Meme - Nick Timothy MP @NJ_Timothy: "The PM is embroiled in a sleaze scandal about secret donations. A man just walked free after trying to stab a man for insulting Islam. Our economy is in a doom loop of low growth, high taxes and debt. And the BBC leads with something about a pointless American celebrity."
"Jimmy Kimmel calls out 'anti-American' threats to free speech in tearful TV return"
Adam Adomount @adomount: "What would Labour say if someone started making jokes about murdered MP Jo Cox ? Would Labour be okay about that free speech"
Piers Morgan on X - "So, Kimmel wasn’t cancelled by Trump or the FCC after all - but temporarily suspended by his employer because they thought what he said was ill-timed and insensitive."
Suspect in ABC Station Shooting ‘Politically Motivated,’ Left Note Warning Trump Officials ‘They’re Next’ - "Prosecutors believe the suspect who allegedly opened fire on the ABC10 station in Sacramento on Friday was “politically motivated,” Sacramento County District Attorney Thien Ho told National Review, explaining that a search of the suspect’s vehicle yielded a note that criticized members of the Trump administration and appeared to reference the recent assassination of Charlie Kirk. The Sacramento Police Department executed a search of 64-year-old Anibal Hernandez Santana’s home, where they not only found the semi-automatic nine millimeter handgun he allegedly used to fire into the station multiple times, but also various pieces of evidence that suggest that he was motivated by anti-Trump animus"
Magills on X - "This guy is going to jail for a decade because Jimmy Kimmel missed three days of work"
Matt Walsh on X - "Kimmel’s show was put on pause for like 3 days and yet leftists will look us dead in the eyes and tell us that this was a greater attack on free speech than shooting and killing Charlie Kirk"
Hillary Clinton on X - "Jimmy Kimmel and other late-night comedians have certainly said things about me that I found offensive, even outrageous. It never crossed my mind to call up the networks and say, "Hey, get rid of this guy." Because that's not how America works. More in my conversation alongside @yarhimilo with the @newyorker ."
Douglass Mackey on X - "Madame Secretary: It crossed your mind to call up Sen. Klobuchar, the FBI and the DOJ and have me arrested for a humorous meme about your campaign. You then celebrated my unlawful and wrongful conviction, which was later overturned by a federal appeals court. Sit down."
Michael Malice on X - "Whats amazing is how brazenly the narrative is being put fwd that Jimmy Kimmel got suspended for a joke as opposed to lying about a murder and refusing to apologize for lying about a murder."
Pop Crave on X - "Elizabeth Warren and three other Democratic lawmakers have launched an investigation into Nexstar and Sinclair, two major TV station owners that are refusing to air Jimmy Kimmel’s talk show."
Bonchie on X - "Wait, don't affiliates have a First Amendment right to broadcast what they want? Are we already back to the left demanding they control the flow of information?"
Meme - Steve @SteveLovesAmmo: "Let's see if a spoon of mine can get more than 126,000 views... Which would be higher than Jimmy Kimmel's ratings." *1.7 million views*
Alex Christy on X - "Jake Tapper and Seth Meyers applaud Kimmel's return with Tapper saying, "it was pretty much the most direct infringement by the government on free speech that I've seen in my lifetime" and ", I don't know why Disney and Bob Iger ultimately made the right decision and stood for free speech. They didn't initially. And that would be the second example. Because we all saw what happened with our friend Stephen Colbert and Shari Redstone at Paramount with a different merger and a different pressure point that the government has. And we'll see what happens when they come for Comcast and we'll what happens when they come for Warner Brothers Discovery, and maybe you and I will be drawing comic books together.""
Stephen L. Miller on X - "It was just released that Google was pressured by the Biden administration to remove YouTube accounts. But go off @jaketapper"
Oxford Union president-elect must resign over Charlie Kirk messages, say former leaders - "Dozens of former Oxford Union leaders have called for the president-elect’s resignation over messages he sent praising the shooting of Charlie Kirk... The letter has been signed by 26 former Oxford Union presidents, including Rupert Soames, the chairman of the Confederation of British Industry, and Damian Green, the former Conservative MP and Work and Pensions Secretary. More than 40 other ex-Oxford Union officials have added their signatures to the letter. They stated that despite holding views “across the political spectrum”, it was “united in one exhortation”: for Mr Abaraonye to resign... “The attack on Mr Kirk was an attack on the purpose, mission, and role of the Oxford Union,” they said. “It is untenable for our society to have a president who shows either no understanding or blatant disregard for that mission. The issue here is not with politics, but with principle.”"
