Wizard's Weekly Wrap-Up: September 7-13, 2025
A Week of Endings: Leaders Fell, Governments Toppled, Martyrs Were Made, and the Eclipse Dragged Truths Into Light
This week, the sky ripped open and the world spilled out.
The people rose up in protest, from London to Paris to Melbourne to Jakarta. Japan’s reformer PM bowed out, France’s lost its fourth Prime Minister in as many years, Britain’s deputy PM tripped over her own flat, and Nepal’s prime minister was chased from power by a mob with fire in its teeth. Israel bombed a peace table in Doha, starved Gaza, and rattled grenades at UN peacekeepers, while Russia’s drones tore across NATO borders and the alliance reached for Article 4 like a panic button.
In Brazil, former President Bolsonaro was sentenced to 27 years in prison for leading a criminal conspiracy and attempting a coup after his election defeat. Meanwhile in America, the man who tried to overturn an election just got booed at the tennis, in a Washington restaurant, and at Yankee Stadium.
In the U.S, the Supreme Court cleared the way for Trump’s roving deportation raids to resume, and Congress released Epstein’s grotesque scrapbook of jokes and sketches, complete with Trump’s jagged scrawl stamped beneath a nude outline alongside notes from other elites turning predation into party banter. Denials rained down, but the signatures and the shadows spoke louder.
But it all got lost in the scrum when Charlie Kirk was gunned down in broad daylight, and America’s culture war went live-fire as the nation tore itself apart trying to find someone to blame.
Last Sunday’s lunar eclipse promised a week of endings, and it delivered. Power cracked, shadows surfaced, and the stage shook under the weight of truths that will not stay buried.
So, once again, I’ve sifted the rubble and read the code - collapse, choreography, and the choices we face when the lights go out.
So take a breath.
Let’s make meaning from the madness.
Transmute fear with insight.
Time to go in and dive deep.
**The cosmic insights shared here are mapped to the real movements of the heavens during the past week. If you want to know more about planetary pattern recognition, read about it here**
🌑 The Eclipse That Opened the Floodgates
This week opened under the shadow of a Pisces lunar eclipse, and if you felt the ground shifting beneath your feet, you weren’t imagining it.
Eclipses have always been seen as turning points, cosmic resets that shake us out of the familiar and force endings and revelations. To the ancients, they were terrifying omens. The Babylonians saw eclipses as warnings for kings, so serious that they sometimes installed “substitute kings” to absorb the curse until the shadow passed. In ancient China, people would bang pots and drums to scare away the dragon they believed was devouring the Sun or Moon. Even just a few centuries ago, sailors feared eclipses as signs of storms and disasters at sea.
A solar eclipse preceded the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Columbus used one in 1504 to terrify Jamaicans into feeding his stranded crew, claiming he could make the Moon disappear. Time and again, eclipses have coincided with upheaval, regime changes, and shocks to the world order.
And eclipses don’t just mark endings - they tear things open. They have a way of spilling secrets, of dragging what’s hidden into the light, of exposing the cracks that people thought they could keep sealed. More often than not, what comes out under eclipse shadows are the things no one wanted revealed.
In 44 BCE, a lunar eclipse foreshadowed Caesar’s assassination. In 1869, the “Great American Eclipse” coincided with Reconstruction scandals breaking wide open. And in the 1970s, a string of eclipses marched alongside Watergate, from the break-in to Nixon’s fall.
Eclipses don’t politely wait for truths to surface - they rip them out, often when it’s most inconvenient for those hiding them. Whether you see it as gravitational force, psychological imprint, or symbolic mirror, an eclipse is not just another full moon. It’s a break in the pattern. A tearing open of the script. A signal that the world is about to turn a corner - sometimes gently, often violently.
And this week’s eclipse fell in the part of the sky known as Pisces. For thousands of years, stargazers have given names to the twelve regions of the heavens, noticing that each carries a particular flavor or theme. Pisces has always been linked with dreams, compassion, spirituality, but also with illusions, denial, and escape. It’s the part of the sky where imagination is strongest and boundaries are weakest, which means truth and fantasy can blur until one crashes into the other.
So when a lunar eclipse strikes here, it doesn’t just dim the Moon. It rips away veils, dissolves fantasies, and floods through truths we’ve been avoiding. And sure enough, by the time this week’s shadow passed, resignations had piled up, assassinations struck, and governments collapsed into chaos.
This eclipse didn’t just ripple through the skies; this week, it tore open the world.
🏛️ Thrones Toppled, Leaders Fall
Just this week, in the wake of the eclipse, Japan’s Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba bowed out after less than a year in office. He came in as a reformer in October 2024, but his Liberal Democratic Party was trounced in July’s upper house elections, losing its majority by three seats. Pressure from his own ranks became unbearable, until this week Ishiba announced his resignation, saying he had to take responsibility for the defeat. It was a spectacularly short tenure, and now the LDP will scramble to find a successor.
In France, Prime Minister Francois Bayrou staked his government on an austerity-driven budget and forced a confidence vote this week that backfired spectacularly. He lost by a crushing margin (194 votes to 364) and resigned within hours. Bayrou was France’s fourth prime minister in just over three years, another casualty of a political system grinding into paralysis, leaving French President Emmanuel Macron weaker than ever, with approval ratings scraping the bottom and France edging closer to the kind of ungovernable chaos that Europe has seen before.
Across the Channel, Angela Rayner resigned as Britain’s Deputy Prime Minister in disgrace after admitting to underpaying £40,000 in stamp duty on an £800,000 flat in Hove, trying to pass it off as a misunderstanding of the rules. The ethics adviser concluded she had broken the ministerial code, failing the “highest possible standards” test, so this week she stepped down not just as Deputy PM but also as Housing Secretary and Deputy Leader of the Labour Party - a brutal fall for one of Keir Starmer’s key lieutenants, and a gift to critics who say Labour’s talk on fairness doesn’t match its walk.
