Ch 5.10 | Prove Me Wrong: What Charlie Kirk’s Death Should Teach Us.
Why defending the right to speak, even words that wound, is essential for democracy’s survival
The assassination of Charlie Kirk on September 10, 2025, at Utah Valley University has left me shaken. I was still processing my last chapter on moral outrage when news broke that a sniper’s bullet had struck him mid-debate, ending his life at 31 years old. A young man, Tyler Robinson, sits in custody accused of carrying out what Utah’s governor called a “political killing.” Charlie’s wife and children are grieving. His movement is grieving. And America is once again left staring at the widening canyon of our division.
As Matthew Continetti stated in the Free Press this week:
Kirk’s death feels like a watershed. It is the most stunning evidence we have to date that America is becoming two nations, divided not only by politics but by culture, lifestyle, psychology, and epistemology.
I did not always agree with Charlie Kirk. I often winced at his rhetoric. Other times I found him not merely provocative, but insensitive, and even offensive. But no one deserves such an end.
To call him “vile,” as one of my friends did, and therefore his ideas not even worthy of consideration, or to dismiss everything he said as “hate speech,” as many do, is to miss the point.
Love him or hate him, Charlie embodied something uniquely American: the unfiltered right to speak freely, to challenge power, to provoke debate. That right must be defended, especially when it makes us uncomfortable. It’s important to remind ourselves that U.S. law protects offensive, demeaning, and even “hateful” speech.1
In an opinion piece published this week entitled Bury the ‘Words Are Violence’ Cliché, Greg Lukianoff states correctly that:
Free speech is not merely a favor for our friends. It is the best nonviolent technology humans have for solving our conflicts.
The remedy in a free society is counter-speech and better arguments, not bullets or bans.
"He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him," wrote Ezra Klein, the liberal New York Times columnist, in a piece mourning Kirk's death. Klein described Kirk as a practitioner of persuasion, a fierce ideological opponent but one who still played by the rules. He said:
You can dislike much of what Kirk believed and the following statement is still true: Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion. When the left thought its hold on the hearts and minds of college students was nearly absolute, Kirk showed up again and again to break it. Slowly, then all at once, he did.
From the Shock Jock Legacy to the Outrage Economy
In the 1997 film Private Parts, based on Howard Stern's life, there's a memorable scene where researchers reveal a surprising truth about his radio audience.
This anecdote captures a time when even divisive voices sparked curiosity rather than immediate cancellation.
While Stern's provocative style drew FCC fines, boycotts, and accusations of misogyny and racism, it also fostered engagement amid the cultural wars of the late '80s and early '90s. Stern was often offensive, but even critics tuned in because they “want to see what he’ll say next.” Hatred and curiosity lived side by side in the same audience.
Fast-forward to today, and that dynamic has evolved into the "outrage economy," where social media algorithms and partisan outlets like Fox/Newsmax/The NY Post and their ilk on the right and CNN/MSNBC/NY Times/Washington Post and their cohort on the left, reward inflammatory content for clicks, shares, and ad revenue. In this landscape, outrage isn't just a byproduct. It's the fuel, amplifying division over dialogue and turning public discourse into a battlefield.
As Sam Harris stated in the Free Press in his op-ed entitled “Log Off”:
Social media amplifies extreme views as though they were representative of most Americans, and many of us are losing our sense of what other people are really like.
In the outrage economy, Kirk's style was deliberate. The Washington Post discusses how Charlie Kirk “harnessed the ‘attention economy’ to build a political empire credited with shattering the left's grip on young voters.”2 The article states that he "mastered algorithms that reward posts that elicit passionate reactions and conflict." Unlike traditional conservatives who valued moderation, Kirk's provocative style was designed to go viral and attract followers.
He employed inflammatory phrasing that grabs eyeballs and forces conversations that he believed "woke" institutions suppress3.
Kirk's defenders echoed this, arguing his style was calibrated for virality in an era where algorithms reward outrage. In The New Yorker, a Turning Point insider described Kirk's method as “old-school tactics for a TikTok world.”
It is also important to recognize the role of the platforms themselves. Social media design choices (e.g., engagement-driven algorithms, echo chambers, and metrics that reward outrage) tilt the playing field toward the loudest, most polarizing voices. But let’s not lose sight of the fact that virality is not the same as persuasion. This is not simply about Kirk choosing to be provocative. It is about a system that rewards provocation and punishes nuance. That reality makes defending free speech even more critical, because moderate or thoughtful voices are often drowned out entirely.
