On September 10, a young man sat on a chair in front of a crowd at Utah University, his voice amplified in passionate defense of his principles. As he had done so many times before, Charlie Kirk had come to discuss and debate… to hear the best arguments of those who opposed his Christian and conservative viewpoints, and engage in the act of defending and convincing with words. A bullet ripped through his neck, ending not only the life of a young father and husband, but silencing forever one of the greatest debaters and conversationalists supporting traditional American values. “He was an inflammatory figure” said his opponents in the media, “a divisive and problematic character.” They were not wrong. His words inflamed the inspiration of millions, dissatisfied with the logic and goodness of what they’ve been force-fed at universities and high schools. His words divided, drawing a clear line between those who submit themselves to God, and those who hate Him. He was problematic to his enemies, because he would win these debates. He showed that logical argument can still defeat endless repetition of false premises, and that our youth are still capable of free thought.
As his lifeblood poured from his neck, cheers rang across the American left, united in one common chorus: Words are violence. Your disagreement with us, expressed so effectively, is equivalent to a violent attack. Thus, your death is deserved, justified by the principle of self-defense. As the sexual degenerate who murdered him pronounced him “full of hate, and spreading hate,” the American left rose to echo. They announced themselves to the world as proponents of a doctrine. “Words are violence.” No supporting premises built into a logical conclusion led them to hold this as truth. No, it was repetition, the pronouncement of this claim over and over by authority figures in kindergarten, grade school, high school, and finally the almighty university.
These institutions of “learning,” many decades past, had all adopted Vladimir Lenin’s strategy set forth in What is to be Done? (1902). Lenin surmised that effective propaganda for the proletariat does not require exhaustive debate, or persuasion through evidence, but rather the disciplined, relentless repetition of key premises to embed them in the consciousness of the masses. “The history of all countries” he wrote, “shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only a trade-union consciousness.” To win them, one must only implant the premises one desires, over and over, relentlessly, and with consequences for dissent.
Are the university graduates of our day aware that they have been treated thus? Do they have any concept that they have fully swallowed the hook… a tactic that was set forth to their own insult? As they stand on the hill, waving Lenin’s flag, are they cognizant that the puppeteers who put them there mock them as mindless animals? No. So, it would seem, the Soviet Russian dictator who dreamed of totalitarian control was right. The once-free land of America is now largely populated by puppets who do not understand that they have never grown up. They have never matured and learned as human beings do. Rather, they have been engineered, created in a Petri dish, and are nothing but the products of a classic totalitarian assembly line. While they scream “fascist” in the faces of the few remaining thinkers, they are oblivious to their own inability to think. The very thing that separates humans from animals, the spark of the Divine Logos, has been engineered out of them by those bent on control. They are the robotic products of the very fascist ideology they profess to hate.
A Call to Rebellious Reason
A left-leaning reader may be inspired to ire at this point. The implication of brainwashing and the lost ability to reason may be too insulting to countenance, and the strong temptation may be to click the exit button in anger, reading no further. I implore you not to do so, and give my promise to proceed in love. If you will bear it manfully, I will attempt to show you, not shout at you, that the oft repeated “speech is violence” mantra that has been hammered into your heads as dogmatic doctrine is contrary to reason. I hope to call you to some form of the rebellious spirit that shaped our great nation, the spirit that refused to be dictated, refused to simply accept the impositions and claims of authority figures without the examination of a sound mind. We are a nation built on the rebellion of reason, as our fathers employed it to reject the impositions of a king across the sea. Their rebellion of reason rejected the class system that had been practiced in societies for all of recorded history. This they tossed on the discard pile, constructing a society in which the peasant had the same vote as the nobleman. Later, other fathers did the same with the practice of human slavery, a tradition that every culture in the known world had practiced for as long as histories have been written. In doing so, they rebelled against the collective thought of all of human consciousness, that people of a different skin color were not really people. I call you to join these greats. I call you to be courageous, as they were, and bravely to employ the examination of reason against the dogmas that have been imposed upon you by the authors of your culture. It will be reason, not repetition, that shapes our minds. Be rebellious. Be courageous. Be valiant enough to think.