In Brazil, former President Jair Bolsonaro was sentenced to 27 years in prison for leading a criminal conspiracy and attempting a coup after his 2022 election defeat. He remains under house arrest while appeals play out, but the verdict marks one of the most dramatic reckonings for a modern head of state - a far-right strongman undone by the very institutions he tried to subvert.
In Nepal, Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli tried to ban 26 social media platforms and the country erupted. Nineteen people died in street clashes, government buildings burned, and ministers fled in panic. Former Prime Minister Jhala Nath Khanal’s wife was killed when their home was torched. Finance Minister Bishnu Prasad Paudel was dragged through the streets and beaten. By week’s end, the ban was lifted and Oli himself resigned, retreating to an army compound as his authority disintegrated.
Astrologically, what we’re witnessing is the first wave of Pluto in Aquarius stripping leaders of legitimacy while the Pisces eclipse pulled masks off in real time.
Saturn’s march through Aries over the next three years will be ruthless: it will test authority and punish weakness, while Neptune in Aries until 2037 will blur political vision, leaving leaders exposed when they can’t deliver clarity. Uranus in Gemini for the rest of this decade is the wild card, igniting sudden shocks, protests, and breakdowns in communication networks.
Taken together, these forces will keep toppling governments that no longer resonate with the collective. What lies ahead is not stability but cascade: resignations, failed mandates, and reshuffling as old systems crack and untested figures step into the void. The 2025–26 stretch is only the beginning - an extended purge clearing space for new political orders to emerge.
We are at the dawn of a Decade of Disruption, but the chaos has purpose. Things are being shaken at the root so that what is rotten falls, and what is ready can rise.
If you want to understand more about what’s happening, I explained it all in detail in the article below:
🔥 Israel’s Firestorm
In the Middle East, Israel’s war machine only accelerated in the wake of the lunar eclipse.
In a move that stunned the world, Israel launched an airstrike in Doha during ceasefire talks, killing senior Hamas officials and civilians in the Qatari capital. Qatar raged that the strike “killed any hope” of a deal, and the UN Security Council - with even the U.S. signing on - condemned it as a reckless breach of sovereignty.
Back in Gaza, Israel issued a blanket evacuation order for Gaza City, forcing hundreds of thousands to flee with nowhere safe to go. The so-called “humanitarian zones” are now little more than overcrowded sand lots without food, water, or shelter - zones that are themselves being bombed. Aid groups warn of starvation and collapse as yet another wave of mass displacement unfolds.
The aggression didn’t stop at Gaza’s borders. In southern Lebanon, Israeli drones dropped grenades within meters of UN peacekeepers, drawing condemnation as one of the most serious breaches in years.
And even the seas turned volatile when a Gaza aid flotilla supported by Greta Thunberg was twice struck while docked in Tunisia. First the Family Boat she had sailed on went up in flames, then another vessel, the Alma, caught fire a day later. Tunisia denies drones were involved, but activists are convinced it was sabotage. The flotilla - carrying supplies and protest symbolism from 44 countries - has become another flashpoint in Israel’s widening war, proof that the blockade now sparks battles far beyond Gaza’s shores.
The upcomingVirgo solar eclipse on September 21 strikes just two days before the UN General Assembly meets, where a wave of nations are set to formally recognize Palestine - a cosmic and political convergence too exact to ignore. With Saturn and the eclipse itself crushing Israel’s natal Jupiter, its alliances and treaties falter, while Pluto’s opposition to its Moon drags its image through grief and exposure. Chiron’s wound to Israel’s Midheaven shows up as humiliation on the world stage, the timing almost scripted: as the eclipse strips away legitimacy, the global community sharpens its verdict.
This UN moment will not read as symbolic - it will be remembered as the start of Israel’s long slide into accountability and isolation.
💥 Russia Escalates, NATO Tested
In Europe, Putin’s war spilled across borders this week when nearly two dozen Russian drones crossed deep into Poland, forcing NATO jets to scramble and airports from Warsaw to Rzeszów to shut down.
Debris rained on Polish soil, and for the first time in years Article 4 was invoked, with one U.S. lawmaker flat-out calling it an act of war. Moscow brushed it off as “nothing new,” but the alliance isn’t treating it lightly - this was a direct test of NATO’s defenses.
At the same time, Russia unleashed its largest aerial assault on Ukraine since the invasion, hurling more than 800 drones and missiles in a single night. Kyiv’s government district was hit, killing a baby among others, while in Donetsk a bomb tore through a line of pensioners waiting for their payments, leaving 25 dead.
Donald Trump this week tried to reframe the carnage as “Biden’s and Zelenskyy’s war,” insisting it would “never have started” if he were president. The claim was blasted as “morally blind and factually wrong” by Representative Don Bacon, and many commentators noted the war has intensified significantly under Trump’s watch, even though he promised to end it on day one of his second term. U.S. politics continues to twist the war into a domestic cudgel, even as NATO itself is being tested on European soil.
Meanwhile, back in Moscow, Putin decorated General Valery Gerasimov - wanted by the ICC for war crimes - with the Order of Courage, a brazen gesture that underscored just how far Russia is willing to go in its campaign of escalation.
The September 21 Virgo solar eclipse supercharges Russia’s bravado but hollows out its core. Neptune’s square to the national Sun clouds authority, while Uranus jolts the people’s Moon, stirring unrest beneath the surface. Jupiter’s trine to Pluto fuels grandiose displays of power and military posturing, and Venus briefly papers over discontent with patriotic spectacle, but the effect is cosmetic.
The eclipse ties Russia’s expansionist drive to karmic costs, exposing the gap between performance and reality. What looks like strength in the moment will read, in hindsight, as the start of a slow bleed of legitimacy.
📖 Epstein’s Birthday Book of Shame
If the eclipse this week cracked the world open, America’s rupture came bound between leather covers as Congress pulled the curtain on one of the most grotesque relics in Jeffrey Epstein’s orbit: his notorious 2003 “birthday book.”
Compiled by Ghislaine Maxwell, it wasn’t a scrapbook but a grotesque gallery of sketches, signatures, and inside jokes that turned predation into entertainment.