Here’s Sam Harris again:
If the medium is the message, the message is mass psychosis, and it will send us careening from one political emergency to the next.
Kirk seems to have viewed all media attention, including criticism, as beneficial. For instance, when he was parodied on the TV show South Park, he embraced it, and even used the cartoon image as his social media profile picture.
That said, Kirk's emphasis was strategic, not a universal truth. His phrasing crossed into stereotyping, which complicates the narrative of "forcing conversations" versus inflaming division. Evidence suggests his tactic worked for attention (e.g., millions of views), but whether it truly "forces" suppressed dialogue or just polarizes depends on your world view (Reuters: Charlie Kirk’s rhetoric inspired supporters, enraged foes).
Charlie’s death has exposed our fractures. On the right, voices like Stephen Miller vowed vengeance, framing the killing as proof of left-wing violence, and President Trump blamed the “radical left” on Fox News, demanding investigations of his opponents. Social media lit up with posts declaring: “Your hate killed Charlie Kirk.”
On the left, some reveled. One student was caught on video saying, “Someone had to do it.” Another wrote simply: “Happy.” Online, he was compared to Hitler: “People gonna remember him just like we remember Hitler.”
This is the duopoly at work: two sides weaponizing grief to stoke their bases, turning tragedy into fuel for outrage. House Republicans’ moment of silence devolved into shouting. Activists on the left cheered. Neither side paused long enough to ask how this moment could lower the temperature. That failure is bipartisan.
As Tyler Cowen states in Stop Blaming ‘Them’:
Judge individual people, not groups. Stop saying ‘they did this,’ when it is individuals who act and choose. Blaming a group of people for a murder they did not commit is hardly going to persuade those individuals to adopt more sensible political positions.
If you hated Charlie Kirk’s rhetoric, I understand why you might feel no sympathy for his politics. But celebrating his murder is something different. It undermines the very norms that protect your own speech. Once political violence is legitimized, no one’s voice is safe. I have warned before in Chapter 3.3 and in Chapter 5.9 that our political system thrives on outrage. Charlie’s death is the latest casualty in this fraught time.
Sam Harris again:
There is no party of murder in this country. Insisting that there is only adds energy to yet another moral panic.
America's Perpetual Strife and Echoes of History
America has never been free of division; our 250-year history is a tapestry of strife, from the Revolutionary War’s debates on liberty to the Civil War’s brother-against-brother bloodshed over slavery, and the 1960s’ unrest with assassinations, the Weather Underground, riots, and Vietnam protests. These were not anomalies. These have been a part of the American experiment’s inherent tensions since inception. A “Republic if we can keep it.”4 Progress amid conflict.
Historian Jon Meacham, in The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels, captured the danger plainly:
Political violence erupts in America when there is an existential question—who is an American? Who deserves to be included in ‘We the people,’ or ‘All men being created equal’?
When disagreement about belonging hardens into a belief that opponents are existential threats, the drift toward sanctioning coercion accelerates. These are not rhetorical flourishes. They are the recurring fault lines of a democracy under siege.
By objective measures looking back through the long arc of history, we are living in the best of times: lower poverty rates, civil rights advances, and technological gains bend history’s arc toward justice. Yet crises recur, as outlined in The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy - What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny. This theory posits history cycles through four phases: Highs of unity, Awakenings of cultural shifts, Unravelings of individualism, and Crises (Fourth Turnings) where institutions falter, and society rebuilds or collapses. We're in a Fourth Turning now post-2008 crash, COVID, and political violence, mirroring the 1860s or 1930s, where outrage amplifies fractures.
Howard Stern's era of the late 80s, during an “Unraveling”, showed openness amid backlash: haters tuned in longer, blending disdain with curiosity. Today, in the “Crisis” era, media ecosystems amplified by social media algorithms and intellectually void memes exploit this for profit, turning figures like Kirk into lightning rods. Kirk's death exposes this cycle. The pattern is clear: our media system monetizes outrage, while our political duopoly weaponizes it.
