To my mind, the single ugliest consequence of Charlie’s murder is the plethora of videos celebrating his death. And these are coming not just from weirdos in the fever swamps of the internet, but, in alarming numbers, from teachers, professors, professionals, medical personnel, and government officials. I don’t care how dramatically you might disagree with someone; if you celebrate his murder, you have lost any sense of the dignity of that person. And don’t we see, especially among the young who have been soaked in woke ideology, a sense that there are no objective norms of good and evil, truth and falsity, just plays of power between oppressor and oppressed? Just the other day, I came across a deeply disturbing statistic: 34 percent of college students feel that it is sometimes permissible to respond to campus speech with violence. That point of view makes sense if and only if one has given up completely on a shared matrix of meaning. If argument is pointless, bombs and bullets become inevitable . . . . Up until his dying moment, Charlie was engaging in a practice that goes back to Socrates and that informs the West at its best. And that is precisely why we all feel so unnerved by his death. We sense that something basic to our civilization, something axiomatic and fundamental, is teetering—and that truly fetid cultural influences have found their way into our institutions and the minds of our kids. My sincere hope and prayer is that we can take renewed inspiration from a courageous and religious man who died, not with a gun in his hand, but rather an instrument of communication.
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