In the rarefied air of academia, words are supposed to be tools of enlightenment. But sometimes, those words become weapons—and the professors who wield them face no consequences, even when their rhetoric turns deadly.
Look, this isn’t theoretical anymore. Charlie Kirk, the 31-year-old founder of Turning Point USA, was assassinated last week while speaking at a campus event, microphone in hand, trying to engage in the very dialogue universities claim to champion. His killer left a note saying he’d “had enough of Kirk’s hatred.” But who was really spreading the hate here? Yet even after this political murder, the left’s response hasn’t been soul-searching or restraint. Instead, they’ve doubled down.
The University of Pennsylvania receives over a billion dollars in taxpayer funding annually. You’d think a billion dollars would buy us some basic human decency, right? Wrong. When one of their most prominent professors shared vile rhetoric about Kirk’s assassination, the university’s response was deafening silence.
Which brings us to what happened at UPenn this week. Professor Michael Mann, the school’s vice provost for climate science and the architect of the infamous “hockey stick” climate graph, shared a post calling the murdered Kirk “head of Trump’s Hitler Youth.” When caught, Mann tried to walk it back with this pathetic excuse:
From ‘UPenn professor Michael Mann’:
“I reposted this earlier today. I was simply agreeing w/ the (widespread) criticism of Ezra Klein’s claim that Kirk was ‘practicing politics the right way’. I do NOT approve of the inappropriate & inflammatory language used to describe Kirk (which I’d overlooked). Have deleted.”
“Overlooked”? Give me a break. He overlooked comparing a murdered conservative to Nazi leadership? Mann also wrote that Kirk’s assassination represented “white on white violence” that had “gotten out of hand”—as if this political killing was just some random street fight. Pennsylvania Senator Dave McCormick demanded “immediate, decisive action” from UPenn. Mann’s response? He attacked the senator for making “inflammatory demands.” The irony would be funny if it wasn’t so sick.
Here’s what really gets me: This wasn’t Mann’s first rodeo. He previously called for drone strikes against President Trump. Yeah, you read that right—drone strikes. This guy’s a Hillary Clinton advisor, a regular Democrat Congressional witness, part of the whole establishment machine.
Oh, and guess who’s bankrolling this hate? The Nation magazine—funded by over a million dollars from George Soros—published a piece calling Kirk “an unrepentant racist, transphobe, homophobe, and misogynist” while his body was still warm. When Vice President JD Vance exposed the Soros connection, The Nation’s president tried to deny it, despite documented proof.
I’ll tell you what—at some point, we need to say enough. These aren’t random Twitter trolls; they’re professors at elite institutions, magazine publishers, the supposed guardians of knowledge and truth. They’ve abandoned every standard they claim to uphold. They spread poison from their tenured positions, fuel violence with their rhetoric, then hide behind academic freedom when blood spills. And we’re paying for it.
Kirk died trying to have a conversation. His killers—both the one with the gun and the ones with the keyboards—wanted to end that conversation forever. UPenn’s silence isn’t just cowardice; it’s complicity. Until there are real consequences for those who incite violence from their ivory towers, their words will keep becoming bullets in our streets. And they know it.
Sources: Breitbart, Daily Wire, Breitbart
