Imagine two 20-something strangers, Joe and Mike, standing elbow to elbow at the open bar of a large wedding reception. The bartender refreshes their drinks, they happen to turn at the same time to face the crowded hall, and Joe points to a woman in a red dress on the dance floor. “Man, look at her,” he says. “I’d like to take that one into my bed.”

“That’s my wife,” Mike says.

Joe grins. “She as hot as she looks?”

Mike throws his drink into Joe’s face, then follows through with a hook to the jaw that sends Joe to the floor.

Words have consequences.

Now travel down to the Benton County Courthouse in Arkansas where two sisters, Kerri and Kaylee Rollo, ages 23 and 22, were filmed in broad daylight destroying a homegrown memorial to Charlie Kirk on the courthouse steps. When the obscenity-laden video became public, the sisters were arrested. The restaurant where Kerri worked fired her, while Kaylee’s boyfriend broke up with her and kicked her out of his mother’s house where they were living.

Said the mother:

Kaylee has lived in my home now for over a year, and I have never once cut her down or not allowed her to have the beliefs that she has. However, I will not allow someone living in my home to be OK or celebrate a murder. I will never allow someone to live in my home who is OK with destroying a memorial for someone else.

Claiming a violation of their first amendment rights, the sisters set up a GoFundMe to help pay their legal fees. A court will consider whether tearing up memorial signs and notes and kicking over candles and flower vases is legitimate freedom of expression.

Whatever the court’s decision, free speech has consequences.

In the last three weeks, others, including school teachers and government employees, have paid a price for online rants celebrating Kirk’s death, receiving reprimands or losing their jobs for their over-the-top and often profane diatribes. Like the sisters Rollo, some of them claim that Americans are being oppressed by a fascist regime.

At the same time, some politicians and celebrities are fueling hatred and violence in our country. In the days since Kirk’s murder, the news has reported several attacks apparently inspired by this rhetoric. One recent incident involved a gunman firing into an ICE vehicle. No agents were shot, but one detainee was killed and two more wounded.

There it is again: speech and consequences.

The political left in our country, especially the 21st century Marxists, know this is true, which is why they keep promoting violence. Most don’t dirty their hands with the violence, the shootings and bombings, but instead urge on expendable fanatics like Kirk’s murderer or the Rollo sisters with their shrill shouts of fascism, Hitler, and tyranny.

Missing from this propaganda, as is so often the case, is reason. Emotion is all. Ask for real definitions of words like fascist and tyrant, for instance, and the leftist agenda deflates. Ask why and how rhetoric – in the negative sense of that word – is superior to reason, and that kickball goes completely flat.

Of course, they are handicapped because the ability to reason, think, and form judgments by means of logic, requires training. In “The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home,” writers Jessie Wise and her mother, Susan Wise Bauer, title one chapter “The Language of Reason: Math.” Throughout their book they repeatedly stress the absolute importance of turning the young into literate readers. Yet in the United States the latest tests by the Nation’s Report Card showed some of the lowest math and reading scores ever recorded among 12th-grade students.

The results of this deplorable education are playing out in the public square. Dunces are the playthings and puppets of extremists. It therefore seems axiomatic that if we wish to raise children guided by the compass of reason rather than by the shifting winds of propaganda and irrationality, we must first see to their education.

This effort on the part of parents is part of the price to be paid for freedom of speech.

An education in morality is equally important. Here we can give children a code of virtue by acquainting them with fairy tales, fables like those of Aesop, the Bible, poetry, and the biographies of great men and women, all accompanied by the living lessons in character taught by parents, teachers, and other mentors.

Attaining these objectives will obviously require years. In the meantime, and whatever our politics, those of us who love our country must fight extremism and violence every step of the way. Our weapons in this war – reason, the law, debate, civility whenever possible, truth when truth can be discerned, courage, and above all, the freedom of speech – may seem inferior to the bombast, bombs, and bullets of the violent, but these are the marks of our civilization, and they also come with a price tag. Abandon them, and we will become as barbaric as our enemies.

Stand up and speak out.

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The republication of this article is made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal.

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