Chloe Dobbs on X - "George Abaraonye, in his tantrum statement after losing the Oxford Union no confidence vote, says “we EQUIVOCALLY deny” rather than “we unequivocally deny”. That’s ABB for you! This comes after he said in a previous statement that his words were “no less insensitive” than Charlie Kirk’s. I think he meant “no more insensitive”! ABB"
Good riddance (or not) to George Abaraonye | The Spectator Australia - "The ballot question was: ‘Should George Abaraonye, President-Elect, be removed as an Officer of the Society?’ The franchise wasn’t limited to current students or those in the environs of Oxford who could conveniently vote in person, but was extended extraordinarily to potentially thousands of life members all over the world who could vote by proxy. This was at the request of the standing committee – at quite short notice – and has been the cause of considerable confusion and chronic delay. The problem was that life members do not all have membership cards (these do get lost over the decades) and so were permitted either to vote in person with photo ID, or email proof of ID with matriculation details to the single extraordinary returning officer (to whom I shall return). Still, many alumni who live in or around Oxford and who went along to the Goodman Library to vote in person were turned away because their past memberships couldn’t be corroborated manually from central ledgers. Those who were turned away included Baroness Deech (a former head of house), Lord Moynihan of Chelsea, and former presidents of the Union Viscount Hailsham and Melanie Johnson (despite photographic evidence adorning the walls). Scores of others were similarly prevented from voting on account of lost records. Shambolic. Abaraonye’s supporters have been challenging every proxy vote cast by email to ascertain whether the senders were ever members. It is of course perfectly reasonable to seek to prevent electoral fraud, but cross-checking a thousand votes can take some time given that dusty ledgers from the 1960s and 1970s seem to have disappeared altogether. The standing committee knew this and should have foreseen the chaos it might cause. The validity of the vote has been further undermined by unconfirmed reports that the extraordinary returning officer gave other students – some distinctly partisan in the proceedings – access to his email inbox. There was no way of knowing if proxy votes were tampered with, deleted or even received... This whole sorry saga is such an Oxford farrago. Perhaps we could have read the runes when email signatories to the motion of no confidence discovered they had to copy in Abaraonye as the mover of the motion, conveniently providing him with a database of a couple of hundred names and contact details of those who wanted to oust him. His supporters have also been able to see the names of those who voted by proxy, including influential public figures, thus breaching the secret ballot. Since news circulated of his moment of ecstasy at the shooting of Charlie Kirk last month, Abaraonye has been trying to redeem himself with exculpatory excuses. His celebratory comments on Instagram and WhatsApp were ‘poor judgment’, he ‘reacted impulsively’, his words have been widely ‘misrepresented’. He also said that his remarks (‘Charlie Kirk got shot, let’s f***ing go’; ‘Charlie Kirk got shot loool’) ‘did not reflect my values’ – which is strange because the impulsive reaction is usually a rather accurate reflection of a person’s values. He even claims to have become a victim of ‘cancel culture’, which is also odd given that he was the mover of the motion and so cancelled himself. Toby Young was of the view that Abaraonye ‘should not be penalised by the Oxford Union or the university for saying something offensive but perfectly lawful. That’s free speech’. I agree that he shouldn’t be disciplined by his college or the university, but the Oxford Union has every right to expect elected officers to uphold its institutional ethos. It is indeed a bastion of free speech, and Abaraonye is perfectly free to express his views. But he does not then have the right to hold the office of president if he believes, as it appears to me, that political assassination and violent revolution are justified when the ballot box and free speech are deemed to have failed. It may be ‘perfectly lawful’ to express such a view, but it would rightly disqualify him from holding a number of positions in public life, including, I believe, one that seeks to advance education through free speech and expression. He has damaged the interests of the Oxford Union and brought it into disrepute. Free speech can have perfectly justifiable consequences, and 1,227 members evidently agree with me. Some of Abaraonye’s allies have been framing the attempt to remove him as ‘racist’. According to the Oxford branch of Stand Up To Racism: ‘If this racist campaign to depose George is successful it will further embolden fascists and the far right.’ I’d say that’s a good example of what I call ‘censory smearing’: tarnishing Abaraonye’s critics with unpleasant character smears to shut them down. But I’m not going to be shamed into doubting motives or thinking that the desire for Abaraonye to be removed as president-elect was based on anything but a concern for the reputation and standing of the society. As for ‘racism’, it is worth noting in passing that another screenshot from one of Abaraonye’s WhatsApp exchanges shows him boasting: ‘I don’t frequent white establishments.’ But perhaps those words don’t reflect his values either... He doesn’t even seem to appreciate that when you are an elected officer of a world-renowned debating society that prizes freedom of speech, your own free speech is necessarily constrained by institutional obligations and reputational demands. If you don’t like that, at least try to learn why you shouldn’t stand for a public-facing office."