The Fourth Turning is one lens among many. I cite it not as prophecy, but as a reminder that America has been through cycles of fracture and rebuilding before. The point is not inevitability, but that division is recurring, and how we respond determines whether we collapse or emerge stronger.
Learning from history means recognizing these patterns, not idealizing the past, but using them to foster tolerance. As I've argued throughout these pages, forgetting leads to repetition; engaging differing views, even provocative ones, is how we emerge stronger.
Words That Wound, Debates We Need
Charlie Kirk rose to prominence as a teenager when he co-founded Turning Point USA in 2012 to counter what he saw as liberal indoctrination on college campuses. Without a college degree himself, he became a relentless debater, traveling from school to school, often drawing both cheers and protests. He built a movement of young conservatives around “America First” principles.
Kirk’s words often sparked fire. Through it all, Kirk championed free speech. He sued universities that tried to block his events. He insisted that even unpopular views deserved a place in the public square. And that insistence, more than any single position, is what made him a lightning rod.
Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud
Part of Kirk’s rise was that he said the quiet part out loud. Millions of Americans felt that their views about race, gender, fairness, or national identity had been pushed to the margins of public discourse. They believed universities, media, and workplaces drew red lines around questions they still wanted to ask.
This sense of being pushed to the margins was not simply paranoia. Across campuses and workplaces, people watched how dissenters were shouted down, doxxed, or punished. That fear of consequence is what made Kirk’s bluntness feel liberating to some and infuriating to others.
The numbers show what many already feel — that the space for speech is shrinking. As Greg Lukianoff the President of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression(FIRE) explains in Bury the ‘Words Are Violence’ Cliché:
The numbers show how far the rot has spread. FIRE’s new College Free Speech Rankings, which surveyed nearly 70,000 students across 257 campuses, find a record share now rationalizing coercion. Roughly 34 percent of students say that using violence to stop a campus speech can be acceptable in some circumstances; roughly 70–72 percent say the same about shouting down speakers. In 2021, the violence number was in the low 20s; by last year it was 32 percent. It should be zero. A university that can’t persuade students to reject violence categorically is failing at the first task of liberal education.
We’ve seen the escalation step by step. Middlebury, 2017: Political scientist Charles Murray was shouted down; professor Allison Stanger left with a concussion and neck injury. University of California, Davis, 2023: Masked protesters smashed windows at a Charlie Kirk event; to the university’s credit, the talk continued. San Francisco State University, 2023: Former collegiate swimmer Riley Gaines’ event was so aggressively disrupted she was held hostage in a room for hours; campus police ultimately suspended the case without charges. And of course, there were the violent riots at University of California, Berkeley, in 2017—the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement in response to a planned speech by commentator Milo Yiannopoulos. It’s a miracle no one was killed. These episodes move norms from argument, to heckling, to property destruction, to “rare” violence—and now, in Orem, Utah, to a bullet.
Against that backdrop, many of Kirk’s supporters felt he was the only one willing to challenge the culture of silencing, even if his methods were crude. To his critics, when Kirk broke those taboos, it was confirmation of prejudice. To his followers, it was honesty. They did not always defend his phrasing, but they admired his willingness to voice what they were told to keep silent. That paradox helps explain why his words could feel like representation to some and cruelty to others.
Still, critics argue these views were never silenced at all — they were simply unpopular. Conservatives had Fox News, talk radio, churches, publishing houses, and even a President voicing similar arguments. What felt like “censorship” to Kirk’s supporters often looked like accountability to his opponents. And there is a belief that the “quiet part” was quiet for a reason. Calling Black women unqualified or trans kids delusional is not merely saying what others won’t, it can reinforce stereotypes and stigmatize entire groups. In that light, his rhetoric looked less like bravery and more like recklessness, cruelty amplified for virality.
This paradox is not just about Kirk. It is about the condition of our democracy itself. If millions feel censored and millions more feel attacked, then every debate becomes a zero-sum struggle where listening dies and only outrage survives.
For millions, Kirk embodied the courage to break through what they saw as elite censorship. For millions more, he embodied the danger of turning taboo into license for prejudice.
Both things can be true at once.
What matters for democracy is not canonizing him or canceling him, but confronting why his words resonated with so many, and how to keep that confrontation inside the boundaries of debate rather than violence.
