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Charlie Kirk died for the same cause that David Horowitz was assaulted for, that Robert Spencer was banned for, and that Ben Shapiro faced bomb threats for: free speech on campus.
In an academic environment where a respected 74-year-old scholar like Charles Murray could be physically assaulted at a college while the perpetrators walked away with a ‘mark’ on their permanent record, the willingness of conservatives to appear on campus was an act of courage.
To do it the way that Charlie Kirk did was sheer heroism. There’s no question that he made an impact on a minority of students and there’s also no question that the majority of campuses, professors and students only became more hostile to free speech since his campaign began.
The numbers are sadly clear and they’ve only been getting worse over the years.
1 in 3 students support using violence to silence opposing speakers. 7 out of 10 want to shout down controversial speakers like those who oppose the transgender and BLM movements.
The vast majority of students do not want to debate. They want to silence any opposition.
We are not going to debate our way out of this because you can’t debate those who not only don’t want to listen, but those who are determined to shut you up any way that they can.
You can’t debate those who want to shout you down unless you shout even louder. You can’t debate those who mob and beat you. And you certainly can’t debate those who shoot at you.
Like Martin Luther King, Charlie Kirk went on campuses to challenge and call out an oppressive system. Where some had been beaten, kicked and threatened, Charlie paid the ultimate price for his courage. And there is no reason to think he will be the last. If there’s one thing we know, it’s that a new low can very quickly become the new normal. It’s only a question of ‘when’.
After spending years speaking on college campuses, and struggling against threats, rants and mob attacks, David Horowitz understood that speaking out on campus was not enough, drawing on his civil rights experience, he called for the university system to be urgently reformed.
His main vehicle for that was the Academic Bill of Rights which ‘controversially’ proposed that no professors or students should be rewarded or punished for their political beliefs, that teaching should reflect different points of view, and that colleges should maintain an “environment conducive to the civil exchange of ideas” and that the “obstruction of invited campus speakers” should not be tolerated by university administrators.
This proposal, with its call not to indoctrinate students, fire professors and assault campus speakers was denounced by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, the American Federation of Teachers, the American Association of University Professors, the American Library Association, the American Historical Association and even the AFL-CIO.
That is how we got here. It’s how we got to even liberal professors who dissent in any way from leftist dogma being hounded out of campuses. It’s how we got terrorist groups rampaging around campuses. It’s how we ended up with Charlie Kirk’s blood on a college campus.
The David Horowitz Freedom Center has been doing this for over two decades. And we know it’s not about a “lone wolf” shooter or a few extreme students. This is coming from the top down. University presidents, deans and professors made colleges into war zones. They chose to shut down free speech and purge dissent. They play ‘bait and switch’ games when they’re called before Congress, promising that this time they’ll crack down on violence and terrorism.
They’re lying.
Last year, leftist and terrorist groups rampaged around UCLA, claiming parts of it for terror camps and assaulting anyone who wanted to get through. They didn’t just do this on their own, but with the complicity of professors, who joined with them, of administrators who allowed campus security to back them up, of local officials, including the LAPD, who refused to make arrests or take reports of assaults against Jewish and conservative students happening right in front of them.
I spoke to an eyewitness who described an LAPD captain deliberately refusing to intervene.
After the violence, top California officials, stood with the terrorists and rioters, used taxpayer money to pay their legal bills, selectively prosecuted only those non-leftist students who stood up to the campus thugs, and, from Gov. Gavin Newsom, on down, are rejecting any settlement.
We’re not going to debate our way out of this because we’re not in a war with ideas. We are up against an oppressive system that uses power and violence to suppress its political opponents.
That system has to be broken.
It’s not going to be fixed by debate. On campuses that resemble terrorist training camps, debate is a courageous confrontation with a totalitarian system. The system however holds all the power, enforces discriminatory measures, and looks the other way when violence takes place.
After a generation of rejecting the Academic Bill of Rights, its principles are an important beginning, but the system of higher education has made it clear that it will not voluntarily adopt them. Nor can the system be trusted to regulate itself because it is corrupted by radicalization.
Only external regulation can even begin to keep campus extremism and violence in check.
Universities act like the worst segregationists and the Trump administration is right to begin treating them that way, imposing hefty penalties which should be bolstered by further consent decrees and constant monitoring of the worst offenders, like Columbia, Harvard and the University of California system, the way some southern states were monitored for decades.
But while there was a national bipartisan consensus that racial segregation was wrong, Democrats continue to believe in political segregation and oppression on campus. They have not recanted or repented, but, like Gov. Newsom have only doubled down on the abuses.
That means once a Democrat is in the White House, all the abuses will return, and politicians like Sen. Chuck Schumer have already told college presidents that they don’t need to worry. The Democrat message to universities is to just wait Trump out and they can resume the abuses.