At its center was the bombshell: a typewritten letter signed “Donald,” paired with a sexually suggestive drawing. The scrawl matched Trump’s unmistakable autograph - jagged and towering, the same mark he’s splashed across hundreds of executive orders this year. White House denials came quick, but MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow laid the situation bare by visually comparing Trump’s signature in the birthday book with numerous publicly available examples of his autograph, saying, “If the White House is hinging it’s whole defense against how ferociously creepy and suspicious this all is on how much these signatures don’t look alike, that’s a terrible defense.”
The surrounding pages only deepened the rot. Leon Black contributed sleazy poetry likening women as fish caught in a net. Alan Dershowitz mocked Epstein with a parody Vanity Fair cover. Bill Clinton praised “childlike curiosity.” There was a photo of a giant check for $22,500, styled to look like Trump had written it to Epstein, for a girl, “fully depreciated.” Elsewhere, Epstein’s friends sketched children with balloons alongside sexual cartoons - a chilling mash-up of innocence and exploitation.
Taken together, the entries revealed not ignorance but complicity. This wasn’t a circle whispering about Epstein’s behavior - it was a circle laughing about it and normalizing it, making him the punchline of their grotesque camaraderie. They didn’t just tolerate his obsessions; they turned them into party games.
Maddow hit the nail on the head again, saying “What in presidential history even approximates a scandal this disgusting? What in the history of the United States of America, for anybody in any position of public trust, approximates the level of repulsiveness that Donald Trump brings to the presidency with this trailing behind him like a snail trail?”
🌍 The Global Web of Complicity
But the Epstein scandal is not just trailing behind Trump.
After Epstein survivors met with Congress last week, Oversight Chair James Comer admitted, “We learned of some additional names today,” calling the revelations “as bipartisan as anything I’ve seen.” From across the aisle, Representatives Anna Paulina Luna, Summer Lee, and Melanie Stansbury emerged with the same grim refrain: this is bigger than anyone thought, and the cover-up reaches the highest levels.
Luna told reporters, “There are some very rich and powerful people who need to go to jail. It is very much a possibility that Jeffrey Epstein was an intelligence asset working for adversaries.” Lee was blunter: “The government itself is responsible for this injustice.” And Stansbury added: “What we heard today is a cover-up potentially involving foreign countries and foreign actors…..there’s a very powerful person who doesn’t want these stories out.”
Following the release of material from Epstein’s estate this week, more names were dragged into the scandal with newly unearthed emails showing former British cabinet minister and UK ambassador to Washington, Peter Mandelson, referring to Epstein as “my best pal” and defending him even after his 2008 conviction, suggesting the case was wrongful.
The revelations forced UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer to sack Mandelson this week, with the Foreign Office admitting the extent of his ties to Epstein was “materially different from what was known” at the time of his appointment.
Mandelson’s abrupt dismissal underscores the assertion that Epstein’s protection network was global, with elite figures on both sides of the Atlantic ready to excuse, enable, or defend him.
🙈 The Art of Denial
As the week went on and the Epstein scandal deepened, Trump’s denials about the birthday book entry bearing his signature became more and more implausible. “I don't even know what they're talking about,” he told reporters on the White House lawn. “Somebody could have written a letter and used my name.”
Republicans on Capitol Hill were quick to echo the excuse, to which journalist Aaron Parnas pointed out, “That would mean that someone intentionally forged his signature more than a decade ago, before he ran for office. Not just that, this letter was never in the possession of the DOJ, it was released by the Epstein estate. Their forgery explanation makes little sense.”
Despite insisting the signature was a forgery, Republicans signaled they had no intention of looking closer. House Oversight Chair James Comer brushed off the birthday letter entirely, saying, “The president says he did not sign it, so I take the president at his word.” Comer confirmed his committee would not pursue a forensic investigation, effectively granting Trump a pass by shielding his denial instead of testing it.
As Trump continued to dismiss the Epstein revelations as a “Democrat hoax,” House Speaker Mike Johnson jumped to his defense with a startling claim that Trump had once been an “FBI informant” working to bring Epstein down. The remark triggered immediate backlash and Johnson soon walked it back, saying he was echoing a victims’ attorney who called Trump “helpful” to prosecutors in 2009. The White House flatly denied the claim, and even Republicans looked stunned. Representative Thomas Massie quipped: “I don’t know if Speaker Johnson misspoke when he said Trump was an ‘informant’ for the FBI, but if it’s a hoax, why was Trump an informant for a hoax?”
📝 Massie’s Petition: Cracking the Files Open
Massie, a Kentucky Republican, teamed up last week with Democrat Ro Khanna to launch a discharge petition - the rarely used mechanism that allows rank-and-file members to bypass leadership and force a bill onto the House floor. Their target is the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which would require the Justice Department to release all Epstein-related records, redacted only for victim privacy and ongoing prosecutions.
To succeed, the petition needs 218 signatures, a simple majority of the House. At the start of this week, it had 216: nearly every Democrat has signed plus four Republicans (Massie himself, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, and Nancy Mace) leaving Massie just two signatures shy of triggering a floor vote.
The count shifted when Virginia held its special election to fill the late Gerry Connolly’s seat this week. Democrat James Walkinshaw won in a landslide and was sworn in immediately and signed the petition, raising the tally to 217 - just one short of the magic number.
That leaves Massie and Khanna on the edge of success. All eyes now turn to Arizona’s 7th District, where a special election on September 23 will decide who replaces longtime Democratic Representative Raúl Grijalva, who died earlier this year. His daughter, Adelita Grijalva, is running to succeed him and is heavily favored - her father carried the seat in 2024 with 63% of the vote, and the district is considered safely blue. If she wins, her first act in Congress could be signing the petition, almost certainly delivering the 218th signature needed to force a floor vote and potentially force Congress to pry open the rest of the Epstein files.
The Virgo solar eclipse on September 21 - just days before the Arizona election - lands squarely on America’s reputation, with Neptune clouding its public face even as Pluto digs to expose what lies beneath. Mars in harsh square to Pluto signals a raw power struggle, while Jupiter’s conjunction to Mercury points to revelations forced into daylight through documents and votes.
