Watching the Charlie Kirk memorial, I'm struck by how extremely culturally distant I feel from this world. Everything about it feels alien - the aesthetics, symbolism, music, rituals, mythology, gurus, ideas, and norms. It feels like being exposed to the cultural and symbolic universe of a distant tribe. If I reflect on this, it occurs to me that this feeling must be symmetrical - that they must view the kind of cultural universe I inhabit as similarly alien. And in a strange way, despite opposing almost everything about this political project, this reflection makes me feel more empathy for what that project must feel like from the inside.