Pain, Speech, and the Public Square
Charlie Kirk’s career illustrates the way our culture consumes and weaponizes rhetoric. On nearly every issue he touched from D.E.I and affirmative action to guns, from women’s rights, abortion and gender identity to antisemitism, his words became viral flashpoints. Clips stripped of nuance were shared millions of times, provoking fury and fear.
For those directly touched by these debates, the pain is real. A Black woman dismissed as an “affirmative-action pick” hears her achievements erased. A parent who buried a child after a school shooting hears gun deaths described as “a cost.”5 A rape survivor hears abortion bans defended as if her trauma does not matter. A trans teenager hears their very identity mocked as delusion. A Jew hears echoes of antisemitic tropes in talk of “elites.” These wounds cannot be waved away as mere snowflake fragility. They are felt. We must retire the trope that speech is literally violence and rebuild the norm that ugly speech is answered with more speech, not force.
But here lies the tension: the media environment does not stop at naming pain. It amplifies it, until every debate is framed as existential, every word as violence.
In Bury the ‘Words Are Violence’ Cliché, Greg Lukianoff points out:
Teach students that objectionable speech is violence and you invite them to see their own aggression as self-defense. Accept the premise that rhetoric is a physical attack and you hand extremists a moral permission slip to answer speech with force.
We now live in a culture where offensive ideas are recast as “harm,” and, in a flourish that should now embarrass its users, where speech itself can be described as “literally violence.” In such an atmosphere, outrage clips become proof of evil, while fuller arguments go unheard.
Lukianoff continues:
Maximal tolerance for speech; zero tolerance for force. Draw the line where the law draws it, at true threats, targeted harassment, and incitement. Keep everything else inbounds, for everyone.
What gets lost is that Kirk’s most viral moments were often the least thoughtful expressions of arguments that do exist in policy and scholarship. His critiques of affirmative action echo Thomas Sowell’s data-driven skepticism6. Kirk’s warnings about gun control and government power and the Second Amendment7 reflect a long American distrust of the “tyranny” of the State. Kirk’s pro-life convictions mirror centuries of moral and religious teaching.8 His questions about fairness in sports and gender echo ongoing disputes across medicine, ethics, and law. His pro-Israel stance is consistent with decades of bipartisan consensus9.
Yes, words can traumatize, sometimes for a lifetime. And Kirk often sabotaged his own case by speaking crudely or cruelly. But if we collapse speech into violence, we erase the only nonviolent tool democracy has to resolve conflict. Once we treat ideas as blows, we justify answering them with fists or bullets.
Charlie Kirk’s legacy should not be read as a blueprint but as a warning: if we allow provocation to replace persuasion, we will lose both the dignity of debate and the protections of free speech. But neither should outrage media be allowed to declare whole debates illegitimate. The real danger is not that Charlie Kirk was sometimes wrong or insensitive, but that our culture no longer believes painful arguments can be confronted in public.
When fear is amplified and words are weaponized, debate shrinks. Our task is to widen the space for argument while narrowing the space for coercion. We are left with shadows of danger, racism, violence and hate, abstracted and inflated by repetition. And yet, the very purpose of free speech in a democracy is to keep hard arguments in the open, where evidence, counter-speech, and better policy can prevail.
Whether you agree or disagree with his positions, he became a central voice for many young conservatives and a constant presence in campus debate.
I do not know Charlie Kirk’s heart. We do not have to agree with Charlie Kirk. We may recoil from his language. But if we dismiss him entirely, we also dismiss the millions who heard in him a voice for their fears and frustrations. The only way forward is to bring those arguments back into the open — not to sanctify them, but to defeat them in debate. That is how democracy survives.
A Call to Unity Through Free Speech
I keep coming back to a scene in The American President. Michael Douglas, playing President Andrew Shepherd, defends the essence of free speech.
Aaron Sorkin captures this moment with clarity:
Let’s see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who’s standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours. You want to claim this land as the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country can’t just be a flag; the symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest.
The point is not to sanctify what offends us. The point is to keep the arena open so better ideas can beat worse ones in public.
That is what Charlie Kirk embodied, even when his words made our blood boil. Defending his right to speak does not mean endorsing his views. It means defending the principle that ideas must be met with better ideas, not with bullets.
For those who despised what he said, defending his right to say it may feel like a bitter pill. But free speech is not about absolution. It is about preserving the framework of democracy itself. If Kirk’s speech can be erased by violence, so can yours and mine. This is the first time I’ve had real trepidation in publishing an article on my Substack.
