The shocking assassination of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University puts an exclamation point on the degraded state of reasoned debate in America.
Like many in the last month or so, I’ve found myself doing a deep dive into Kirk’s YouTube channel, watching debate after debate. You learn something from watching them in full: Kirk was willing to talk to anybody, and he always brought liberals to the front of the line.
We must teach our students to be virtuous, both individually and politically.
He was pugnacious at times, but always civil. His interlocutors sometimes resorted to ad hominem attacks, and their arguments often collapsed under a steady stream of his questions and retorts. Time after time, these students lost the debate with Kirk because they simply didn’t know enough.
What causes a person to stake out a position with such confidence before mastering the evidence to support it? For many of the students who challenged Kirk, the answer is “action civics.” This pedagogical theory holds that the highest form of civic participation is protest rather than discussion. Its result is thoughtless grandstanding or worse. The antidote to this state of affairs is classical education rightly understood.
When it comes to civics, knowledge is necessary but not sufficient. Civic life requires more than a grasp of American history and government, as important as those things are. It requires us to be people formed by practice in the habit of reasoned deliberation — people who know how to disagree and be disagreed with and who are willing to change their opinions when they learn something.
Political speech — reasoned discussion about the good within a regime — allows us to improve our opinions by sharing them with others and refining them through conversation and disagreement. Civic education divorced from these practical virtues produces either performative activism or feckless intellectualizing.
These virtues can be cultivated within the classroom through classical education. Reading and discussing works from Aristotle to the Federalist allows students to wrestle with enduring questions about justice, rights, and the good life. They learn not only to discern what is right but also to pursue it amid the complexities of a changing world.
Yet the real formation comes in seminars and Socratic discussions, which are laboratories of civic practice.
After years outside of the classroom, this semester I began teaching a course on moral and political philosophy to 11th graders. These students are young, but after years in a classical school, they have some real learning under their belts. The task this year is to develop within them the habits necessary for a real seminar conversation, with Socratic discussion three days a week and a full-blown seminar on the other two.
In a well-run seminar, teachers merely provide a question about a great work of literature, history, or philosophy, intervening to guide the discussion only rarely. As in life, no authority swoops in to give the right answer and make decisions for everyone else. It’s the students who lead and who learn to find their way together.
A properly run seminar allows students to disagree and be disagreed with. They are forced to humble themselves before an author and a text, to scrutinize their own opinions, and to discard error in favor of knowledge.
But it isn’t a lawless environment. Students in a well-run seminar know that they are to speak about the text and only the text. Every comment must respond to the previous speaker. Non sequiturs are not allowed, and the students don’t interrupt each other (we are still working on that last one).
If we want a citizenry capable of sustaining liberty, we cannot settle for activist training without understanding, nor abstract lectures without practice.
When they do speak, they have to ground their statements in an argument drawn from the text. If they don’t have an interpretation of the text to offer, they can ask a thoughtful question, which is often just as beneficial to the conversation as a well-reasoned argument.
Disagreement in the seminar room is an opportunity to learn that disputing someone’s argument doesn’t mean impugning their character. Most teenagers are terrified to disagree with someone their own age and even more terrified to be disagreed with. But after a few weeks, they develop thicker skin. They learn to think more about the substance of their argument and less about their social standing.
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When the arbiter of the debate is the text itself, everyone knows that success means advancing the clearest and most correct reading. And when the text is rich and deep, it takes time, conversation, and disagreement to interpret it well.
Disagreement is an opportunity for clarification. In a well-developed seminar, it’s welcomed. What matters is not superficial civility, but the willingness to examine and revise our opinions in light of reason and fact, to argue from truth rather than feeling, and to labor toward a common understanding.
In a way, these classroom discussions on Plato and Virgil, Swift and Shakespeare, are a crash course in practical civics. Not protest, not theory, but character formation through dialogue, study, and experience — all preparing students not only to understand their country but to participate in it responsibly. In a way, classical education creates more people like Charlie Kirk.
If we want a citizenry capable of sustaining liberty, we cannot settle for activist training without understanding, nor abstract lectures without practice. We must teach our students to be virtuous, both individually and politically. Only then will they be capable of self-government — not as activists or spectators, but as citizens.
Editor’s note: This article was published originally at the American Mind.
Evil introduces itself subtly. It doesn’t announce, “Hi, I’m here to destroy you.” It whispers. It flatters. It borrows the language of justice, empathy, and freedom, twisting them until hatred sounds righteous and violence sounds brave.
We are watching that same deception unfold again — in the streets, on college campuses, and in the rhetoric of people who should know better. It’s the oldest story in the world, retold with new slogans.
Evil wins when good people mirror its rage.
A drone video surfaced this week showing Hamas terrorists staging the “discovery” of a hostage’s body. They pushed a corpse out of a window, dragged it into a hole, buried it, and then called in aid workers to “find” what they themselves had planted. It was theater — evil, disguised as victimhood. And it was caught entirely on camera.
That’s how evil operates. It never comes in through the front door. It sneaks in, often through manipulative pity. The same spirit animates the moral rot spreading through our institutions — from the halls of universities to the chambers of government.
Take Zohran Mamdani, a New York assemblyman who has praised jihadists and defended pro-Hamas agitators. His father, a Columbia University professor, wrote that America and al-Qaeda are morally equivalent — that suicide bombings shouldn’t be viewed as barbaric. Imagine thinking that way after watching 3,000 Americans die on 9/11. That’s not intellectualism. That’s indoctrination.
Often, that indoctrination comes from hostile foreign actors, peddled by complicit pawns on our own soil. The pro-Hamas protests that erupted across campuses last year, for example, were funded by Iran — a regime that murders its own citizens for speaking freely.
But the deeper danger isn’t foreign money. It’s the spiritual blindness that lets good people believe resentment is justice and envy is discernment. Scripture talks about the spirit of Amalek — the eternal enemy of God’s people, who attacks the weak from behind while the strong look away. Amalek never dies; it just changes its vocabulary and form with the times.
Today, Amalek tweets. He speaks through professors who defend terrorism as “anti-colonial resistance.” He preaches from pulpits that call violence “solidarity.” And he recruits through algorithms, whispering that the Jews control everything, that America had it coming, that chaos is freedom. Those are ancient lies wearing new clothes.
When nations embrace those lies, it’s not the Jews who perish first. It’s the nations themselves. The soul dies long before the body. The ovens of Auschwitz didn’t start with smoke; they started with silence and slogans.
RELATED: Evil unchecked always spreads — and Democrats are proof
So what do we do? We speak truth — calmly, firmly, without venom. Because hatred can’t kill hatred; it only feeds it. Truth, compassion, and courage starve it to death.
Evil wins when good people mirror its rage. That’s how Amalek survives — by making you fight him with his own weapons. The only victory that lasts is moral clarity without malice, courage without cruelty.
The war we’re fighting isn’t new. It’s the same battle between remembrance and amnesia, covenant and chaos, humility and pride. The same spirit that whispered to Pharaoh, to Hitler, and to every mob that thought hatred could heal the world is whispering again now — on your screens, in your classrooms, in your churches.
Will you join it, or will you stand against it?
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