The Oxford Union is strangely changed - "It’s the fact that they had met that I struggle with. For George Abaraonye, the president-elect of the Oxford Union, Charlie Kirk was not an abstraction, not a monster concocted by Left-wing TikTok feeds. He was a flesh-and-blood man who had bothered to fly across the Atlantic to engage members of the world’s most prestigious debating society in a civil and civilised conversation... How did such a man get elected in the footsteps of WE Gladstone and Benazir Bhutto? How did someone so close-minded get to Oxford in the first place? Abaraonye’s A-level grades were reportedly A,B,B – well below the normal entry requirements for his course. He is, of course, only one student: but one does note that Oxford and Cambridge have, for the first time, dropped out of the top three places in The Times university rankings. The shocking thing is that Abaraonye is, indeed, not an aberration. The Union has seen a series of candidates elected on grounds of identity politics over the past five years. Abaraonye’s bad luck was to go in for performative wokery just as the mood outside turned, just as commentators stopped indulging the lunacies they had put up with since the BLM summer of 2020. The Union’s George Floyd moment had come a year earlier, when Ebenezer Azamati, a Ghanaian student, was physically removed from the chamber. Azamati, who is blind, had arrived to find the debating hall full. Someone had offered him a seat, unaware that it was reserved for the teller. When a security guard asked him to move, he became angry and, after a scuffle, was manhandled out. It was, in a smaller way, a foretaste of what was to happen in Minneapolis the following year. The footage was shocking. Anyone seeing a blind man being dragged from his chair, will feel outrage on his behalf. Amid the indignation, it seemed somehow inadequate to say that Azamati was the victim of an unfortunate misunderstanding or of an over-zealous security guard. No, he had to be a victim of institutional racism, and the Union as a whole needed to atone (as well as pay compensation). Two things have happened since then. First, there has been an increase in the number of officials with various kinds of outreach, inclusion and anti-racist roles. Second, it appears to have become an unwritten rule that, to be elected to an Oxford Union post, you need protected characteristics. All this has happened against the background of rapid change within the university. There are proportionately many more post-graduates, often international students on one-year courses. The change in the membership of the Union has been more radical still, because students at the Saïd Business School, 97 per cent of whom are from overseas, get automatic membership as part of their fees. That deal brings much-needed revenue to the Union which, largely as a result of recent internal shenanigans, is not financially healthy. But it also skews the electorate towards people who are passing through, and who feel little attachment to, let alone reverence for, 200-year-old British institutions. Does that sound exaggerated? Are candidates really putting themselves forward for election to a society that they despise? And winning? Yes. In the current “decolonise” mood, it has become quite normal. Judge for yourself. On Thursday, the following exchange was revealed between Abaraonye and one of his friends. “if u hate it then you should run for presidency!!!” says the other student. Abaraonye replies “real lol that’s what I did”. In fact, the Union has always been politically and, by the standards of its time, ethnically diverse. Off the top of my head, the Left-wing Sri Lankan leader, SWRD Bandaranaike, was an officer in 1923, and James Cameron Tudor, the founder of the Barbadian Democratic Labour Party, in 1942. Theirs are among numerous non-white faces in the photographs on the walls. Of course, if you are determined to bring down the patriarchy, none of this will register with you. There was a neat illustration of this thinking the term before last, when wrangles over a proposed rule-change held up the start of a scheduled debate by two hours, prompting one of the speakers – the then 91-year-old Lord Heseltine, himself president in 1954 – to walk out. There had been hopes that Hezza might remember the society in his will. What mattered so much that it was worth insulting him in such a way? According to that term’s president, Ebrahim Osman-Mowafy, “The changes being introduced are long overdue. A fairer, more inclusive system allows students from non-traditional backgrounds to succeed at the Union”. That term, not a single officer or officer-elect was white. The following term – the one just ended – all four elected officers were Pakistani nationals... The danger, indeed, is the opposite: that it becomes obsessed with foreign quarrels, above all, that in Palestine. A debate in Osman-Mowafy’s term, “This House believes that Israel is an apartheid state responsible for genocide”, brought forth support for Hamas so aggressive that it is being investigated by the police."
