Prayers for Alibis
The selective mercy of a country that never names itself.
September 14, 2025
“Mercy is never absent—it is simply assigned.”
—Taylor Allyn, UNSPUN
Prelude:
What looks like hypocrisy is not failure but fluency. This essay reads the language of borders: who is prayed for, who is punished, and who is rewritten into innocence after the bodies are counted.
Thirty-Three Hours of Denial
America does not pray for lives. It prays for alibis.
The Utah governor said the quiet part in front of cameras: he had prayed, for thirty-three hours, that the killer of Charlie Kirk was not “one of our own from Utah.” He did not pray for the dead. He did not pray for the wounded. He prayed the story would hold—that the bullet would belong to someone else’s body, some foreign skin, some queer or Muslim scapegoat. Anything but white. Anything but Republican. Anything but theirs.
Because when it is theirs, the entire script collapses.
Outrage in Two Tongues
Nancy Mace revealed the choreography.
When the shooter was imagined as a trans leftist, she sharpened her nails into knives: “Bring back the death penalty.” “Democrats own this.” She had no hesitation demanding death for the imagined enemy.
But when the mugshot arrived—Tyler Robinson, 22, white, Republican, raised in a Trump household—the register dissolved. The calls for execution became calls for prayer. The predator was rebranded as “a lost soul.”
Watch how quickly the performance shifted. The same fingers that typed “death penalty” now typed “pray for him.” The same voice that demanded accountability now asked for understanding. The same moral outrage that burned for the imagined trans terrorist went cold for the actual Republican killer.