Moral Vacuum: The Theory of Relative Righteousness
In order to examine the claim “speech is violence,” (or “silence is violence” as the other side of the same coin) you need to first come to grips with the moral theory in which it is based. This moral theory is called “Relativism,” and has roots much further back in history than Vladimir Lenin, who dreamed of a society in which the lower classes were controlled by repetitive dogmas in their education system. The ancient Greek sophist Protagoras may be widely regarded as the father of relativism in philosophy, but its threads were woven together by a far older and more sinister mind than his. Protagoras posited famously that “man is the measure of all things,” asserting that truth, reality, and morality are all subjective, depending on individual perception rather than absolute standards.
There is one thing that is crucially important that you notice. This is not a scientific theory. It is a faith. One must adopt it as belief, and hold it as a matter of faith, expressly because it is unprovable by observation and untestable by any objective measures. After all, according to its own principle, there are no objective measures with which to test it. Therefore, it does not belong to the category of social science, it belongs to the category of faith.
This faith, a matter of blind and untestable belief, holds forth that what is good and right for me is not good and right for you. In fact, the words “good and right” are utterly meaningless, and nobody has any right to invoke them. You may claim that the kidnapping and molestation of someone else’s child is “wrong,” but you have no access to the perspective of the rapist, and have no right to impose your truth upon him. It is “right” for him, because he did it. Where man is the measure of all things, the actions of man are always in alignment with his own desire, and are always right. Your choice to donate money to feed starving children cannot be called “good” either, by anyone but yourself. All moral action is entirely subjective to the actor. To the man who believes humanity is a plague upon the earth, and that the planet would be better off without him, you have done a “wrong” thing by perpetuating the lives of children.
But it is not only the words “right” and “wrong” that lose their meanings if the religion of relativism is adopted. It is in fact all words. There is no concept that can be grasped, no principle to be examined, that cannot mean opposite things from one man to the next. What is honorable to one is dishonorable to another. What is courage to one is cowardice to another. Generosity is greed. Love is hate. Kindness is cruelty.
Once words have lost all meaning, we lose the very thing that separates us from predatory beasts, the ability to speak and reason with one another. In the same way that we can no longer define “right” as that which adheres to a set of objective moral laws, we can no longer define “dog” and “cat,” and we can no longer define “violence” as physical harm exacted upon the body of another. It may in fact be looking at someone cross-eyed, or breathing at a cadence that is faster than what someone else appreciates. It may be that holding a different opinion, and saying so, is “violence” to that person. I have no right to say that it isn’t, in the religion of relativism. But here’s where it falls apart. Inversely, he has no right to say that my words are not kindness. If I choose, instead of using words, to butcher him in his sleep, he has no right to say that my action is not kindness, in the religion of relativism.
It is this chaos, this spiral into meaningless anarchy, that the liberals demand we accept. But it is a privilege they want to hold uniquely. Definitions can be flexed in whatever way the desire demands, but only their desire. Never yours.
Returning to America’s Soul: Christianity and Greek Philosophy
The great society that has made them the wealthiest and safest people in all of history was not built on Marx’s philosophy, or Lenin’s. There have been cultures built on those ideas. They did not work, producing neither safety nor wealth for the proletariat, ending in mass starvation and murder. Rather, the indisputably greatest nation on earth was built on Biblical philosophy and Greek wisdom.
The Biblical Anchor: Objective Truth from the Divine Logos
At the heart of America’s founding lies the Judeo-Christian conviction that truth is not a human invention, but a divine revelation. “In the beginning was the Word,” declares the Gospel of John, “and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). This Logos, the eternal reason and order of the universe, is not subjective. It does not shift with the whims of men, but is absolute, etched into the fabric of creation by the Creator Himself. The Ten Commandments were not negotiable opinions handed down on Mount Sinai; they were immutable laws, binding on every soul, from the lowliest shepherd to the mightiest king. Murder is wrong not because a majority votes it so, or because it offends my personal sensibilities, but because it violates the image of God imprinted on every human life (Genesis 1:27). Theft, adultery, false witness… these are not “wrong” only if the victim feels offended. They are transgressions against a holy standard that precedes and outlasts any earthly regime.