Clearly, Abaraonye's comment on hating the Oxford Union has been taken out of context and he's a victim of racism
Meltdown at the Oxford Union - "Harold Macmillan once described the Oxford Union as ‘the last bastion of free speech’. Perhaps this remark made sense when it was uttered back in the 1960s, but it reads today more like a mordant quip. The recent furore over George Abaraonye, the president elect, has all but obliterated the union’s credibility. Everything we know about Abaraonye tells us that he is profoundly unqualified to lead such an institution. He openly celebrated the shooting of Charlie Kirk, posting on his Instagram account: ‘Charlie Kirk got shot loool’. In a WhatsApp group, he wrote: ‘Charlie Kirk got shot, let’s fucking go’, ‘Scoreboard FM’ and ‘It really writes itself, doesn’t it’ in response to a fellow student’s comment that ‘He was pro guns LMFAO’. This was in spite of the fact that Abaraonye had met Kirk in person only a few months previously, shaken his hand, and debated him in the chamber. Such musteline behaviour tells us that this is not a man of strong character, but more objectionable still are his attempts at back-pedalling. Abaraonye might at least have acknowledged that it was a hot-headed moment in which he was childishly attempting to be edgy for his friends. But unable to muster the courage to take responsibility for his own words, he instead attempted to blame the victim, saying that his reaction was ‘shaped by the context of Mr Kirk’s own rhetoric’ and ‘My words were no less insensitive than his – arguably less so’. Abaraonye has claimed that he has been on the receiving end of racist abuse and threats. I don’t doubt it. Any story that trends online to this extent will attract its share of trolls who have nothing but bile to add to the conversation. But Abaraonye should also be mature enough to acknowledge that the vast majority of his detractors are not in the least part motivated by racism and would be just as critical had the president elect been white... Abaraonye issued the following statement: ‘This is a chance for us to stand against the racism of the far right, and to stand up for the principles the Union has championed for 200 years. Two centuries later, the same people who claim to believe in the Union are now acting in stark opposition to the Union’s founding principles, by supporting a campaign of harassment, censorship and abuse. We will not be silenced.’ This attempt to position himself as a martyr confirms that he was never fit to be president of the Union. It is purest DARVO (Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender). In celebrating the murder of his political opponent, it is quite clearly Abaraonye who has acted ‘in stark opposition to the Union’s founding principles’. Nobody is justifying any of the abuse he has been subjected to, all of which must be condemned, but to take these outliers as somehow representative of his critics is dishonest in the extreme. The drama hasn’t ended there. Abaraonye evidently believed that he could mobilise his supporters to win the no confidence vote, but he had not anticipated that it would be opened up to life members. The Spectator has reported that Abaraonye and his supporters then ‘moved a revenge motion of no confidence in the current president, Moosa Harraj, for allowing alumni to vote on Saturday’. Worse still, there have been allegations that the returning officer was subjected to intimidation and so the voting process was temporarily suspended. In spite of these plot twists, the final result was conclusive... inevitably he is now contesting the result. He simply cannot accept that his conduct has undermined his legitimacy as president of the Oxford Union. He would apparently much rather hold firm to the delusional belief that this is a plot by the ‘far right’. The entitlement is off the scale. As I have argued previously, it is simply unfeasible for a man who delights in the assassination of his political opponents to lead an organisation whose entire existence is predicated on the sanctity of free speech. Irrespective of the blindingly obvious incompatibility – somewhat akin to Ayatollah Khamenei taking charge of a synagogue – the Union has seen six-figure donations from alumni put on hold, and dozens of speakers cancelling their forthcoming appearances. This is simply not sustainable. Abaraonye’s narcissistic inability to reflect on his own poor judgement is one thing, but perhaps the more pressing question is why such an individual would be lauded by his peers and elevated to such a prominent position in the first place. This entire carnival adds credence to the view that the prestigious institutions of higher education have become corrupted. Many students have succumbed to an ideological obsession with group identity over academic standards, an infantile conviction that ‘words are violence’, and are determined to live in an atmosphere of strict viewpoint conformity. In such circumstances, perhaps the very notion of a renowned debating chamber that exists to promote the marketplace of ideas has become obsolete. If the Oxford Union was once ‘the last bastion of free speech,’ its ramparts now seem to have crumbled beyond repair."
