College students are on an alarming path of equating words with weapons and supporting politically-motivated violence to stop “harmful speech.”
Even before the assassination of Turning Point USA founder and free speech champion Charlie Kirk, college students have increasingly seen free speech as an enemy of safety and security.
The free speech group Freedom of Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) released a timely study two days after Kirk’s assassination, revealing that one in three college students now believes it’s acceptable to use violence to silence a speaker—a 50 percent increase over the past five years.
Lydia Prudent, a Political Science major specializing in domestic terror at the University of Georgia, told Minding the Campus that the vitriolic rhetoric often spewed by the left, now commonplace, has warped students’ ability to engage in civil discourse, leading them to commit acts of physical violence in response to opposing viewpoints.
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“Nowadays, we hear the words Nazi and fascist being hurled at people where it is unwarranted,” said Prudent. “By attributing [violent characteristics to words] and making everything about ‘identity,’ people feel as though they are under attack. All of these things lead to people feeling as though political violence is a valid response when it never is.”
Having conducted a study on the realities of liberal tolerance, Prudent also discovered that conservative students are both “more likely to be willing to listen to opposing beliefs” as well as “remain in a relationship with people who hold different beliefs.”
“Liberal students tend to be less apt to listen to other points of view and are likely to end relationships over differing beliefs,” she explained. At the same time “people on the right are more willing to have their beliefs challenged and are more likely to seek out opposing beliefs on social media.”
Prudent says that, while non-violent social change takes time and patience, political violence is “never the correct answer.”
“Words are words, while they are powerful and can do many things, they are not physically violent; therefore, they cannot rationalize violence,” said Prudent.
Josiah Jones, College Republicans president at Hillsdale College, largely attributes the surge of physical violence in response to free speech to “Gen Z’s obsession and reliance on social media.”
Jones said that he watched politically moderate friends “become radicalized and hate-filled for anyone with opposing beliefs because of social media.” He also said COVID-19 lockdowns exacerbated social media’s effects on his generation.
“I think social media is very good at providing an echo chamber of beliefs that manipulates you into falsely believing that anyone with differing opinions is pure evil,” said Jones. “Short reels and infographics easily suck impressionable young people into this mindset with trendy graphics and music.”
Jones said that many of his leftist friends celebrated Kirk’s death in September on social media, but his conservative peers did not laud former President Joe Biden’s prostate cancer diagnosis or the heinous murder of Minnesota’s Democratic Speaker of the House, Melissa Hortman.
A study by the Buckley Institute at Yale found that only 29 percent of conservatives believed violence could be justified to combat hate speech or racially charged comments, in contrast to 44 percent of liberal-identifying students who responded favorably to the same question.
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This chasm, as Minding the Campus editor Jared Gould noted in an earlier essay, can undeniably be ascribed to the liberal majority in higher education:
[T]he left overwhelmingly controls America’s colleges and universities, these institutions have been able—without meaningful opposition—to inculcate students with narratives such as the oppressed-versus-oppressor hierarchy and ‘speech is violence’ mentality, effectively becoming incubators for political radicalization. Leftist administrators and faculty have, for decades, fostered a culture in which silencing—or even eliminating—opposing voices is seen as a legitimate path to victory.’
Today’s generation has grown comfortable equating words with weapons, and institutions meant to cultivate reason are now instructing in emotional fragility and moral relativity. When “speech is violence” becomes doctrine, actual violence inevitably follows—as the response to Charlie Kirk’s assassination revealed.
If America’s campuses have any hope of preserving the faintest trace of intellectual integrity, they must relearn the simple truth that disagreement is not harm, dissent is not hate, and words, no matter how uncomfortable, are not violence.
Image: “Charlie Kirk shooting scene from front” by KSL News Utah on Wikimedia Commons
