RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/09/11/the-murder-of-charlie-kirk-cancel-culture-turns-lethal/

Charlie Kirk is dead, aged just 31, gunned down at Utah Valley University doing what the conservative firebrand had been doing for more than a decade. Arguing, debating, talking in public. For that, he’s gone.

A manhunt is still underway, to find the scumbag who put a bullet through Kirk’s neck and deprived his wife and two children of their husband and father. We don’t yet know the motive. But it is impossible to ignore the climate in which this senseless killing has taken place.

Kirk was wearing a white t-shirt, with the word ‘Freedom’ emblazoned on it, when he was slain. It’s been the cause of his career. Bounding on to the scene in 2012, a co-founder of student group Turning Point USA, he was a seminal figure in the young-conservative pushback against the blue-haired intolerance of the campus left.

He dropped out of university himself, but cut his debating teeth touring campuses and taking on all-comers. He built an enormous following doing that most shocking of things in America in the 2010s: taking right-of-centre views to college campuses, arguing his case unapologetically, taking no prisoners but also treating those he disagreed with seriously.

Minds have turned to the rising temperature in America. To the bleak rise in political violence. To the bullet that ripped through Donald Trump’s ear last year. To Luigi Mangione shooting Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, in the back with a 3D-printed pistol.

I dare say the college campus is where this rot took hold. When Kirk was coming to prominence, students were rioting at Berkeley because Milo Yiannopoulos had dared to show up, or were manhandling academics at Middlebury for interviewing Charles Murray. Now, campus cancel culture has turned deadly.

Speech is violence. Words wound. These are the toxic fictions that have infected the West’s universities, media and cultural elites. Now we are confronted with the bloody consequences of it. For if speech is violence then surely violence is a legitimate response to speech?

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21909/new-york-vulnerability

It is time to talk about the Democratic nominee for New York City Mayor, Zohran Mamdani.

Not because he may well be the next mayor of one of the most important cities in America, and perhaps the world.

But because of what he represents: the core principles of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) of which he is a staunch and unapologetic member.

Let us first recognize that his socialism is not the socialism that we often attach to the Great Depression policies of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR’s version of “socialism” saved the nation from the ravages of the Depression in the 1930s through programs that leveraged public works as a means of restoring paychecks and pride for millions. The creation of FDR’s Social Security allowed families to put aside money that would be returned to them upon retirement. It was government with empathy.

Mamdani’s “socialism” is a corrosive ideology that despises the very principles that have made America the envy of the word. Capitalism, the economic engine that powers opportunity, is to be demonized. (No small irony for Mamdani: it is capitalism that has made New York great since its founding.) The DSA platform also calls for dramatic cuts in American military spending and withdrawal from NATO. Not only would allies of America, such as Israel, forfeit any military assistance, but America would oppose Israel being recognized by any other sovereign nation across the globe.

Mamdani is now seeking to cloak his positions, such as defunding the police and weakening our criminal justice system, because he undoubtedly recognizes that if New Yorkers ever truly focused on what he actually believes, they would seek out literally anyone else other than him.

Because New York City has a six-to-one Democratic enrollment edge, all Mamdani needs to do is throw a bomb blanket over what he truly believes in between now and election day, and he may be able to declare victory in November. Through slick online video hype and an effective grassroots campaign, he has been trying to sanitize his contempt for American values. If successful, the DSA would undoubtedly use his victory as a template for similar political seduction elsewhere across our nation.