And that is not acceptable.
Penalties send a message. But like executive orders, they’re only a temporary band aid that the Democrats will tear off once they’re back in power. And the wound will be bloodier and uglier.
The modern American university needs to be fundamentally reconstructed and reformed. The Left had a vision for how to hijack and remake the educational system using private and public influence. Conservatives need such a vision and they need to be willing to implement it.
Key to the leftist vision was massively expanding the college curriculum, watering down the elements of both scientific and classical education, while creating numerous positions and even entire departments dedicated to radical political indoctrination, and also massively expanding the student body, providing incentives and using economic pressure to push teens into college.
Restoring the proper function of a university begins with dramatically shrinking both the scope of the curriculum and the size of the student body. DEI bans are the beginning of restructuring colleges away from embedding radical politics into every discipline and restoring the fundamental tenets of a classical education. And reducing the national student body would allow universities to focus on a core mission instead of on treating college like a rite of passage.
In 1910, there were a million college students, by the 1950s there were 2.5 million, by 1970 there were 8.5 million, by 1984 there were 12.5 million and we now approach 20 million.
Are we better off for it?
Federal and state governments directly and indirectly provide much of the funding for higher education. As do private donors. They have the ability to focus colleges on education over politics by shrinking their runaway curriculums, departments, deans and endowments. Rather than funding college for all, the government should make it possible to once again get a good job without the need to waste four years and six figures on a worthless diploma.
The Trump administration has the ability to create meaningful change that will be difficult for a future administration to undo. And that will begin fixing college campuses and fixing America.
College, to echo Bill Clinton, should be “safe, legal and rare.” And America will be better for it.
We can’t debate our way out of this. Not unless we want to debate fists, firebombs and bullets. But we can fundamentally transform our way out of this. That’s what the Left did once upon a time.
Now, we need to do it too.
That’s why we’ll be presenting a blueprint for University 2030: a vision of systemic change for education, the economy and the future of a saner and deradicalized educational system.
“The process of spreading a philosophy by means of free discussion among thinking adults is long and complex. From Plato to the present, it has been the dream of social planners to circumvent this process and, instead, to inject a controversial ideology directly into the plastic, unformed minds of children—by means of seizing a country’s educational system and turning it into a vehicle for indoctrination. In this way one may capture an entire generation without intellectual resistance, in a single coup d’école.” – “The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom In America”
So what are you going to do about it? Give us more Lenny Piehole missives?
Not exactly a man of action are you. You are the classic “Let’s you and him fight” kind of tough guy.
And what are you going to do? Tell us about your Homosexual approved satanic fake church which worship0s the fake god allah?
Or… tell others how they should read a book? <<< Hahaha
You're a waste… at least THX has a valid comment.
I know what I’m going to do and I’ve been preparing since I read Kurt Schlichter’s ‘The Attack.’ If you think I am dumb enough to reveal those plans to a little sh*t-for-brains nothing fake punk Christian like you go ahead. FAFO.
All you have are your silly repetitive missives about my church that you have never been to. All you have is your 3rd grade name calling because mentally you are still in the third grade.
And then there is your bizarre version of Christianity. And your insane conspiracy theories about the government. You are so stupid and gullible you actually believe I was chasing women around a church during services. You are so stupid you actually think, without proof, that my church is a mosque. You are so arrogant you think you will be raptured. Did you have a conversation with Jesus? Did he promise you you would be raptured.? You are an immature child. F.U. and your stupid beema=bop=a luma toilet.
All THX, our resident Judeo-Christian hater, has is his copy and paste missives about atheism, Ayn Rand and Objectivism. So you are dumb enough to fall for his B.S. That is how massively stupid you are.
And then there is our resident Muslim Jew/Israel Hater, Sebby Webby who thinks accusing people of being gay is somehow clever and grown up.
I see a pattern here with little dumb-assling pukes like you?
It figures you are attracted to and attract the real losers. Look f*ckhead, you can be as smug, arrogant, unprepared, stupid and uninformed as you want to be. I don’t care. It’s not going to change what I do or what I write.
When the SHTF, and it will, just know, no one is coming to save you’re sorry ass. Perhaps you should read a book now and then.
Meanwhile I will keep getting the upvotes. You and your idiot admirers will keep getting the downvotes.
Well your very dumb suggestion that the answer is to arm up reeks of “tough guyness.”
Maybe winning elections is a better approach.
Doesn’t matter to me if you arm up or not. But the arrogant attitude is so typical of the folks who won’t help themselves.
So keep on voting and hope that the people who get elected have to stones to fix the country.
BTW we already won a great victory last November. But the judges are doing their best to block Trump. So are the democrats and the Muslims.
