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.