Imagine classrooms where students debate Kirk’s positions rather than doxing his supporters. Imagine town halls where advocates of gun reform face Second Amendment defenders without fear of violence. Imagine a public square where DEI skeptics and equity champions can find common ground in fairness for all. And imagine returning to a time when our leaders, led.
This is not martyrdom. It is maturity. It is what democracy demands.
Listen, Even When It Hurts
I keep thinking about that Howard Stern scene. People who disliked him not only tuned in but listened longer. Hatred and curiosity lived in the same audience. We did not confuse listening with agreement. We listened because we wanted to understand what we were up against and because a confident country believes it can out-argue bad ideas.
Here’s Sam Harris:
When we see another person gleefully dance on a slain man’s grave, it is easy to conclude they represent some significant faction of American society, and to be outraged.
Viral cruelty is not a census. It is an algorithmic mirage.
We can choose that again. We can bring back the discipline of hearing a viewpoint we dislike, restating it fairly, and then answering it with better facts and better principles. We can teach our kids that “prove me wrong” is not a taunt, it is an invitation to think. We can remind ourselves that listening is not surrender. It is the price of a free people governing themselves without violence.
If the outrage economy rewards spectacle, let us reward patience. If algorithms amplify the loudest voices, let citizens amplify the fairest ones. If we cannot quite bring ourselves to like the speaker, let us still do the harder thing and listen long enough to win the argument honestly.
That is the America I want back. Not an America without offense, but an America with thicker skin. We used to listen to people we could not stand and then answer them. We can do it again.
We are living through a time of spiraling violence. From attempts on Trump’s life to the murder of Charlie Kirk, the line between rhetoric and bloodshed grows thinner. If we do not reclaim the principle of free speech as a bridge rather than a battleground, we will lose the republic itself.
Charlie Kirk was not a saint. He was not without fault. But he was an American who believed in the right to speak, to provoke, to argue. His death should not become another weapon in the duopoly’s arsenal. It should be a call to all of us to heal, to listen, and to unite.
We once listened to people we could not stand and then answered them. We can do that again, and we can do it without violence. That is the whole case I am making.
Violence won the day against Charlie. But ideas endure.
In Repairing America After the Murder of Charlie Kirk, the Free Press editors ask:
Is there a way back?
There is, but it demands two bright lines. First, the widest possible protection for speech. Second, a categorical rejection of force in civic life.
For Charlie. For our children. For America.
Fairness Matters: Because unity demands honesty.
What are your thoughts?
Share and comment, and let’s continue the conversation.
Footnotes:
Brandenburg v. Ohio is a landmark 1969 Supreme Court case that established the "Brandenburg Test" for determining when speech advocating illegal actions can be restricted. The test states that the government can only punish speech if it is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action AND is likely to incite or produce such action. This ruling broadened First Amendment free speech protections by overturning previous laws that criminalized mere advocacy of violence or illegal acts, as seen in the case of KKK leader Clarence Brandenburg's conviction under an Ohio criminal syndicalism statute. The Brandenburg standard protects advocacy, including offensive advocacy, unless it is intended and likely to produce imminent lawless action. That is the line this chapter defends.
In their 2001 book, The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business, Thomas H. Davenport and John C. Beck argue that in a world overloaded with information, the most valuable and scarce resource is not capital, talent, or even ideas, but human attention.
The core premise of the book is that both individuals and organizations suffer from an "attention deficit" because they are constantly bombarded with emails, voice messages, faxes, and other forms of communication. This overload leads to "info-stress," making it difficult to focus on what's truly important.
To succeed in this environment, the authors propose that businesses must become adept at attention management. They outline a two-sided challenge:
Obtaining and Retaining Attention: Companies must find ways to capture the attention of their customers, employees, and investors, who have an overwhelming number of options competing for their focus.
Allocating Your Own Attention: Managers and knowledge workers must learn to effectively manage their own attention, prioritizing critical tasks and filtering out distractions.
The book suggests that an organization's ability to manage attention both internally and externally will become the single most important determinant of its success. They recommend that companies shift their focus from being "time-based" to "attention-based," rewarding employees not for the hours they log, but for the usefulness of their creative ideas and their ability to implement them. The authors also discuss four perspectives for managing attention: measuring it, understanding its psychological and biological aspects, using technology to protect it, and learning from traditional "attention industries" like advertising.