So far not much has changed and the Muslims are making inroads. So are the leftists. Best of luck to you if the SHTF. No one is coming to save your sorry butt.
When ANTIFA was allowed to wreak havoc, battering, burning and pillaging with impunity, the predicate was set for murder.
sounds good, Daniel. I hope you have good contacts within trump’s inner circle.
I wish I had hope the left could be defeated but I believe the Republican party as currently constituted is incapable and fearful of doing that. Cowardice and duplicity seem to be the current Republican playbook which will only let leftist tyranny grow.
I agree that the current national Republican Party is hopelessly weak, bought out by Big Tech and other donors, treacherous, and ‘in cahoots’ with globalists and uniparty types.
I am in favor of a new Party; I have been betrayed fifty times too often.
It seems like the R’s are on the payroll by the same masters as the D’s.
The mega-corporations and the “Intelligence Community” run DC, not us.
THAT is why PRESIDENT TRUMP, PRESIDENT VANCE, PRESIDENT DeSANTIS, PRESIDENT RUBIO et al are so important!
I wonder if the left has even considered their position of using violence to shut down speakers! Imagine if WE on the right decided that WE needed to “shut down” some of THEIR speakers! They should thank GOD that we are not mentally ill monsters like they see in their mirrors!! BUT, if it ever gets to that point – then all bets are off!
Amen to the current college system needing drastic overhaul. We must make our voices heard at the state level to implement the changes Daniel spoke about. Now that the left is reeling from depraved and imbecilic leaders, we should be marching full speed ahead.
What percent of that “20 million” students could the Left consider their own “personal army”? Not to mention the alumni.
Radicalized, well funded, all on-call 24/7 via hand-held personal marching order devices… soon to be worn on the faces of all via smart glasses.
A gordian knot of twisted corruption loops that Mr. Greenfield has brilliantly described. I’m wondering what the gods of ancient Greece looking down up us mere mortals would say.
Maybe they’d say “Greenfield argues successfully that arguments can’t win the debate”…. exactly the type of classical discourse we are hoping to restore.
I say just punch lefties in their faces. We don’t have to shoot them, just beat the shit out of them. Shut them up the old fashioned way. Who cares what they want to say anyway.
I was reading some of the Ancient Greek debates. The Greeks won all the debates but the Romans won the wars.
Big talk from an ignorant blowhard. I think history has proven beyond any doubt that “just beat the shit out of them” has proven over and over to be an impractical, unworkable solution for anything other than a prize fight. There are intelligent solutions out there, but unfortunately the not-quite-bright among us wouldn’t recognize a good solution if it punched them in the nose.
The left is geared entirely toward winning political battles and “controlling the levers of power” as they like to say. Normal people just want to live their lives and be left the hell alone. In the event they are in a position with power they just try to be competent administrators and good stewards. This is why it always seems like an uphill battle to defeat the left and they are always one step ahead. Trump is the first Republican since Gingrich to understand the power of taking the initiative.
Kurt Schlichter just published American Apocalypse. A narrative of our second civil war.
I read it right after Charlie Kirk was assassinated. The author says repeatedly he doesn’t want a civil war. But I think it’s inevitable especially if the Democrats get the government back. The Dems will overreach. They will enact their dream agenda……packing the courts, gun confiscation, crazy laws and arrest of republican candidates.
The result of course is war. The push back is the same for patriots when preparing for the Jihad. Gun up, ammo up and start forming militias.
Trump has at best 3 more years and hopefully Vance is elected. But with the left and it’s proclivity to use extreme violence anything is possible.
Read the book. We are already at the cold war stage of this war.
Universities no longer aim to serve nor actually perform their historic purpose. Alternative means of learning and gaining understanding of letters, art, science, engineering, and technology are improving continuously and becoming less and less expensive. The once useful role of higher education in growing social skills and networks is largely lost, and we need a replacement – perhaps available through return to childhood religion and social clubs. And real research, already funded by taxes and corporations, do not need university settings any longer.
The cost-benefit ratio of university attendance is no longer sustainable. We cannot reasonably expect this failing model to survive, any more than we can expect improved buggy whip manufacturing techniques to save that business.
The solutions will be considered extreme. They go against the radical progressive egalitarianism in which ALL of us swim, but they would restore much of our nation’s greatness.
1. Deport about 100 million people, including people who are mere paper citizens or who obtained citizenship by fraud. Everyone who has been here only 5 minutes needs to go. They are not one of us and they have their own nations to make great. There is no right to live among us.
2. Recognize that hierarchy is natural and good. Not everyone is college material, soldier material, pilot or control tower material, physician material, engineer material, etc. Give honor to the menial jobs and necessary and important.