"Minorities" can do no wrong and holding them accountable is bigotry. All their actions are justified because the violence of the Oppressed is Resistance and is morally good, and is not the same as violence of the Oppressor
Oxford Union in fresh turmoil after second no-confidence vote - "a motion of no confidence against Moosa Harraj, the union’s current president, had failed... “This poll of no confidence is a vengeful counterattack in response to the vote of no confidence against Mr Abaraonye – a vote he brought against himself”, Mr Harraj said in an Instagram post on Wednesday. “It is spiteful and retaliatory”. Mr Harraj, an economics master’s student, also accused his opponents of peddling “racist tropes” to “bring the institution down”."
The saga of the Oxford Union president-elect has just reached a sinister level - "Threats of refusal of invitations by potential speakers and the withholding of significant funding by donors have clearly been taken seriously. It would have been interesting to let things play out naturally, and to see what happened, and how, but it seems that the risk was considered too great. “The adults had to step in,” wrote Daniel Hannan on X. Inevitably that sentiment caused a stir elsewhere. One of Lord Hannan’s followers – “cat mum/abortion is healthcare/trans ally” – made the mistake of pronouncing that it was a “pretty vile” stitch up by “people who do t [sic] actually attend the university”, and was very quickly put right on the concept of membership organisations and how they work."
Clearly speakers and donors are only withdrawing because of racism
Adrian Hilton on X - "🔴Oxford Union, Act III. Having brought allegations and complaints about the integrity of the procedure and count of the no confidence poll, the result is now pending and George Abaraonye remains President-Elect. Apart from being utterly graceless, he has no sense at all of the damage he has done and is doing to the standing and reputation of the Society. To rejoice in the murder of Charlie Kirk was one thing (from which he says he has learned); but to put ego and ambition above the honour and integrity of the Union is just vanity. He has learned nothing."
Oxford Union facing financial crisis over Charlie Kirk scandal - "The Oxford Union’s freshers week stall also recruited around half the number of students it has in recent years, one official claimed."
I was once Oxford Union president. I no longer recognise what it has become - "I resigned as secretary of the trust that owns the Union’s buildings, over comments made by the President-Elect that gloried in the shooting of Charlie Kirk on an American campus. For some years, free speech has been a cause celebre of the Right. I have even written a piece in The Telegraph defending it, in the context of an attempt by students to cancel a controversial speaker at the Oxford Union. Some will therefore accuse me of hypocrisy in calling for George Abaraonye, the President-Elect, to be removed from his position. This is the wrong reading, however. I do not think Mr Abaraonye should be punished by the law for expressing his horrible views; I do not even think he should be sent down from university. But the right to free assembly is every bit as important as free expression; indeed in some ways it is the same thing. A private organisation has the right to order its affairs as it wishes, and should be free to remove those who contravene rules or customs. The ability of institutions to self-govern in accordance with societal norms is crucial to them maintaining respect and relevance, and keeping the state from meddling in its affairs. An institution as well-known and newsworthy as the Oxford Union has a responsibility to do just this. Allowing someone who has praised “violent retaliation” and appeared to make comments mocking the shooting of a man (someone he himself stood across in the Union just months ago) who engaged in public discourse, to remain as head of the world’s most prestigious debating society, is not acceptable. You would not suffer the head of a cancer charity to be rooting for the tumours. Further, my right to write this, and try to encourage the President-Elect to resign, is also part of the process by which society tries to regulate its affairs. Given that, at the time of writing this, this man has rowed back his non-apology, telling the New Statesman that “My words were no less insensitive than [Kirk’s]—arguably less so” – it seems that I am justified in my efforts to further force his removal. But this kind of institutional capture, by those who dismiss their inherent value, is a much broader and more concerning trend than just this student debating society. Just as the socialist Left has learned to take over institutions (the Church of England and the BBC spring to mind) and the Muslim Brotherhood have taught how to gain influence for Islamist ideas via the same mechanism, so too are new radicals using both our institutions and our freedoms against us. As I said in my resignation letter, radical groupings “merely wear our precious freedoms as a costume until they can use them to attack that which is sacred to us.” You believe in freedom of assembly, don’t you? So you cannot object to Gaza marches spewing hate clogging our streets every Saturday. You believe in free speech? So you must allow someone justifying “violent retaliation” and glorying in assassination to remain President of a debate club. You believe in democracy? So you must allow for recent arrivals to vote en masse for Members of Parliament who care exclusively about Palestine and similar causes. I feel bitterly bad about leaving the trustees in the lurch, but it is becoming existential for guardians of civil society to realise that we have allowed the old world of shared norms and institutions to wither; if we aren’t radical in reasserting those time-honoured customs, they will be lost to those who don’t even care. At least Mr Abaraonye is honest about this. He said (in a debate in the Union, of course): “To effectively create change in the world we desire… at times there is simply nothing else that can be required other than violent retaliation. And this is a view I wholeheartedly agree with: the view that some institutions are too broken, too oppressive to be reformed. Like cancers of our society, they must, and they should be taken down by any means necessary.” We have been conditioned into learned helplessness by being told there is nothing we can do in a Left-liberal society to conserve those institutions we care about. It is time for us to reject this notion. As Charlie Kirk would say, we are at a turning point. We must choose the right direction."
