Remembering Charlie Kirk: When universities greenlight actual violence.

In recent years it has been a commonplace to regard university professors as the mouthpieces for extreme political outbursts on social media. Many of us tenured academics of the Gen-X vintage witnessed the birth of the World Wide Web, the brainchild of Tim Burners Lee, and used Netscape Navigator to browse the internet, and opted for Altavista as their go-to search engine in those heady early days. Quite naturally, we were inevitably going to be suspicious of the nascent social media platforms led by MySpace and Facebook in the early Noughties, poking at them like exotic poisonous snakes. Today, in 2025, I am not going to deny the validity of those deep instincts.

After the latest visceral Zeitgeist-shifting anchor-point in a decade, the live-streamed execution of online influencer Charlie Kirk on a university campus, the propensity for academics to spew daft and deranged nonsense should come as no surprise whatsoever. Yet, even seasoned observers of today’s prevailing leftist lunacy have been dismayed by the outpouring of vitriolic incivility and downright inhumanity coming from those on the left of the political spectrum. The social media world is a lens that magnifies the very real tribalism and toxicity of human affairs, a sad reality that has remained unchanged for long millennia.

What is altogether more fascinating is the sudden spleen-venting outrage sparked by the career-terminating actions of many of those who sought publicly to dance on Kirk’s grave while his body was still warm. At my own institution, the University of Toronto, Professor Ruth Marshall was summarily placed on leave after an ill-conceived tweet suggested that ‘shooting’ was, apparently, too mild a punishment for those she deems to be ‘fascist cunts.’ Not exactly the polite rhetoric the average Canadian might anticipate from an appointee to the country’s leading university—but never mind. The times, they are a-changin’.

The concept of cancellation from public and private life—something that was formerly labelled by those on the political left as the mere ‘consequences’ of heinous, politically incorrect speech and actions by everyday individuals, such as university professors like me—is now, all of a sudden, a self-evident reality that no sane person could deny.

But don’t be duped by this convenient volte-face by the neo-Marxist ideologues that today plague our universities, because it is a smokescreen designed to cloud the truth of what has been happening on college campuses across North American for over a decade. The death of Charlie Kirk in the most brutal fashion imaginable—an assassination transmitted across the globe in a heartbeat—has marked the logical endpoint of an ideological battle that has inflamed our educational institutions ever since Paulo Freire’s seminal work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, was adopted into the holy canon of teaching orthodoxy.

A tenuous claim, you might think. But ever since the bold vanguard of the liberal intellectual elite advanced their theories of cultural relativism, of subjective personal truths, of linguistic reimagining, of Foucauldian power dynamics, ever since science and objectivity came under attack by those deranged champions of cultural and social change, a clear path can be drawn to the appallingly bloody killing of a right-leaning young husband and father of two who calmly invited young college students to “prove me wrong.”

I have witnessed many of the missteps along that tragic road. The endless ‘call-to-arms’ circulars emailed to professors by university administrators that urged us to valorise the merits of decolonising the campus, and the curriculum; of navel-gazing to root out one’s internal unconscious bias; of heightening everyone’s awareness of the impact words might have on those listening, and the purported mental harm they can cause. These are the unending but weirdly insupportable claims that posit ‘words are violence,’ a chant that embodies a uniquely 21^st Century fallacy, one resulting from postmodernists quietly perverting the underpinnings of linguistic meaning and blurring the boundaries of what, in fact, constitutes real violence—namely physical contact, assault, injury and death.

These ideas seem, at least on first inspection, to be a reasonable extension of our common-sense understanding of the world. For instance, many people suffer from mental illness: something we know to be verifiably true, but which remains intractable to physical measurement. But what precisely is mental illness? In recent years, we have progressively learned to broaden that definition to include almost anyone—from a flat-out psychopath, to any person experiencing sustained anxiety. It is largely mirrored by our collective obsession with mental wellness, as if anyone can, in fact, characterise what that is. What is very clear, bearing in mind the modern permissive culture for recreational drugs, is that any mental illness, mild or severe, can be treated effectively with mind-altering drugs; or so the progressives would have us believe. That is some blanket prescription.

The climate on campus has, of course, been to accommodate everyone and everything. It is a perverse misreading of the Latin universitas, the root of the modern word ‘university’ which misleadingly suggests it to be an institution of learning for absolutely everyone, when, in reality, it was meant to signify an independent guild of learning. But this concessionism, in our modern educational era in the West, is what we are best at. Those who run the universities have long recognised it for what it undeniably is: the business of education; and they have pivoted to make sensible business decisions. The customer is always right; and if the customer feels that almost anyone should be admissible to a university education, regardless of their true intellectual capacity—because, let’s face it, every twentysomething regards themselves as an Einstein—then why not just admit them? Especially if they arrive on campus with immutable physical characteristics tying them to historical oppression, because that can translate very effectively into social capital for the institution as a whole. This is where we find ourselves in 2025 after a decade of such social engineering.

There is a dark consequence of universities promoting this politicised discourse. If you teach that words are violence, then those who become inured to these ideas will not unreasonably suppose that when words offend them, they can legitimately resort to physical violence in retaliation.

In recent days, I urged one of my students, who is not a native speaker, to resist using the word ‘retaliate’ because it is loaded with aggression. It breeds and perpetuates an air of violence. Only your enemies retaliate. But if those in authority preach that mere words are indistinguishable from violence, then actual violent responses are justifiable. Retaliation is inevitable.

This is where we have come to with the Charlie Kirk shooting. A radicalised young man, who has been swept along by the teachings of the vast majority of professors—themselves indoctrinated into self-hatred and despite of Western values—has taken matters into his own hands. It would have been better if he did not have such easy access to a firearm, the ownership of which under the Second Amendment, Kirk so vocally supported.

Gun laws are one thing. But cold-blooded murder is altogether another. There was clear premeditation here, for which the death penalty—in Utah, it is by firing squad—stands as the state-sanctioned deterrent. Will they video record that? Will they show it to preadolescent schoolchildren in our Canadian schools the way Kirk’s murder was used as teaching material, serving as a warning to the next generation? No, because the educational system is polluted.

Those charged with nurturing the young people who will build our future society have lodged in the minds of the next generation the idea that the spoken word, when deemed offensive, when it is raised in dissent, when it puts forth an unfashionable opinion can legitimately be countered with a bullet. It is precisely the premise of Christopher Nolan’s heist thriller, Inception. Nothing is more insidious than an idea.

Just ask Charlie Kirk. Except, of course, that you cannot. Rest in peace.