This biblical framework supplied the moral scaffolding for the Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” wrote Jefferson, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” Note the language: self-evident, not self-determined. These rights are not granted by kings or crowds, nor revoked by relativist decree; they are inherent, rooted in the objective reality of a God who speaks and means what He says. Words, in this tradition, are not violence, they are the very instruments of covenant, prophecy, and persuasion, the first and last barrier to violence. Jesus did not silence His opponents with a sword; He dismantled their errors with parables and questions, inviting them to “repent and believe” (Mark 1:15). The early apostles, facing Roman persecution, did not riot or assassinate; they preached, debated, and died as witnesses to truth. Christianity’s power has always lain in its appeal to reason undergirded by revelation, not in equating disagreement with assault.
The Greek Complement: Reason as the Path to Universal Truth
If the Bible provided the moral North Star, Greek philosophy furnished the compass. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics did not treat truth as a private possession but as a public treasure, discoverable through rigorous exchange of controversy in the marketplace of ideas. Socrates roamed the agora, cross-examining merchants and statesmen not to “harm” them with microaggressions, but to expose contradictions and lead them toward eudaimonia, the flourishing life aligned with virtue. His were arguments of love, not hate.
“The unexamined life is not worth living,” he insisted at his trial, refusing to recant even under threat of death. His method presumed that words, however sharp, are tools for clarification and motivation to thought, not weapons for doing physical harm. Aristotle built on this foundation in his Nicomachean Ethics and Politics, defining justice as an objective mean between extremes, knowable through reason and observable in nature. This Greco-Christian fusion birthed the First Amendment: Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press. Why? Because speech is the lifeblood of a free republic. James Madison, echoing Aristotle, argued in Federalist No. 10 that factions arise from diverse opinions, and the remedy is not suppression but deliberation in an “extended republic” where truth emerges from collision. Think about that. “Collision” of ideas, strong disagreements, are what Madison viewed as necessary for the survival of the republic. “Violence” enters only when fists replace arguments; words, even inflammatory ones, are the safety against it.
The Incoherence of “Speech is Violence”: A Logical Dismantling
Now, let us apply this inherited wisdom to the leftist slogan. If speech is violence, then:
All distinctions collapse. Violence, by any objective definition (biblical, Aristotelian, or Webster’s), requires physical force causing bodily harm. A debate, no matter how heated, leaves no bruises. To make it so, we have to become acolytes to the religion of relativism, redefining “bruises.” This loops us endlessly in Protagoras’s chaos. But if everything is harm, nothing is. Speech is violence means that thought is violence. Breathing is violence. Everything is violence.
Unequal justice reigns. The assassin of Charlie Kirk claimed self-defense against “hate speech.” Yet under relativism, Kirk’s Christian affirmations were “kindness” to his audience. Who arbitrates? The one with the gun? This is not justice; it is might makes right, the law of the jungle masquerading as progress.
Free society implodes. If disagreement is assault, then campuses become war zones, elections battlefields, and families commit murder over dinner-table disagreements. The left’s selective application of this bizarre idea, holding that false accusations of “Nazi” are speech, but misgendering is “genocide,” exposes the hypocrisy. Relativism is a tool for power, not principle.
History testifies against it. Regimes that equated words with violence… Stalin’s purges, Mao’s Cultural Revolution… devoured their own, murdering millions for “counter-revolutionary” thoughts. America’s greatness stems from tolerating offense. Abolitionists called slavery sin, directly accusing slave owners of wickedness and inhumanity. This was extremely offensive to slave owners. But it was not violence… words wounded their pride, but spurred national reform.
In relativism’s moral vacuum, the assassin becomes the hero, the debater is the villain. But anchor in objective truth, the law of God and the reason that He gave to His image-bearing creation, and the equation reverses. Kirk’s words were love, exposing error to save souls. The bullet was hate, silencing a voice to preserve delusion.
A Final Plea: Choose Life, Choose Reason
Charlie Kirk died defending the right to speak truth in a nation that once prized it above comfort. His blood cries not for vengeance, but for revival… a return to the soul of America. Reject the assembly line of repetition. Embrace the rebellion of reason. Read the Bible not as myth, but mandate. Study the Greeks not as relics, but roadmaps. Define violence as it is: the bullet, not the ballot… the fist, not the phrase. In doing so, you honor the fallen, fortify the free, and reclaim the spark that makes us human. The choice is yours: remain a puppet, or rise as a thinker.
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