Defining words as a form of violence creates a permission structure for actual violence. And once political violence becomes thinkable, it becomes inevitable.
The one mundane part of the shocking murder of Republican activist Charlie Kirk is that it happened on a college campus.
Outside a few gang-dominated neighborhoods in cities like Chicago and L.A., the most common crime scenes in America are the nation’s colleges and universities. If President Donald Trump were going to send the National Guard to defend free speech and confront antisemitic violence, wouldn’t Columbia University and UC Berkeley be at the top of the list?
News that a conservative speaker has been roughed up by a college crowd is barely news anymore. Jews blocked from walking to class or forced to barricade themselves in a university library to avoid an angry mob is just a day that ends in “y.”
And if you needed audio of American citizens promoting violence, out loud and in public, where would you go to get audio of “Globalize the Intifada” or “From the River to the Sea”?
Not a Charlie Kirk speech. A college campus.
And who runs America’s colleges? Progressives. Liberals. Democrats.
Right now at the University of New Hampshire is a professor named Chanda Prescod-Weinstein who compared Hamas to Jewish victims of the Nazis and who has publicly argued that humans should rethink going to Mars out of fears of colonialism. Nobody even notices. Why? Because college classrooms are filled with far-left ideologues obsessed with “colonialism” and “critical race theory” and “cisgender resistance” and other extremist views that they pump into their students.
And one of the most significant arguments progressives on our campuses and at the commanding heights of culture make is “words are violence.”
It’s a key part of critical theory, the underpinning of progressive ideology. As the book “Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and The First Amendment (found at Columbia Law School) puts it:
“Words, like sticks and stones, can assault; they can injure; they can exclude. In this important book, four prominent legal scholars from the tradition of critical race theory draw on the experience of injury from racist hate speech to develop a first amendment (sic) interpretation that recognizes such injuries.”
Defining words as a form of violence creates a permission structure for actual violence. And once political violence becomes thinkable, it becomes inevitable.
After all, if words are the weapons of oppression, then isn’t an evangelical Republican giving a speech just an armed and dangerous enemy? And if Charlie Kirk’s words are verbal bullets, what are actual bullets other than lead-weighted words sent in return?
Sound crazy? Not to the one in three U.S. students in a poll released earlier this week who said it can be acceptable to resort to violence to stop an offensive speech on campus. That’s the highest percentage in the history of the College Free Speech Rankings, as compiled by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).
“More students than ever think violence and chaos are acceptable alternatives to peaceful protest,” said FIRE Chief Research Advisor Sean Stevens. “Students see speech that they oppose as threatening, and their overblown response contributes to a volatile political climate.”
Ironically, when Charlie Kirk showed up on those campuses for his “Change My Mind” public discussions and debates, he was the target of the hate speech. Regularly denounced as a “Nazi,” a “fascist,” a supporter of “genocide.” The same progressives who tally microaggressions, intentional or not, see no problem with screaming “Hitler!” at a husband and father who came to their campus to talk about Christ.
Political violence embraced by the progressive Left is hardly new. The Weather Underground was a project of President Barack Obama’s good friend Bill Ayers, a retired professor at the University of Chicago who helped build the bombs. The radical left of the 1960s and ’70s was overwhelmingly populated by college students, many of them affluent, being taught by America’s elite educators.
And it’s not just college professors. Several commentators have noted over the past 24 hours the disproportionate number of K-12 teachers across the country who’ve taken to social media and to celebrate Kirk’s death — and in some cases, get fired for it. Two teachers in Massachusetts were placed on leave Thursday.
In Iowa, a school teacher’s response to Kirk’s death was “1 Nazi down.” In New Hampshire, a high school English teacher told the world, “And yeah, I’m glad he’s dead.”
Sending American kids to indoctrination camps to learn to embrace violence, spew hate, and loathe their own country sounds like a psy-op from the CCP. Instead, it’s something we’re doing to our kids ourselves.
The results can be seen on the blood-stained concrete at a college in Utah.
Michael Graham is Managing Editor of InsideSources.com.