America’s image wavers between humiliation and transformation, but the sky couldn’t be clearer that disclosure, not denial, is the path the cosmos is pressing.
⏳ The Epstein Clock Is Ticking
With progress stalled in the House (for now), this week Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer tried to tack an amendment onto the must-pass defense bill that would have forced the Justice Department to release all federal Epstein files within 30 days. The effort failed by a razor-thin 51–49 vote, with only Rand Paul and Josh Hawley breaking ranks to join Democrats. Schumer blasted Republicans for blocking transparency, while GOP leader John Thune dismissed the move as “political gamesmanship.”
Trump tried to wave the controversy away in an NBC interview, calling the Epstein letter release a “dead issue.” But the polling says otherwise. Surveys from Reuters/Ipsos, YouGov, Quinnipiac, and others show only 15–22% of Americans approve of his handling of Epstein, while well over half disapprove.
Even within his own party, support is soft - many Republicans are uneasy, and some 2024 Trump voters say they’d rethink their backing. Americans overwhelmingly want the Epstein files released, and most believe the government is hiding the truth, leaving Trump looking defensive, isolated, and out of step with the national demand for transparency.
🎭 Trump’s Desperate “Big Thing”
Author Michael Wolff reported last month that Trump had been wandering the White House muttering that he “needs a big thing” to pull attention off the Epstein scandal, and since then, the president has lurched from one headline-grab to the next.
In mid-August, Trump tried a “big thing” by meeting with Putin in Alaska - a summit that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy later said “gave Putin what he wanted”: the optics, legitimacy, a photo-op, and the confidence to escalate pressure on NATO by pushing forward in Ukraine and now even testing the waters in Poland, knowing Trump seems asleep at the wheel.
Days later, Trump gathered Zelenskyy and European leaders in Washington for another “big thing” where he floated a trilateral with Putin, promising peace talks within two weeks, but that deadline has come and gone without action, confirming to many that the hastily organised Alaska summit wasn’t about diplomacy at all - it was just a distraction, another one of Trump’s “big things”.
Back home, Trump has tried all manner of other “big things,” like threatening to send the National Guard into Chicago, though plans for that have reportedly been shelved after advisers warned him that sending in troops to help with local law enforcement without buy-in from the state’s governor could create legal headaches they want to avoid. Undeterred, his administration tried another “big thing,” launching “Operation Midway Blitz,” an ICE crackdown at Chicago’s Midway airport that local leaders blasted as political theater.
He changed the name of the Defense Department to the Department of War, and carried out a drone strike on a small vessel in the southern Caribbean - a “Venezuelan drug boat,” according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio - killing all eleven people on board with no trial and no evidence beyond the Pentagon’s word that the dead were members of a cartel.
He tried to oust Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook over disputed fraud claims - an unprecedented move that a federal judge quickly blocked. Even his communications have taken on a sharper edge, with the White House issuing videos and statements on violent crimes in ways critics say are designed to inflame public anger. It all amounts to a scattershot strategy: a president throwing everything at the wall, desperate for a “big thing” big enough to smother the Epstein drumbeat.
At times, “big things” have fallen into Trump’s lap like gifts from the gods - none bigger than this week’s Supreme Court ruling that greenlit his “roving” deportation raids targeting Latinos and Spanish speakers. The decision jolted headlines and had critics declaring the Court itself had fallen.
But even these headline-grabbers - every stunt, every ruling, every supposed “gift” - have failed to erase Epstein from the front page for long. Since July, when Trump first refused to release the remaining files, the scandal has shadowed him like a storm cloud he can’t outrun.
And now, in the wake of the eclipse and with just two weeks until the Arizona election likely delivers the 218th signature to force Congress to open the files, the skies themselves seemed to flare. The charts of Epstein’s associates lit up like warning beacons, as if the universe were signaling that the “big thing” Trump has been grasping for is about to land squarely in his lap.
🌌 A Big Thing Written in the Stars
As the Moon slipped out of Earth’s shadow this week, Trump’s chart bristled with Mars signatures - violence feeding identity, crisis feeding destiny. Uranus and the Moon pushed destabilization into spectacle, wiring him to seize drama rather than shrink from it. Another man’s downfall was primed to become his stage.
And America’s chart looked like rupture incarnate. Neptune fogged national values, propaganda saturating the air. Mars pulsed raw through the system, turning violence into an open channel. Words sharpened into weapons, headlines into detonators. The Moon set people against power in a collision of grief and systemic rot, while the spotlight illuminated taboos clawing up from the underworld. The sky itself screamed narrative manipulation, shadow exposure, and collective trauma.
In the eclipse’s wake, the signal was unmistakable: something big was about to break.
🚨 Shots in Utah: The Kirk Assassination
On Wednesday at midday, crowds gathered at Utah Valley University to hear right-wing influencer and founder of Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk, speak at his “American Comeback Tour.”
In a tent pitched outside, Kirk sat at the mic delivering his signature blend of conservative fire and grievance politics in a Q&A branded as a “Prove Me Wrong” session, a format he often used to spar with critics and build viral soundbites. The energy in the tent was tense but familiar - a mix of cheers, jeers, and the performative jousting that had become his brand.
One student stepped up to press him on a topic that had become a flashpoint in Kirk’s rhetoric: transgender people and gun violence. “Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last ten years?” the questioner asked. They supplied their own answer before Kirk could reply: “Five.” The moment carried an edge - a challenge to Kirk’s frequent linking of gender identity and social decay.
Kirk gave his answer without hesitation. “Too many,” he said flatly. Then, almost as if to seize back control of the exchange, he shot back a qualifier: “Counting or not counting gang violence?” Mass shootings and gang violence are completely different things, but conflating them served his narrative. It was classic Kirk - deflect, reframe, push the debate onto his terms. The crowd reacted with a mix of laughter and groans, the kind of friction he thrived on.
