Husband, father, and political activist, Charlie Kirk, was shot dead while speaking on a college stage. I won’t print the killer’s name. I will say this: when a culture normalizes calling political opponents “Nazis,” someone eventually acts like it’s true.
I’ve opposed this kind of dehumanization for years… no matter who it targets. As a grad student at UCLA, I once stood next to Lyndon LaRouche activists who had plastered President Obama’s face with a Hitler mustache with a sign that read, “F these guys!”.
I was born not far from Auschwitz; the stunt made my stomach turn. Disagreeing about health-care policy is not the moral equivalent of industrial murder. I said so at the time, and I still mean it.
When I joined the University of Alabama faculty in 2016, I watched another version of the same slide: words like “nazi” and “fascist” describing the newly elected president became casual contempt; students in MAGA hats were treated as a “safety” problem; administrators gamified speech codes. I was a libertarian then (I still keep libertarian instincts), and my view of both parties hasn’t grown rosier. But one thing became undeniable inside higher ed: an overwhelming, practically totalizing, tilt to the political Left.
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