After Charlie Kirk’s murder, many were shocked to see people celebrate killing someone for mainstream conservative views. I’m not. As a professor, I saw the ideology that taught “disagreement = harm” take over higher ed. This is the endgame of that lesson. 🧵
In this campus culture, to even question the ideology is to cause harm. That belief fueled extreme reactions to speech. Administration and students relentlessly harassed me for holding mainstream liberal positions until I resigned. 2 https://x.com/i/status/1150377...
A society that equates argument with injury will normalize violence toward opinion. What's worse, the ideology that seeded this holds radical views far outside the values of middle America. 3
What results is ordinary political discourse, like Charlie’s, on family, immigration, gender, or abortion, is recast as a violent violation. For decades, universities wove this ethos into American life. That’s why we’re here. And yes, the left started it. 4
If you want receipts, seek out the work of my friend @mikenayna, especially his film The Reformers. It documents this problem better than anything else I’ve seen. 5
@peterboghossian When speech is labeled violence, it leads to violence in response.
@peterboghossian Safe spaces became recruitment and indoctrination centers for radical victimhood; and the best way to understand your victimhood is via oppressor/oppressed narratives; and the solution to those narratives is, of course, Marxism and destruction of the West. The revolution is real.
@peterboghossian I think you might gloss over the possibility that he was not so much killed for his mainstream conservative views, but for the deliberately controversial messages he used for outrage/engagement farming. There's a good chance the killer never got passed that.
@peterboghossian We started seeing this more than a decade ago, when leftists would protest universities allowing conservative speakers on the basis that it made them feel "unsafe" (Oh, to be a poor, oppressed leftist at a major university). I recognized this at the time for what it was: a
@peterboghossian @SwipeWright Seems like a good argument until you look at the reality that it wasn't some leftist gender studies graduate student who did this but someone who dropped out of a conservative college after 1 semester and went to trade school. So hypothesis is disconfirmed.
@peterboghossian @SwipeWright Same. In fact, it tries my patience when folks are surprised by the contemporary left’s hatred of conservatives. This traces back a couple hundred years to—and is predictable because of—Rousseau and all he begat. Rousseau showed how easy it was to stir envy of the successful
@peterboghossian She was in the professor’s class at A&M who just got fired - that also forced the President to resign. Incredible listening to all the indoctrination forced up on her in a CHILDREN’S LITERATURE course.
@peterboghossian I rewatched the wonderful debate between Professors Haidt and Barrett recently on whether speech can be violence because this seems like the correct time to discuss this topic. Appreciate you doing so! If it’s is of interest, my review is below. Words Are Not Violence -
@peterboghossian I’m not surprised because it’s been bleeding obvious on social media for years, and anyone surprised after Butler is fooling themselves, not paying attention, or has the memory of a concussed dormouse.
@peterboghossian This has bred systemic narcissism and generations of humans who cant connect or build their civilisations into a high trust healthy network. This is nihilism in its most destructive form. It's ultimate endgame state will be darker than anyone can yet imagine
@peterboghossian It’s odd how the irony is lost on those that forget he is a man that told parents of school shooters victims that the children were acceptable unfortunate casualties for gun rights. They were victims too & he thought their deaths were a fair price for society to pay.
@peterboghossian @ZubyMusic People who see themselves as victims become more capable of violence. Losing an argument became a reason for action. This is Freud 101 level stuff.
@peterboghossian Your thread is going viral! #TopUnroll https://threadreaderapp.com/th... 🙏🏼@atribelessquest for 🥇unroll
@peterboghossian @JDVance needs to reconstruct the federal relationship to colleges and incent them to change. This will be difficult because the rot is deep and the admins are part of the rot.
@peterboghossian It’s been nine days, and I’ve yet to find a Democrat IRL who knows who Charlie was. “ Was he a MAGA guy?” is the closest, but even that guy wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. Narcissism creates the illusion that 80 million people are invested in your story.
@peterboghossian Nikita Chrusjtjov called it (Russia’s combative leader from 1953 to 1964), famously threatened, “We will take America without firing a shot. We do not have to invade the U.S. We will destroy you from within.” Here is how: https://youtube.com/shorts/vle... #saveeducation
@peterboghossian Wrote about it this week. https://open.substack.com/pub/...
@peterboghossian Charlie’s murder clearly demonstrates how brave you have been to stand against this tide of bullshit. Thank you.
@peterboghossian Well, there was a reason they wanted to label speech violence - so they could feel justified in committing actual violence in response to speech.
@peterboghossian The greater mistake came at the beginning by allowing the language to be hijacked. "Words are violence" had the predictable endgame we are now living in
@peterboghossian Ample explanation of the plan was given well in advance.
@peterboghossian Over several years I watched students become increasingly divisive, thinking they were following the new moral standards. All the -isms rose up like hateful monsters, 'microaggressions' were everywhere & language was policed. It was becoming the new Lord of the Flies. Horrible.
@peterboghossian If people are taught that speech = violence, they will inevitably respond to speech with violence.
@peterboghossian Pomo progressivism has backed education into a corner with nowhere to go because blank slatism bestowed a god-like status on language; words became "literal violence," at once bringing free discussion to an end & making actual violence a mere equivalence to "hate speech"
@peterboghossian I wasn't. I KNEW there would be monsters celebrating. They showed their true colors last year: saying we were "this close" to getting rid of Trump & cheering that a father was murdered that day. This is nothing new. I remember liberals actually siding with Al Qaeda over GW Bush!
@peterboghossian That's a lot of words to say you have no actual guiding principles and will do anything for power.
@peterboghossian THIS It is the natural progression of a desire for "consensus" which they all learned from the Climate Change grift. If you can silence all disagreement, you remove all harm. Welcome to actual leftist fascism, idiots.
@peterboghossian yeah I dont really get the shock of this. Like this is kind of the world now. And tbh the right are sort of doing it now, and they arent aware of it. People think things that are not what you think. Thats life. Some people cut off their parents, some cant. Some think abortion is
@peterboghossian I speak for myself. I considered those people despicable but still able to discern humanity. Now I do not. Now I want to know who I disagree with and who relishes in not being human. #thesifting
@peterboghossian This is not the end, not even the beginning of the end. It is merely the end of the beginning.