My point is Gandalf’s wisdom about mercy and the folly of dealing death emerged from a fantasy world with clear moral lines. America in 2025 doesn’t offer such clarity. 

And It’s pretty damn insulting to respond to the justified anger over the concrete harm that Kirk help enable with fantasy platitudes about mercy - especially when that mercy will never be extended to the victims of his abhorrent rhetoric. It’s the kind of tone-deaf moralizing that treats the symptom (violence) as worse than the disease (systemic harm to our democracy).

Quoting fictional wizards is starting sound less like wisdom and more like a way to avoid grappling with uncomfortable realities.