I go around universities and have challenging conversations, because that's what is so important to our country,

is to find our disagreements respectfully, because when people stop talking, that's when violence happens.

Welcome back to James Poupery. I'm Joe Heschmire, and I want to talk about the assassination of Charlie Kirk because, honestly, it hit me harder than I thought it would. I'm not a super political guy, but I think it bodes poorly in two ways that I'm not hearing enough people talk about that I wanted to talk about. The first is the rise of what Kirk himself referred to

as assassination culture. And I'll explain what I mean by it and what I think he means by it. But basically

it's the idea that because other people's ideas are bad, you can suppress them violently,

including by murdering people for disagreeing with you.

And so if you think about it this way, Kirk is a representative of the idea that you win by having

better ideas.

His whole like schick was prove me wrong.

And so he would make a case and he would challenge students on the various campuses he would go to to argue against him.

And then he would show them where he thought he was wrong.

That's one model.

The marketplace of ideas exists and the way to establish your ideas as the ones that are dominant is by debating them, by conversing, by using logic to show why that's right.

The other approach is the one that his as yet unnamed murderer used, which is if you don't like what somebody is saying, you kill them.

You use violence or you use other

kinds of force to make sure they can't share the ideas that they want that you find

controversial or objectionable. Now, that's controversial in any form. You know, what role should the

government play in, you know, censoring speech, for instance. But it's in its most egregious form when it's private individuals trying to decide

for the entire society what people are and aren't allowed to think. This is our version of the

Charlie Hebdo murders. Like, either you stand up to this and say, whatever I think of the ideas being defended,

we need to be able to say a small group of people don't get to just dictate this based on their

own private vision of their own totalitarian idea of what is and isn't acceptable speech.

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