And then, before he could say another word, the crack of a rifle split the air. A bullet from a rooftop nearly 200 yards away tore through his neck. Jeers turned to screams as Kirk collapsed, the stage dissolving in an instant from spectacle to a scene of horror.
🎯 False Leads, Framed Faces
In minutes, UVU went from pep-rally energy to active war zone protocol. Alarms blared. SWAT teams swept the grounds. The school was locked down, a bubble of fear while helicopters buzzed overhead.
As Kirk was rushed from the stage to the hospital in a critical condition, America entered a strange holding pattern. For a brief stretch of time, no one knew if he would survive.
In that silence, the speculation machine roared. Commentators tripped over themselves to declare him dead, alive, critical, stable. Some spun instant conspiracies - that it was staged, that it was foreign interference, that it was the opening shot of a new civil war. Hashtags clashed in real time, “#PrayForKirk” colliding with “#CivilWarNow.” It was the kind of digital fever dream America now knows by muscle memory: when the facts aren’t out yet, opinion becomes reality.
When police claimed they had a suspect, images shot across the internet of officers escorting a frail older man in cuffs - instantly identified by Utahns as George Zinn, a 71-year-old gadfly better known for jaywalking arrests and street-corner rants than murder plots. Bodycam audio caught an officer muttering, “He said he shot him, but I don’t know.”
Cable news plastered his mugshot. Blogs declared him the shooter. Social media turned him into a villain. FBI director Kash Patel tweeted with chest-thumping certainty, “We have the shooter in custody.” But Zinn was no assassin - just a bewildered old man swept into the dragnet of panic, who was released without charge.
After wrongly identifying one potential shooter, law enforcement went on to name a second person of interest: Zachariah Qureshi. He was detained, questioned, but then released. Like Zinn before him, his name and face were briefly dragged through the rumor mill before the authorities had clarified anything.
This is Uranus in Gemini: a digital stampede where rumor outruns fact, scapegoats are crowned in minutes, and headlines move faster than truth. When the planet of disruption sits in the sign of messaging, a nation drowns in noise.
🕰️ Trump Seizes the Moment
For nearly two hours after the shooting, the nation hung in suspense with Kirk in the hospital, his condition unclear, until at 2:40 p.m., the silence broke - not from doctors, not from police, not from the university - but from the President of the United States.
Donald Trump appeared in a solemn video on social media, declaring Charlie Kirk dead, seizing the narrative, ensuring Kirk’s death carried the weight of presidential theater before the hospital had even spoken.
In his statement, Trump called it a “heinous assassination” and cast the blame squarely on the radical left. He railed against critics who had compared Kirk to Nazis or mass murderers, saying their rhetoric had fueled the violence. Yet even as he urged calm, he laced his remarks with vengeance, and went on to vow to “beat the hell out of the radical left lunatics” he said were responsible for poisoning the country.
Jimmy Kimmel noted, “With all these terrible things happening you’d think our president would at least make an attempt to bring us together, but he didn’t. President Obama did. President Biden did. Presidents Bush and Clinton did. President Trump did not. Instead, he blamed Democrats for their rhetoric. The man who told a crowd of supporters that maybe the Second Amendment people should do something about Hillary Clinton. The man who said he wouldn’t mind if someone shot through the fake news media. The man who unleashed a mob on the capitol and said Liz Cheney should face nine barrels shooting at her blames the radical left for their rhetoric.”
When Trump announced that Kirk would be posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, he sanctified him as both martyr and symbol of the movement. In one stroke, grief became political theater, Kirk’s death recast not as a lone tragedy but as proof of the war Trump insists America is in.
The sky that day cast Charlie as a martyr, too. Mars pressed against his Sun, marking him for violence. The Moon tangled with Uranus and Neptune, throwing the scene into chaos and confusion. Saturn weighed heavy on his heart, while Jupiter swelled his story beyond the man himself.
In the cosmic script, Charlie’s death was never just an end - it was written as theater, sacrifice, and symbol.
🗣️ Martyrdom and Mayhem
Trump’s announcement hit like a rallying cry, as his base and Kirk’s supporters flooded social media with tributes, hailing Kirk as a fallen warrior, a martyr whose death proved the stakes of their fight. Turning Point USA announced vigils and pledged to carry on his mission, framing his killing as an attack on the movement itself.
Within hours, the right’s biggest mics were banging the war drum. Alex Jones declared, “This is a war,” Chaya Raichik posted “THIS IS WAR,” Elon Musk called the left “the party of murder,” and Steve Bannon and Jesse Watters cast the shooting as a turning point demanding a harsher, punitive posture.
Stephen Miller went on Fox and said, "The last message that Charlie Kirk gave to me before he joined his creator in heaven was he said that we have to dismantle and take on the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence. That was the last message that he sent me….we are gonna do that."
Though no shooter or motive had yet been identified, many on the right rushed to paint the left as responsible. Instead of reflection, Kirk’s death became accelerant. A young man gunned down on a campus was transformed overnight into the spark for talk of insurrection, vengeance, and civil war. The martyr machine roared into gear, sharpening America’s knives for the next round.
Even Congress couldn’t hold it together. When Speaker Mike Johnson called for a moment of silence, the chamber descended into shouting as Republicans demanded a spoken prayer while Democrats shouted back that gun victims in their districts never got the same ritual. Others reminded the floor that a school shooting in Colorado had happened that very day, and no prayer had been offered for the dead there.
As silence curdled into shouting and prayer into partisan brawl, Johnson’s gavel pounded, pleading for civility, but civility was gone. What should have been unifying dissolved into spectacle - grief breaking cleanly along party lines.
The rupture rippled abroad. In Strasbourg, the European Parliament saw its own clash when far-right members demanded silence for Kirk. The presiding chair refused on procedural grounds, but right wing members erupted, thumping their desks in fury as the chamber descended into jeers.
What was meant as a solemn gesture became another partisan spectacle - proof that even across the Atlantic, Kirk’s death was less a unifying tragedy than a fresh fault line in the culture war.