Kirk’s statements align with observations from organizations like the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) an institution committed to defending the First Amendment. FIRE has extensively documented instances where "woke" or progressive-leaning institutions particularly on college campuses have suppressed free speech through cancel culture. FIRE's 2024 report, Spotlight on Speech Codes, highlights cases where student groups or faculty faced disciplinary actions or deplatforming for challenging DEI orthodoxy, such as the 2023 suspension of a University of Southern California professor for critiquing affirmative action policies, or the 2022 cancellation of a speaker at Hamline University over a depiction of the Prophet Muhammad. These examples support Kirk's claim that certain conversations especially those questioning progressive frameworks are suppressed, often under the guise of protecting marginalized groups, which he frequently targeted with his rhetoric.
On the left, cancel culture has indeed been linked to suppressing dissent. FIRE notes that between 2019 and 2024, over 400 campus incidents involved speech restrictions, with a significant portion driven by student or administrative pressure to align with "woke" values, such as the 2021 case at Smith College where a staff member was forced out for questioning diversity training. Kirk capitalized on such examples, using inflammatory language like his 2023 remarks on Black women's qualifications to highlight what he saw as hypocrisy, forcing debates on meritocracy that might otherwise be sidelined. His approach mirrors FIRE's findings that public backlash to cancellations often amplifies the suppressed view, as seen when his comments went viral despite (or because of) outrage.
"A republic, if you can keep it" is a quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin upon leaving the Constitutional Convention in 1787, responding to a question about the newly drafted U.S. Constitution. The phrase signifies that the United States was founded as a republic, a representative government with checks and balances, but its success and longevity are dependent on the active, informed, and engaged participation of its citizens to prevent the government from overreaching and to maintain its foundational principles
On this point, I tend to agree with Joe Nocera who wrote in Stop Worshipping Guns:
Charlie Kirk, whose tragic assassination prompts this column, used to say that a certain amount of gun violence was “worth the cost” to protect the Second Amendment, which “protect[s] our other God-given rights.” Sadly, I’ll never have the chance to debate him on this point; I think America’s 45,000-plus annual gun deaths is far too high a price to pay. What my liberal friends tend to omit when they play that now-infamous video clip of Kirk defending the inevitability of gun deaths is that he also said, “You can significantly reduce them.” He added, “We should have an honest and clear reductionist view of gun violence.” On this point, I couldn’t agree more with Kirk.
To be sure, no workable gun law would have prevented Kirk’s assassination. His alleged killer showed no signs of mental instability; the gun he used was a bolt-action rifle, owned by millions of Americans; and he was old enough to simply walk in a store and buy it. But as someone who has been writing about gun violence since Newtown, I believe there are plenty of ideas to reduce gun deaths without infringing on the Second Amendment right of gun owners.
Kirk’s perspective echoes the rigorous, data-driven critiques of famed economist Thomas Sowell, who has argued for decades that affirmative action often harms its intended beneficiaries. Criticized in the 1970s for rejecting forced busing, favoring investments in Black schools. Labeled "Uncle Tom," Sowell's data-focus contrasts Kirk's crudeness, but both prioritize merit. Sowell faced sharp criticism in the 1970s for his outspoken rejection of forced school busing as a means of desegregation, arguing instead that resources should be invested directly in Black neighborhoods and schools to foster genuine educational improvement without disrupting communities.
