Pun Salad

Not even Utah Valley University is immune.

On August 31, 2025, a Change.org petition titled “Stop Charlie Kirk From Spreading Hate on Utah Campuses” started circulating. Motivated by Kirk’s upcoming appearances at Utah Valley University and Utah State University, the petition embraced the equations favored by student narcissists everywhere when those students seek to censor and exclude:

Proposition one: speech that challenges campus orthodoxies is “hate speech.”

Proposition two: people who disagree with campus orthodoxies are “haters.”

Proposition three: “hate speech” and “haters” cause harm.

Proposition four: because of that harm, “hate speech” and “haters” should be silenced, stigmatized, and excluded from college campuses and other citadels of tolerant, inclusive culture.

The petition dressed up those equations with the familiar tropes of student sanctimony and fragility:

Kirk’s presence on campus would be a “threat to the inclusive, respectful environment that our campuses are supposed to represent.”

Universities have a “responsibility to protect students from harassment, hostility, and the legitimization of hate under the banner of ‘debate.’”

“When speakers with a record of targeting marginalized groups are given the microphone, the result isn’t dialogue—it’s harm.”

Were Utah Valley University and Utah State University to allow Kirk to speak, they would be “endorsing rhetoric that directly undermines their stated commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

These hothouse phrases are usually associated with the denizens of the Ivy League and other selective colleges, but the ideology of totalitarian safetyism has spread to every college campus that is not explicitly and militantly countercultural—including, it would seem, Utah Valley University.

We live in troubled times.

The moral culture of Western civilization is unraveling before our eyes. This seems self-evident for those with eyes to see.

Nor is it possible to unsee the things that we’ve witnessed even if only in recent days. One’s daily doom scroll through X, TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube has unleashed a barrage of hitherto unimaginable acts of cruelty and savagery. These images are not from some war torn Third World hellhole but from the beacon of Western civilization.

We live in a time of routinized vulgarity and barbarism. Our cultural conscience has been desensitized. What’s worse is that we are becoming anesthetized to what Hannah Arendt referred to as the “banality of evil.” We meet it with a shrug or titillation.

Those who care about our civilization—a civilization built on reason, objectivity, freedom, science, technology, individual rights, self-government, constitutionalism, and laissez-faire capitalism—must confront the spiritual, moral, and cultural crisis of our time. We must search for the deepest cause of that crisis, which can be summed up in one word: nihilism.

It appears that words no longer matter to Nancy Pelosi. For years, Pelosi and other Democrats have blamed President Donald Trump and Republicans for their “inciteful rhetoric.” In seeking Trump’s impeachment, Pelosi bellowed that the use of “words such as a cry ‘to fight like hell'” produces violence and added, “words matter. Truth matters. Accountability matters.” No longer. After all, she explained, “we can’t take responsibility for the minds that are out there and how they hear it.”

Democrats and the media have long applied a double standard to political violence. CNN made “fiery but mostly peaceful” protests a national joke in describing riots that caused massive property damage and deaths. CNN’s Chris Cillizza even denounced Trump for using the word “riots” to describe the violent protests in Kenosha in 2020. Violence on the left cannot be riotous; it is righteous.

To Whom It May Concern:

I am flattered to have received the many overtures in the wake of the Charlie Kirk shooting inviting me to a Second American Civil War. These missives have been graciously received and duly considered. You seem quite enthusiastic about this venture, and I have no doubt that you will throw a first rate Civil War that will have social media buzzing for years to come.

However, I regret to inform you that I will not be attending your Civil War. I’m afraid that circumstances make it simply impossible. Allow me to explain…

For starters, there are scheduling issues. I have a strict video game/eating Cheez-Its/watching dumb shit on my phone until 1AM regimen that I do not like to disrupt. Further, the ribbed and non-ribbed paper clips in my junk drawer are all mixed together, so I urgently need to sort that out. Finally, there’s Going Dutch, the Fox sitcom about a US Army colonel assigned to a backwater base in the Netherlands — that airs Thursdays at 9:30, and I refuse to miss it. You might think “couldn’t you DVR it?”, but that leaves me vulnerable to Going Dutch spoilers — I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been on a train or in a coffee shop and heard people discussing the details of last night’s Going Dutch. So, that won’t work. The bare truth is that if I have to choose between a Civil War and Denis Leary’s antics as a gruff-but-loving father, I choose the latter. I hope you understand.

Further — I’ll be honest — I’m not entirely sure what, exactly, Civil War II is meant to be. Is it a literal armed conflict? Between whom, exactly, and pursuing what goals? Are armies led by Alex Jones and Matt Walsh going to meet at Gettysburg against well-drilled soldiers led by Hasan Piker and Krystal Ball? Will bayonets be involved? Do we have to grow beards? Will I need to write eloquent letters home to my wife so that Ken Burns VI can hire Robot Sam Waterston to read them in a PBS documentary about the war? That seems like a lot of pressure; I mostly just text with my wife, and I doubt that even Robot Sam will be able to squeeze the emotional heft out of the words “thumbs-up emoji” that KB6 will want.