🇺🇸 An American Issue, Not a Partisan One
Twenty-four hours after the shooting, it was still unclear who had pulled the trigger and why, but that didn’t stop Trump and right-wing voices squarely and repeatedly blaming the “radical left,” with politicians like Representative Nancy Mace tweeting, “The Left owns what happened yesterday.”
Critics blasted Trump and his supporters for politicizing Kirk’s death, accusing him of weaponizing tragedy to inflame division before a shooter or a motive had even been identified.
Right-wing politicians and commentators seemed determined to pin the surge in acts of political violence on Democrats, as if Republicans were the only ones being caught in the crosshairs. But after 150 politically motivated attacks in just the first six months of this year - nearly double the number from the same period last year - it’s clear that figures on both sides of the aisle are under threat.
Donald Trump narrowly survived two assassination attempts last year. Representative Steve Scalise was gunned down at congressional baseball practice and left fighting for his life. Senator Rand Paul was tackled and beaten by his neighbor, suffering broken ribs. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was targeted by an armed man outside his home. And now, conservative activist Charlie Kirk has been shot dead on a university campus.
But Democrats have been no less vulnerable. Paul Pelosi was beaten with a hammer in his home by a conspiracy theorist. Governor Josh Shapiro’s residence was set ablaze by an arsonist while his family slept inside. Minnesota Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband were gunned down in their living room by a man carrying a kill list of Democrats. Representative Gabby Giffords was shot in the head while meeting constituents - an attack that also killed a federal judge and a nine-year-old girl. And Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer was the target of a foiled kidnapping plot by a far-right militia.
And on January 6, 2021, it was both Democrats and Republicans who huddled together in fear, hiding from a mob that had smashed its way into the Capitol.
“People are scared to death in this building,” Democratic Representative Jared Moskowitz told Politico of his colleagues in the Capitol. “I mean, not many of them will say it publicly, but they’re running to the speaker talking about security.”
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson confirmed the growing alarm, acknowledging fresh fears from both Republicans and Democrats alike: “We’ve got to protect people who run for public office, or no one will.”
🙊 Free Speech for Me, Not for Thee
Critics also took issue with Republicans lionizing Kirk in the wake of his death, pointing out that he had openly flirted with and advocated violence himself.
Republicans called on Speaker Mike Johnson to grant Kirk the Congressional Gold Medal, erect a statue in the Capitol, and even allow him to lie in state - honors usually reserved for elected leaders. Commentators warned that canonizing him this way was like dousing gasoline on an already raging culture war.
Supporters rushed to cast Kirk as a fallen champion of free speech, silenced by a bullet, while simultaneously raging at those who used their own free speech to call out his record by quoting his past statements.
British broadcaster James O’Brien skewered the hypocrisy: “Imagine casting yourself as a disciple of somebody you describe as a free speech champion…..and then having conniptions over the words that he spoke.” If Kirk’s words were noble, why fear them being heard? If they were shameful, then what exactly was he championing?
MSNBC analyst Matthew Dowd went further, arguing that Kirk’s brand of divisive rhetoric had helped create the very atmosphere that ended with his assassination. “Hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions,” he said - comments MSNBC quickly called “insensitive and unacceptable” before firing him.
Meanwhile, over on Fox, Jesse Watters thundered that “we are going to avenge Charlie’s death in the way Charlie wanted to be avenged,” declaring the shooting proof that “they are at war with us.” Instead of punishment, he was rewarded with prime airtime and applause.
The imbalance was stark. Those who reminded the public of what Charlie actually stood for were silenced, while those trying to rebrand him as a Christian martyr were elevated.
While Kirk was being lionized in death as a martyr for free speech, ordinary people who said little more than “hate begets hate” found their own free speech punished. Educators, service workers, even a pro sports staffer were fired for posting that Kirk’s end reflected the hatred he spent his career amplifying. Those voices were silenced, while those calling for vengeance were amplified. Praising Kirk in death was treated as piety, while questioning his life was treated as a heresy for which the price was ones livelihood.
And there was plenty to question. Kirk mocked climate change, crusaded against LGBTQ rights, sneered at women who supported Kamala Harris, and gave a platform to white nationalists. He endorsed replacement theory, claimed Islam was incompatible with the West, and spread conspiracy theories about Paul Pelosi’s attack, even calling for his assailant’s bail. He called being gay “an error,” praised biblical verses prescribing death for homosexuals, and argued that “some gun deaths every single year” were worth the cost of keeping the Second Amendment untouched.
This wasn’t accidental provocation - it was strategy. The movement he fueled thrived on fear and division, and often deceit. His murder was heinous, and his family deserves sympathy, but his death should not sanctify his politics. If anything, when a man who mocked empathy and fought gun reform is gunned down in the middle of the very culture war he fed, it should force a national reckoning and moment of deep reflection.
Instead, both his supporters and his detractors looked outward, blaming perceived enemies across the aisle and turning tragedy into fuel for more division.
👤 To Catch A Killer
As the hunt for Kirk’s killer intensified, The Wall Street Journal floated that unspent rounds found at the scene of the shooting carried engravings tied to “transgender” and “antifascist ideology” - a framing that instantly fed speculation about the shooter’s politics, even though the reporting was eventually found to be inaccurate.
The FBI announced they were on the trail of yet another suspect, releasing a grainy clip of a young man wearing a baseball cap and dark sunglasses sprinting across a rooftop in the minutes after the shot. Not long after, officers recovered a high-powered bolt-action Mauser rifle, wrapped in a towel, in the woods off campus; authorities confirmed it was the weapon used to kill Kirk.
While cable shows argued over what this all meant, the break came far from the crime scene.
In Washington County, 250 miles south, Matt Robinson recognized the face in the footage - his son’s - and confronted him at home, urging him to surrender. A family friend and youth minister with ties to a U.S. Marshals fugitive task force told Matt to keep Tyler in place and tipped the Washington County sheriff. About 33 hours after the shot, agents arrested 22-year-old Tyler Robinson.
