None of the harassment, intimidation, cancellation, and violence against conservative speakers was ever acceptable, but they were accepted.
A little-known Jewish sage called Ben Azzai challenged his students in a message memorialized in the ancient ethical guide known as Pirkei Avot: “Be quick in performing a minor commandment as in the case of a major one.” Fallible human beings cannot know which obligations are small and which are large, both in God’s eyes and in the greater scheme of human events. What appears trivial may hold a community together; what seems like a minor failure may open the way to collapse. The sociologists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling gave that ancient lesson a modern expression in their famous (yet widely misunderstood) 1982 article, “Broken Windows.” They argued that small signs of disorder – graffiti, vandalism, public intoxication – signal a lack of enforcement, which in turn invites greater violations. When norms are not upheld, the boundaries of acceptable behavior blur, and soon serious crime follows.
Many commentators have noted that the assassination of Charlie Kirk is a massive escalation in our simmering culture war and another in a rapidly growing pattern of political violence. But because the escalation was so enormous, many have lost sight of the fact that his murder is also the last of a pattern of lawless attempts to prevent Kirk and similar figures from sharing their messages. In that light, it is a stark demonstration of the Broken Windows principle. Kirk, a conservative activist with a long record of appearances in contentious settings, had been targeted with hostility for years. His events drew heckling and organized attempts to shut him down. His organization regularly had its campus booths defaced, ambassadors harassed, and events canceled because the university couldn’t guarantee security. Kirk and Turning Point USA were hardly the first to suffer such mistreatment on campus. Charles Murray, Allison Stanger, David Horowitz, Ann Coulter, Bill Kristol, E.O. Wilson, and dozens of Israeli diplomats can attest to the harassment and violence that heterodox speakers endured.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Civitas Institute
______________________
Tal Fortgang is an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He was a 2023 Sapir Fellow
Photo by Kilito Chan/Getty Images