WE ARE CHARLIE: Unreleased Director’s Cut

My reactions to him were based on the topic at hand, not his movement, his status, or his influence. I watched him the same way I watch anyone else in the public arena, judging each moment by its own merit rather than treating him like a side I was supposed to defend.

When he was killed, I expected disagreement. I expected criticism. That is the world we live in. What I did not expect was to see people I knew celebrating it. Friends and family were posting jokes, excuses, and little moral victories so they could assure themselves they were still the good ones. They had not called me fascist or Nazi to my face, but they had no problem sharing articles and posts implying that people with beliefs like mine were dangerous, hateful, or aligned with those labels. They never stopped to consider how a decade of that rhetoric helped create the environment that made this kind of reaction feel normal. They did not attack me directly, but they aligned themselves with voices that did, and then they turned around and celebrated the death of someone who challenged their worldview. Seeing that level of disconnect and cruelty pushed something in me that I had been ignoring for a long time.

I had not edited any video in almost ten years, but I opened my laptop and started pulling clips. At first it was supposed to be a small montage showing the dishonesty in the reactions. Then it grew into a forty minute piece about where we are as a culture and how easily people dehumanize political opponents. Watching the footage back to back made something painfully clear. The problem was not only the murder. It was the way people reacted afterward and the mental gymnastics they used to feel righteous while doing it.

For a long time I hesitated to release this because people still argue about who actually killed Charlie. I understand that debate, but the identity of the killer is not the point. What mattered was the hatred that poured out afterward. What mattered was how quickly people celebrated a death, how easily they justified cruelty, and how comfortable they were discarding empathy the moment ideology came into play. We say we value truth, compassion, and open debate, yet we attack anyone who actually engages in it.

I did not agree with everything Charlie said, but I respected his willingness to take on conversations others avoided. That mattered to me because I watched the same pattern happen to him that had been happening to people like me for years. He was labeled racist, fascist, misogynist, dangerous, extremist. Not because those accusations were true, but because most people are too lazy or too afraid to look into the facts themselves. These labels have become the all purpose weapons people use to shut down debate and shame anyone who thinks differently. Charlie lost his life in an environment shaped by that kind of rhetoric. Not by evidence, but by narratives, ragebait, and soundbites people repeated without ever questioning them. That is a major part of what this film is about, not the theories surrounding his death.

What people never see is the work behind something like this. It took me almost a month to cut it together. I spent night after night digging through Charlie’s positions, watching full debates, searching for clean versions of clips buried under layers of captions, emojis, filters, stickers, and jump cuts. Most of the footage online had been reposted so many times I had to track down original uploads just to create something watchable.

Piece by piece it started coming together, but I still had no idea how to end it. I did not know if the film should leave people with hope or sit in the heaviness of what happened. I tried dozens of royalty free tracks and nothing carried the weight of the story. Everything felt hollow or disconnected.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, the song Charlie by Tom MacDonald came up on my playlist while I was driving home. That was the moment the bulb went off. Hearing it pulled me straight back to when I first met Tom in 2019 at a small concert in Orlando. I had discovered his music a few months earlier, and neither of us were who we are now. Neither of us had lived through covid, censorship, the pressure of speaking up, or the backlash that comes with refusing to fall in line. Watching him wake up over the last five years, and watching how the world shifted around both of us, has been something impossible to ignore

It reminded me that during a recent Facebook live, Tom said he wrote the song Charlie because the situation shook him and he needed to get his thoughts out. He couldn’t sleep that night until he got it out. Hearing that hit me harder than I expected because editing this film had become the same thing for me. It was my way of processing what happened, the reactions, the culture, and the shift inside my own mind.

Then, when I finally tested that one song against the final sequence, everything clicked. The tone, the emotion, the message. It felt right instantly. I could not imagine ending the film without it. The story finally closed where it needed to.

This whole project became a turning point in my life about speaking up. Watching the reactions to Charlie’s death, seeing people celebrate it, and dealing with censorship myself pushed me past a line I had been avoiding. Silence was no longer an option. This was when I started organizing my thoughts instead of letting them sit in the background. It was when I stopped wasting energy in comment threads and began turning ideas into something real, into concepts that could grow into larger work.

I had a realization while finishing the last few frames. The end of the film is where we are right now. It lays out the past as it happened. What happens next is up to us.

Disclaimer:
This is an unfinished edit created for personal documentation and commentary. I do not own the rights to any of the footage shown. All clips were sourced from publicly available material online. All music used in this project is properly licensed except for the track Charlie by Tom MacDonald.

I didn't really follow Charlie or Turning Point before he was killed. I had seen a lot of his clips online, and most of what he said made sense to me. I agreed with many of his positions, but I was never the kind of person who puts on a team jersey for any political figure. If I thought he handled something poorly, I said so. One of the last things I posted before he died was a critique of him losing his temper during a debate on Israel.

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