The arrest itself became part of the theater. Tyler was picked up late that night, but the news didn’t break until the following morning - not from the FBI, not from local law enforcement, but (once again) from Donald Trump on live television. According to The Daily Beast, FBI Director Kash Patel held the announcement back so the president could deliver it himself on Fox & Friends, turning a homicide investigation into a morning-show exclusive. What should have been a straightforward law-enforcement update was instead packaged as political spectacle.
At the arrest presser later that day, Utah’s Republican Governor Spencer Cox tried to pull the country back from the edge, saying this was a moment to choose a different path and denouncing the culture of political rage. “For the last 33 hours, I was praying that if this had to happen here, that it wouldn't be one of us. That somebody drove from another state, somebody came from another country. Sadly, that prayer was not answered the way I hoped for.”
And that’s the deeper wound: the killer wasn’t the “other.” Not a Muslim, not an immigrant, not a person of color, not LGBTQ. He was a young, white man from a deep-red state with Republican parents but no political affiliation himself. Not at all the shooter that many of Kirk’s supporters had been breathlessly describing.
The “anti-fascist” bullet engraving rumor turned out to be a game of telephone: reporters mistook bits of gaming slang for politics, and the supposed “transgender ideology” marking was likely a misread of TRN - the headstamp for Turkish ammo maker Turan. What was actually etched read like internet trolling and ephemera: “Hey fascist! Catch!”, lyrics from “Bella Ciao,” “If you read this, you are GAY lmao,” and the meme-y “Notices bulge, OwO what’s this?” No trans references, despite the early spin.
After Robinson’s arrest, the rumor mill went nuts. A photo claiming he wore a Democratic Socialists of America shirt was the wrong guy. A claim that Robinson donated to Trump in 2020 turned out to be a different Tyler Robinson. State records show Robinson wasn’t a registered Republican and was listed inactive, as he hadn’t voted in the last two general elections.
That’s the story so far. Less grand theory, more uncomfortable fact: the rifle, the rage, the reach of online nonsense - not clearly their side or your side, but ours. Not red or blue, but red, white, and blue - stamped “Made in America.”
🩸 America’s Old Wound
In the aftermath of Kirk’s killing, Senator Bernie Sanders delivered a solemn reminder of what’s at stake. He offered condolences to Kirk’s family, acknowledged their profound political differences, and then drew a hard line: democracy cannot survive if violence replaces debate.
“Freedom means we can disagree - sometimes profoundly - but we resolve those disagreements with words, ideas, and elections, not with bullets. Violence is not debate. Violence is not democracy. Violence is cowardice.”
His warning was blunt: democracy, both here and worldwide, is under siege. The only way forward is to reject political violence “loudly, clearly, without exception.”
But America has been here before. This has been the nation’s cry since the very beginning, since its birth in blood and war. America came into the world through revolution and rebellion, through muskets fired at redcoats and bayonets driven into neighbors branded traitors. Its founding wasn’t peaceful debate; it was gunpowder and gallows.
And the violence has never really stopped. A Civil War that turned fields into graveyards. Lincoln murdered in a theater, Kennedy in Dallas. Martin Luther King Jr. on a Memphis balcony, Malcolm X at a podium in Harlem, Robert Kennedy in a hotel kitchen. Bombed churches, lynched citizens, riots in the streets. Political conventions marred by blood, militias rising and falling, public servants from mayors to judges living under the shadow of the gun.
This isn’t a deviation from the country’s path - it is the path itself. Every time America edges toward peace, the wound reopens. Violence isn’t just in the nation’s history; it’s in its bloodstream. The question is what to now do with it.
Pluto just dragged the United States through her return, the once-in-250-years reckoning every empire faces. That isn’t an astrological parlor trick; it’s the cosmic test of survival. Pluto doesn’t do half-measures. You either face the shadow and transform, or you refuse and collapse under the weight of your own denial.
That’s where America stands now. The eclipse tore off the mask, and what’s underneath isn’t pretty. But masks don’t heal wounds. Reckoning does.
The choice is brutal but simple: heal or collapse. Strip away the mythology, own the blood in the nation’s history, and cut new patterns into the fabric. Or keep pretending, keep silencing, keep shooting, and let the republic die the same violent death it was born in.
The mask is slipping again. The wound is rising. The mirror is unavoidable. America can see herself clearly now - fractured, armed, still convinced the only way to win is to silence the other side.
The question is, what will she do next, with that reflection?
A World at War With Itself
And as America cracked under the eclipse shadow this week, it felt like the whole world seemed to split open with her too - leaders unable to hold power, governments unable to hold order, movements unable to contain their rage.
In London, more than 100,000 marched under Tommy Robinson’s banner of “free speech,” a veneer for one of the largest far-right mobilizations in decades - drenched in anti-immigration slogans, nationalist flags, and fury at Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Barely a few thousand counter-protesters stood against them, and clashes left dozens of police injured.
In Melbourne, anti-racism activists under the “Sovereignty Never Ceded” banner outnumbered far-right demonstrators, flooding Parliament with a clear refusal to cede public space to hate.
In France, the arrival of newly appointed PM Sébastien Lecornu sparked instant backlash: under the banner “Bloquons Tout” (“Block Everything”), thousands rose up against looming austerity. Barricades, burning bins, blockades, tear gas, water cannons, nearly 300 arrests - proof the discontent is no longer quiet.
In Serbia, what began as student outrage over corruption after the fatal Novi Sad collapse has become an unrelenting anti-government uprising. Thousands are demanding accountability and early elections, met this week with police crackdowns and a regime insisting the unrest is “Western-backed.”
In Indonesia, anger over a delivery rider’s death at police hands has swelled into mass fury at corruption and elite privilege. Tens of thousands are now demanding reform, this week turning streets into pressure cookers the government can no longer ignore.
From Gaza to London, Paris to Belgrade, Jakarta to Melbourne, the same story is spilling out: the shadow breaking the surface.
Pluto in Aquarius is ripping old powers apart, Neptune in Aries is stripping illusions, Uranus in Gemini is wiring unrest through the streets, and Jupiter in Cancer is inflaming national fears.
