What is cancel culture? It is murdering a young father who organised debates at universities so that adults could reason, engage in dialogue, and confront ideas. It is labelling dissent as “hate,” banning reality, erecting “sanitary cordons,” and sacralising emotions to the point of fanaticism. It is assuming moral supremacism and disguising it as virtue; it is dehumanising the opponent and usurping democracy. And it is calling Charlie Kirk a fascist just hours after his death, insinuating that deep down he deserved it because “violence” (thinking and speaking in public) supposedly provokes violence (a bullet to the jugular) – as Ignasi Guardans, a former Member of the European Parliament, declared on Spanish national radio while Charlie’s body was still warm.
After the abject assassination of Kirk, no one can still claim that cancel culture is something marginal, a case of misguided benevolence, nothing more. No – the cultural cancer of cancel culture kills, its hands are covered in blood, and it has dragged the West into an unimaginable degree of social and intellectual decay. We must eradicate it before it eradicates pluralism and dissenters. Let’s be clear: Charlie was murdered, first and foremost, for being a conservative – for saying loudly and clearly that he was a Christian, a patriot opposed to abortion, for affirming that there are only two sexes, and for rejecting illegal immigration.
His death is the most tragic example of this disastrous trend of prohibiting, or even criminalising, dissonant opinions and restricting the respectability of political debate to a single option. Behind “hate speech,” behind sanitary cordons, or behind the so-called “pro-European democratic forces” (dixit von der Leyen in her latest speech), lurks an autocratic impulse that undermines democracy and turns opponents into enemies. To equate being conservative with “hate” is the prelude to dictatorship, and lately the West has already given far too many examples of this autocratic tic, including within the European Union itself. After the assassination attempts against Bolsonaro, Trump, and Fico, the attacks on Milei and Babiš, the murders of Villavicencio in Ecuador and Uribe in Colombia – not to mention Pim Fortuyn’s killing in 2002 or the recent massacre in Minneapolis at the hands of a transgender individual – it is high time the Left began to ask itself who truly hates whom.
Sadly, Charlie Kirk’s death is also an attack on freedom of expression and the culture of debate – an attempted assassination of what made the West great: Confronting ideas, arguing, reasoning, and not being carried away by emotions. Kirk did nothing more than go from campus to campus to supplement universities in their primary mission, one they no longer fulfil: Educating and the exchanging of knowledge-based ideas. As he himself said, ceasing to speak is the first step toward civil strife, while debating is above all about building bridges and de-radicalising groups trapped in a bubble of certainties, dogmas, and emotion. I once had the opportunity to meet a former British jihadist who recounted how a teacher had rescued him from his spiral of hatred and victimhood through the Socratic method, forcing him to rethink his prejudices and to reason. Was Charlie doing anything different? That is also why he was murdered.
We already knew that cancel culture is mediocrity, cowardice, foolishness, and obscurantism. Now it is clear that it is also violence and death. Charlie Kirk represented the very opposite of this liberticidal delirium, and he ended up paying with his life for his courage, his brilliance, his openness, his combativeness, and his desire to build bridges. His assassination is an irreparable loss, above all for his widow and his two children, from whom woke fanaticism has stolen an exceptional man. My deepest condolences, and also my admiration and gratitude for this legend who restored hope to tens of millions of people, who will take up the baton from their father and husband to multiply his legacy.
Rest in peace, Charlie. Death is not the end. And since the European Parliament had the audacity to disregard you, know that yesterday my students and I began class with a minute of silence in your honour.
The knife through Zarutska’s neck, the bullet through Kirk and anti-white racism