Author’s Note:

This isn’t about politics, it’s about what happens when dialogue dies. I’ve spent my life in locker rooms, weight rooms, and training rooms where you could speak your mind, argue hard, and still shake hands after. That’s how men sharpened one another — through honesty, not hostility. The old adage says, “Iron sharpens iron, as one man sharpens another.”

But somewhere along the way, that disappeared. When disagreement became heresy and emotion replaced reason, the foundation of a free society started to crack. We’ve confused fragility for virtue, outrage for courage, and comfort for truth. The result isn’t progress, it’s paralysis.

The Death of Dialogue

I haven’t commented on the CK assassination because I’m still struggling with what I’ve seen, thousands celebrating the death of a man for daring to speak, for daring to engage college students in open discussion. In the true spirit of Socrates, condemned for “corrupting the youth” by teaching them to think, he engaged the young in spirited discourse. His death marks how far we’ve fallen.

We’ve raised a generation to believe that words are violence, that disagreement is danger, and that emotional discomfort justifies moral destruction. The Coddling of the American Mind didn’t just soften our resilience, it hardened our hearts.

When honest conversation becomes an act of aggression and empathy disappears beneath ideology, civilization begins to rot from the inside.

The darkness isn’t just around us anymore, it’s taken over. And like every power vacuum in history, it’s being hijacked by opportunists chasing clicks, clout, and control. His death has become currency, traded, twisted, and weaponized. The right is clawing over itself to crown a new CK, but what they’ll find are louder, emptier voices, men more interested in attention than truth.

That’s not leadership.

That’s rot.