We are living in the unmasking. And there is no going back.
🔮 What Lies Ahead: The Portal Between Eclipses
Right now, we’re in the tunnel between eclipses - a cosmic hallway where truths crack open, old stories collapse, and emotions run raw. Expect turbulence, but don’t mistake chaos for meaninglessness: this is the rewiring in motion.
Already, stories are being rewritten. Charlie Kirk’s assassination has cracked America’s mirror, his life recast in death, his legacy rewritten in real time. The eclipse corridor turns figures into symbols - martyr to some, menace to others - and the fight over what his name means is the opening chapter of this season of edits.
The Virgo Solar Eclipse on September 21 won’t just dim the sky - it will flip the script. Eclipses are cosmic editors, and this one lands in a week where the margins are already burning.
In Arizona, voters head to a special election that could deliver the missing signature to force Congress to unlock the Epstein files. At the UN, nations prepare to recognize Palestine, redrawing borders on paper even as bombs fall in Gaza.
This eclipse doesn’t whisper change - it stamps it. Governments will be jolted. Secrets will be pried open. Power will be shuffled. This is a hinge in history disguised as a shadow across the Moon.
On October 14, Pluto stations direct in Aquarius, forcing buried power into daylight.
By December, the map will have shifted. Saturn and Neptune turn direct, the fog clears, and the comet 3I/ATLAS sweeps past Earth like a torch from another world - perfectly timed with the solstice. The planets pile at the edge of change, the year itself shifting on its axis.
January hammers it home as the inner planets cross Pluto, activating the future in one relentless wave. And February seals it: a solar eclipse followed by Saturn–Neptune’s once-in-history union at 0° Aries. The Genesis Portal opens, the decade flips, and we begin again.
If you want to know more about what this eclipse season triggers and what lies ahead, I wrote about it in detail in the article below: ⬇️
❤️ Hold on to your hearts
We are living through another turning of the great wheel. Pluto in Aquarius and Uranus in Gemini are once again ripping the old world apart, just as they did two centuries ago during the American and French Revolutions when thrones toppled, revolutions erupted, and democracy was born. That cycle is back, and collapse is no longer a headline - it’s the air we breathe.
Governments are falling, wars are spreading, and the seams of the old order are splitting wide open. One world is ending, and another is trying to be born, and here we are - caught in the middle.
Yes, the world feels like it’s at war again. But what is war, if not the inability to meet in the middle? War only happens when hearts close - when we stand so far apart that another’s life no longer matters to us. Every time we let someone else’s closed heart justify closing our own, we harden the world another layer until all that’s left is grievance calcified into hate.
The radical path is the opposite one: to stay open. To keep choosing love even when you’re met with insult, contempt, or rage. To stand anchored in compassion, patience, and empathy when fear tells you to lash out.
Dr. King’s words still ring true: “Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.”
At every moment, we each hold a stick with fear written on one end, and love on the other. You cannot grip both. You must choose. And the choice you make ripples outward, building the foundation of the world that will follow this collapse. Reach for fear, and you call in more fear. Reach for love, and you call in more love.
The new world won’t be born from hardened hearts, but from those who, in the face of collapse, refuse to descend into hate. Who hold steady, open-hearted, while the old order burns itself out.
In these times, there are many who will try to incite you to criticize, call out, smack down or fight back. You can, if that’s your path, but know there are other ways. The light doesn’t fight the darkness. It doesn’t argue with it. It simply shines, and emanates, and anchors. The light never wastes its power pushing darkness away; it just is, and by being, it transforms the space around it.
We can do the same.
Not everything has to be a fight. Sometimes the most radical act is to be still - to refuse to be dragged into sides and opposites. Instead of wrestling with the dark, pour your energy into powering your light. And your light is love.
Our greatest power isn’t in words, but in energy. Some of our most potent work can be done in complete silence - bare feet on the grass, anchoring into love, transmuting fear, anger, and hatred. You don’t have to march in the streets or argue online. You can, if you wish, but the deepest work often happens in stillness, when you let raw energy move through you and rise into a higher resonance.
Because that’s what we are: transmuters.
Just as we breathe in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide, we take in energy and return it changed. The problem is, most people don’t transmute - they amplify. They take in the hatred they see online, and instead of alchemizing it into peace, they hurl it back more charged than before. That’s how the atmosphere fills with poison.
Our task is different.
Feel what you feel - anger, fear, grief - but don’t fling it back. Let it rise through you, let it transform, and send back harmony. This is invisible work, silent work, but it is the most powerful work we can do right now.
Friends, right now it feels almost impossible. The impulse to hate is so strong. The impulse to fight back, to smack down, to lash out, to fight fire with fire. But it is also easy, and the easy road is rarely the one that leads to anything worth keeping. Hatred is downhill - gravity will carry you there without effort. Love is uphill. It asks for strength, for breath, for the courage to keep climbing even when your legs shake. But it’s the only path that doesn’t circle back into more rubble.
The world will try to convince you that hardness is power, that vengeance is justice, but don’t believe it. The true revolution is to keep your heart soft when everything around you is going hard and cold. To hold the line of compassion when the world shouts at you to hate.
Because in the end, the ones who keep their hearts open in times like these are the ones who will carry humanity across the threshold.
This week, don’t join the war of closed hearts. Be the one who keeps love alive in a world terrified of it. That is how the new world will be midwifed - by those brave enough to stay open.
(And if you want support staying open, come join me in the Daily Lighthouse. I’ll be there, each day with you.)
See you next Sunday - until then, stay kind, stay fierce, and stay human.
This! “Because in the end, the ones who keep their hearts open in times like these are the ones who will carry humanity across the threshold.”
Thank you Wiz! 🙏
I really appreciate reading your Weekly Wrap-up each week. It is always well worth reading. Thank you so much for writing the last section ‘Hold on to your hearts’. It sometimes seems very difficult to keep an open heart, but I agree that is the way forward through all of this, and I am doing the best I can to keep the love flowing.