserves better than having his death used to justify the very divisions he spent his life fighting. The best way to honor his memory isn’t to embrace the logic of civil war, but to reject the forces trying to tear our democracy apart.

After Charlie Kirk’s assassination I heard growing rhetoric from the Right about dramatically escalating leftist violence and decided to dig into the data and see where things were trending. What I didn’t expect to find was the rhetoric wasn’t just wrong, it was catastrophically backwards. Compiling 20 years of ideological violence data from FBI reports, academic databases, and terrorism research centers revealed that right-wing extremism accounts for 68-78% of all fatalities—over 375 deaths—while left-wing violence represents barely 1.5-2%. Even generous sensitivity analyses couldn’t bridge this chasm. The gap is so large that no amount of methodological adjustment changes the fundamental conclusion: right-wing violence kills Americans at 20 times the rate of left-wing violence, minimum.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Genocide doesn’t start with gas chambers. It begins with dehumanizing rhetoric, legal discrimination, and deportation systems. Right now, the U.S. is progressing through the documented early stages that preceded every modern genocide: systematic dehumanization of immigrants, Muslims, and LGBTQ+ Americans; mass detention infrastructure; military involvement in civilian operations; and emergency powers that bypass normal legal protections. This isn’t hyperbole—it’s pattern recognition based on decades of genocide research. The warning signs are unmistakable, and the time to act is now, before prevention becomes impossible.

For twenty years, American political discourse has crossed a dangerous line—and no, both sides aren’t doing the same thing. There’s a fundamental difference between attacking what people believe versus who they are. Right-wing rhetoric increasingly targets immutable characteristics: race, sexuality, ethnicity. Left-wing rhetoric more often targets chosen beliefs and roles. This distinction isn’t semantic—it’s the difference between democratic conflict and the ideological groundwork for atrocities. The data is stark: hate crimes against LGBTQ+ people have doubled. Right-wing ideological killings outpace left-wing by an order of magnitude. When words systematically dehumanize people for existing, body counts follow. We’re watching the permission structures for genocide being constructed in real-time.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

I just watched truth lose to conspiracy theory in real time on Twitter—a viral thread claimed “leftists” and “radical Muslims” formed a secret alliance to destroy civilization, racking up millions of views and massive engagement, while my reasonable explanation (maybe it’s just misguided people making predictable mistakes?) got crickets and algorithmic burial. This is how we’re drowning in conspiracy theories: social media rewards apocalyptic rage and punishes nuance. The Dundee “Braveheart” hoax followed the same pattern—inflammatory fiction went viral while police corrections got buried. The algorithm wants you angry. The question is whether we’re going to keep feeding it what it wants.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​