In a 1976 New York Times article entitled “A Black Conservative”, Sowell contended that busing was not a policy but a "crusade" driven by middle-class liberal assumptions, ignoring evidence of declining academic performance, lower self-esteem among Black children, and increased racial antagonism post-busing; he highlighted successful all-Black schools like Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., which in 1939 had an average IQ of 111 and sent more graduates to college than any white public school in the city, as proof that segregation was not inherently unequal if properly resource. Sowell echoed this in later writings, such as his 2015 Jewish World Review piece, stating that Chief Justice Earl Warren's declaration in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) overlooked Dunbar's achievements, which were "within walking distance of the Supreme Court," and that post-desegregation neighborhood schooling policies led to Dunbar's decline by flooding it with unmotivated students from rough areas, turning decades of excellence "into thin air.” His advocacy for alternatives like educational vouchers to empower Black parents allowing choices between public and private schools without bureaucratic overreach drew ire from civil rights activists and liberals, who labeled him an "Uncle Tom" or token conservative for supposedly undermining Black progress and excusing segregation's harms, as seen in critiques from outlets like Vocal Media and Make It Plain, which accused him of being a "racist redneck" enabler despite his data-driven focus on economics over politics in uplifting Black communities. In Thomas Sowell, Our Greatest (Inconvenient) Intellectual, the author says rightly:
Humility and integrity make it hard for left-wing media to attack Sowell but also easy to ignore. His ethnicity makes common racist slanders used against conservatives, inadvisable to attack him with. Haters are unable to refute anything he’s ever said or written with any credibility. It’s quite the feat. . . and the reason my academic friend hates him.
Charlie Kirk’s 2023 remarks on affirmative action, particularly questioning the qualifications of Black women like Michelle Obama and Ketanji Brown Jackson, were racist and painted him as a bigot. Yet, his views closely mirror the meticulous critiques of Sowell. Here is the irony as articulated so well by above, Charlie’s is impossible to ignore but sadly, his ethnicity makes him easy to undermine his credibility. Kirk’s rhetoric was crude and often inflammatory where Sowell’s was clinical, but their core concern aligned: policies prioritizing identity over merit foster division, resentment, and unintended harm rather than unity or progress. Labeling Kirk’s critique as mere racism oversimplifies a debate Sowell’s scholarship demands we engage with nuance. Kirk’s anger, though cruder than Sowell’s clinical analysis, shared this concern: identity-driven policies like affirmative action undermine merit, stigmatize beneficiaries, and deepen societal divides rather than unite us. Branding Kirk’s critique as racism sidesteps the evidence Sowell marshals, stifling a debate critical to fairness and progress.
The Second Amendment states rather unambiguously that:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
In the Second Amendment, "well regulated" describes a militia that is well-trained, well-disciplined, and properly equipped to function effectively, rather than being a militia subject to extensive government control or restrictions. The term reflects the 18th-century understanding of a functioning militia composed of armed and skilled citizens who could be called upon for national defense, rather than a modern-day governmental regulatory state.
Charlie Kirk supported the idea of laws that ensured gun owners were “well regulated” in the sense that they are well-trained, well-disciplined.
I would love to imagine a world where we could pass a constitutional amendment to repeal the Second Amendment. My reason for saying that is not because I am an advocate of removing all guns from our country (because that will never happen). I say this because the Second Amendment inhibits our ability to have a reasonable debate around reasonable regulations on gun ownership.
Sadly, I am not one to put my hope into that utopian fantasy. We must live in the real world and in the current environment, the process of amending the Constitution makes that a pipe dream.
As a parting thought on this subject, I sometimes ponder, drawing from history’s recurring political inversions (like the Republicans transforming from Lincoln’s party of emancipation to a bastion of states’ rights), whether narratives will flip once more: as the left increasingly decries Trump’s ‘fascism’ and embraces resistance against perceived governmental tyranny, could we envision a near future where progressives rally behind the Second Amendment as an essential safeguard for individual liberties?
I wrestled with many of these same tensions in my chapter on Women’s Rights. If you’re exploring these subjects, it’s important to consider philosophers like Judith Jarvis Thomson who, in her famous “Violinist” thought experiment, have argued that even if one grants the fetus full moral status, bodily autonomy still matters. That perspective, alongside others, shows how complex the debate truly is. If you’re unfamiliar, Judith Jarvis Thomson's "Violinist" thought experiment, introduced in her 1971 paper "A Defense of Abortion," argues that even if a fetus is considered a person with a right to life, abortion can still be morally permissible. She asks you to imagine waking up one day connected to an unconscious, world-famous violinist who will die unless he remains connected to you for nine months to use your kidneys. Thomson argues that you are not morally obligated to stay connected to him, as doing so would violate your bodily autonomy—your right to control what happens to your own body. By analogy, she suggests that a woman's right to decide what happens to her body is a more fundamental consideration than a fetus's right to use it. The experiment shifts the debate from the question of whether a fetus is a person to the question of whether a person's right to life includes the right to use another person's body without their consent.
I have written extensively about antisemitism and debunking the lies about Israel in Blood Libels