3. Take away the universal franchise. It leads to the worst forms of government.
4. Restore freedom of association.
5. Restore color-blind merit.
6. Restore Anglo-protestant principles in government and policy.
7. Restore beautiful architecture and monuments reflecting our own people and history.
8. Make jails and asylums great again.
9. Repeal the civil rights legislation of the 1960’s.
10. Prohibit federal or state representatives with dual citizenship from public service.
12. Prohibit lobbyists, especially those from foreign nations, from writing legislation or giving any financial or other benefit to serving congressmen.
This is just a smattering. Unless we have the stomach for these kinds of things, we will disappear as a nation and people. If we don’t act while we can, then our posterity will rightly curse us.
“If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.” – Samuel Adams
Don’t trust what the government is saying about the Kirk assassination…
Forget about “imposing hefty penalties”. Make all colleges and universities in the country adopt the Hillsdale College model; no federal funds at all, no student loans, no federal grants, no funding even for research. We have too many colleges and universities. We should cull that herd, pare it down to a manageable minimum.
We should also urge private donors, wealthy alumni, and corporate donors to cut their academic funding to zero. Shrink the curricula, but more importantly eliminate most of the administration; it suffers from bloat and morbid obesity. Abolish DEI in all it’s malignant forms.
Starve the beast into submission.
We know very well that the Leftists oppose Free Speech when the Universities have certain areas marked of as Free Speech Zones
Bravo bravo. DGreen. Bravo. You mighty correct 👍
It is more frightening to understand the strategy of the masterminds
and higher ups in academia to destroy America by capturing our
young – than it is to see the assaults and beatings perpetrated by
their thugs in Antifa and in Palestinian protests. Especially knowing
that their strategy is in turn backed by the powerful globalist forces
of Communism and Islam.
It would’ve been better if we had been outright attacked like in Pearl
Harbor so America could unite and fight back – instead of this insidious
and slow strangulation of America’s freedom. Americans are finding
themselves afraid – not just from proliferating assaults from the Left’s
thugs – but from fear of speaking out. Censorship thrives on many
prominent conservative websites – penalties are incurred for pushback
against the lunacy of transgenderism and the perverted sexualizing of
little children. There are plenty more examples where Americans have
become afraid – rampant crime, astronomical cost of living, depletion
of basic resources by illegals, Islamic Sharia encroachment – to mention
a few. And Americans are finding their children just fine with it all.
President Trump said at Charlie Kirk’s memorial that the bullet causing
his death wasn’t just aimed at Charlie. It was aimed at us all. He is so
right.
Wokism isn’t so much an ideology as it is an aggressive tactic against ideology they oppose. They’re fighting a one-dimensional war with only one goal in mind: Destroy their conservative opponents by whatever means necessary.
These ideas could make a helpful impact on univeristies gone mad. But they don’t address the problem coming out of other sources, like social media and other media. As we know, there is a vast army of angry people hungry for socialism, anarchy and islam.
These ideas are anti our Constitution and should be declared illegal. Period. Enough with trying to talk rioters out of them. Free speech has its limits just as endless compassion for immigrants does.
Consider this. McCarthy was right.
The obvious take-away from this is simply DON’T GO TO COLLEGE! Most degrees are useless a$$wipe and give the bearer nothing more than a mountain of never-ending debt. If you’re not majoring in law, engineering, medicine, or business/finance, you’re being taken. What we see in today’s college protests is nothing more than simple-minded indocturnated lemmings letting someone make their decisions for them. What happened to learning how to think?
we need more trade schools & apprenticeships, universities are pathetic. a cloward piven style waste of time, money & energy.
There is only one correct response. A vicious, blood curdling crackdown with immense weaponry. Leave hundreds – if not thousands – of students and professors in piles on the ground, shrieking, bleeding, and dying in their own blood, filth, and vomit. Then follow that up with a middle finger to all of the critics, especially the suburban soccer mom “I can’t stand the bickering” types.
The left is struggling with its theory that speech is violence. This was useful in silencing debate, but the inevitable outcome is that if speech is violence, then violence is justified to protect oneself or agenda from violence. If the speech was effective in questioning your agenda or beliefs then it was harmful, dangerous violence hence justifying physical violence in return. If the defensive violence of shaming, doxxing, deplatforming and job loss is insufficient then physical violence is justified. Hence the determined effort to demonize Kirk as a rational for violence without addressing the root cause. If speech is violence open, honest debate is both impossible and dangerous. Just think how many times the Left has claimed that a different opinion is placing lives at risk and terrorizing people. If one looks closely at the commentary on Kirk you see a common pattern of “he attacked us’, he caused harm, he endangered the vulnerable all in essence justification for “defensive” violence. Free speech and debate cannot survive if the belief that speech is violence is not addressed.