How ignorant. Doesn't he know that Democracy is only to push the left wing agenda?
Ousted Oxford Union President-Elect George Abaraonye Could Learn from Frank Meyer - "Bizarrely, Abaraonye depicted the campaign to remove him from office as one of “harassment, censorship, and abuse.” Without a hint of self-irony, the young man who indecently cheered Kirk’s murder wrote: “We will not be silenced.” This past May, Kirk and Abaraonye had met in the Oxford Union. They debated the question of toxic masculinity. Kirk looked and sounded like the Oxford product and Abaraonye looked—in sweatpants, a t-shirt, and what resembled slippers—and sounded like the guy who had never gone to college, rather than the reverse. Though both men were respectful, Kirk clearly won the exchange. One needn’t even watch the 12-minute, 25-second discussion (it starts at 1:06:36) to know this. No one winning a fight bites the other man’s ear, and no one who triumphed in a debate celebrates the murder of his opponent... Abaraonye’s intolerant ilk have dominated the campuses—including Oxford—for the past century or so. I just published a book about one such Oxonian, called The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer. Like Abaraonye, Frank Meyer joined the Oxford Union, majored in politics, philosophy, and economics (PPE), and depicted himself as a free-speech martyr as he showed contempt for the free expression of others. Meyer, dubbed “the founder” of Great Britain’s student Communist movement in declassified MI5 files, entered Oxford with zero Communists within the student body. He left boasting 300 members of the explicitly Communist October Club that he had started. When George Lansbury, leader of the Labour Party (and Angela Lansbury’s grandfather) spoke at Oxford in 1932, his sponsors had to eject a shouting Meyer from the lecture hall. That year, the October Club invited H. G. Wells to campus months after his “liberal fascism” speech that partly criticized Communism. Meyer shouted Wells down, too. In 1933, conservatives blamed Meyer’s groups for the Oxford Union’s passage of the infamous King and Country Pledge, in which the body vowed not to fight for England. In truth, a socialist had introduced the measure. But Meyer’s group had disrupted an Armistice Day gathering of veterans, and MI5 recognized him as the leader of Communist student antiwar efforts. As a graduate student at the London School of Economics, Meyer conspired with Krishna Menon, later one of the most powerful men in India, to rig a vote that elected him president of the student government. After the authorities finally deported Meyer (by then, like Abaraonye, a cause célèbre stripped of his presidency) in June 1934, he showed the emptiness of his activism by going to work directly for future East German dictator Walter Ulbricht, a Communist who had already ordered murders and later ordered the construction of the Berlin Wall, on “peace” efforts in Paris. The obvious parallels between the campus extremists in Britain of the 2020s with those of the 1930s are that both claimed to support peace even as they cheered violence, both defended their own free-speech rights as they worked to strip them from others, and both refused to recognize elections that did not go their way. But a deeper lesson can be drawn—and Charlie Kirk may have understood this better than anyone—that points to the human capacity for change. Frank Meyer acted in an even more obnoxious manner during the 1930s at Oxford than George Abaraonye does now. Yet he eventually asked the bravest question: What if I’m wrong? By 1949, he was serving as a star witness in, to that point, the longest, most expensive trial in U.S. history, which sent 11 former comrades to prison for Smith Act violations. He helped found the American Conservative Union, the Conservative Party of New York, and the Philadelphia Society. His book, In Defense of Freedom, served as a canonical text for the postwar right. Joan Didion credited him, when he was National Review’s literary editor, as the first to take a chance on her freelance work. Kirk debated Abaraonye and thousands of other students who not only disagreed with him but despised him. He did so because he believed in the power of persuasion. Epiphanies happen. Second thoughts birth second acts. Kirk’s Christianity dictated that he treat others as he would be treated. The political animal in Kirk understood that behaving humanely toward ideological adversaries makes it easier for them to embrace your position."
