September — Escalation

When the Fight Becomes the Strategy

In September, we came back to a different world.

Leadership had given way to open conflict. Not disagreement. Not debate. An all-out brawl. Our leaders weren’t leading anymore—they were fighting. And in the process, they pulled the country into the fight with them.

We, the people, were fighting too.

Then Charlie Kirk was shot and killed.

It was a tragedy—full stop. A loss of life that should have demanded restraint, reflection, and care. Instead, it became leverage. Not by accident, but by design.

The death was immediately folded into a narrative that justified escalation: escalation of rhetoric, escalation of force, escalation of fear. It became the emotional permission structure some had been waiting for—the moment used to argue that extraordinary measures were now necessary. That cities were no longer cities, but enemy territory. That dissent was no longer disagreement, but threat.

And suddenly, the idea of deploying the military domestically—once an absolute last resort—was being cheered.

That should have stopped us cold.

For most of our lives, there was a shared understanding: the U.S. military does not police its own people. It is not used internally except in the most extreme circumstances—natural disasters, insurrections overwhelming civil authority, or direct threats to the survival of the nation.

That line mattered.

In September, that line was bent—and in some cases, crossed.

The new norm wasn’t responding to emergencies. It was manufacturing them. Deploy force first. Provoke reaction. Use that reaction as justification for more force. Policy enforcement blurred into intimidation. Authority blurred into coercion.

At the same time, the narrative hardened.

Immigrants—particularly those here illegally—were no longer framed as a policy challenge or an economic reality. They were framed as an existential threat. Not a problem to manage, but an enemy to confront. And once a common enemy is named, everything else becomes permissible.

The left became that enemy.

Every norm broken, every constitutional safeguard bypassed, every line crossed was explained the same way: we had no choice. They made us do it.

It was the logic of the bully—claiming victimhood while throwing the punch. Justifying the beating by insisting the smaller guy deserved it.

That is escalation.

And this escalation wasn’t accidental. It wasn’t chaos. It was strategic. Fear was being organized. Outrage was being focused. Power was being exercised openly, while restraint was mocked as weakness.

Through all of this, we kept doing the work we committed to earlier in the year. We tracked facts against narratives. We proposed solutions. We resisted the pull toward tribalism and emotional shortcuts.

But something had changed.

September wasn’t just louder. It was sharper. The consequences of abandoning norms were no longer theoretical. They were visible. They were emotional. And they were being applauded.

The question was no longer whether escalation was happening.

The question was whether enough people would recognize it for what it was—before it became the new normal.

Tomorrow: how free speech, media pressure, and narrative control turned escalation into enforcement.