Proving someone wrong should never be the point: even football players are penalized for celebrating too much

Lauren Vaughn was a teacher's aide in Spartanburg County (South Carolina) School District Five. In an online post, she shared Charlie Kirk's own words supporting gun ownership, admitting that it's "worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year." She then criticized his beliefs on the Second Amendment. She was fired. She is suing to regain her job.

Former Iowa teacher Matthew Kargol is suing Oskaloosa Schools and its superintendent after being fired for a posting that categorized Mr. Kirk as a Nazi. Kargol's lawsuit maintains that his words "did not threaten any person, did not incite imminent unlawful action, and were not directed at any member of the school community."

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott called for and welcomed the expulsion of a Texas State University student who mocked Kirk's mourners in a viral video, then warned that the Texas Education Agency would investigate the conduct of teachers and take action.

This last example is the most disturbing because it penalizes a college student who was expressing a controversial point of view—i.e., doing exactly what Charlie Kirk did from a different political perspective. Now, if we can talk about Charlie Kirk for a moment without losing our minds...

Kirk's catchphrase, "Prove me wrong," underscores what's wrong with our politics today. Charlie Kirk didn't cause it, but he didn't mitigate it either. He didn't foster rational debate, not with an opening line like that. To seriously debate, one would choose a topic that both sides were willing to discuss and defend. All assertions would need to be defended; emotional appeals and crowd-pleasers would be discarded or disqualifying. If in a debate, Mr. Kirk were to assert that Black women lacked intellectual acuity, he'd have to prove it factually. If he thought a Black pilot was incapable of flying an airliner, he would need more than anecdotes or casual observations. Wishing, surmising, imagining, or spitballing doesn't have a place in honest debate.

And the worst part of "prove me wrong" is that it does nothing to improve the end result. In a debate over issues, we don't need a happy winner or a frustrated loser—we need to arrive at some middle ground that people can accept with some degree of equanimity and some degree of disappointment. If I want to ban guns and you want everyone to have one, can we agree that some people should not have one, then maybe agree on who those people are? In the end, nobody needs to be ecstatic or despondent—nobody needs to prove anybody wrong. Compromising at some point might make for a better political climate.

I'm not blaming Charlie Kirk—he merely utilized the politics of his time. And I take no joy in some perverted irony that he was a weapons victim himself. No one deserves that. But in the zero-sum realm of MAGA, where compromise is condemned as weakness, scores are kept and settled, and the inflammatory rhetoric of JD Vance and Stephen Miller passes for insight and direction, we can expect the poison to spread. Every once in a while, it will reach its most horrifying embodiment in people like Vince Boelter, Dylan Roof, and, on September 10, 2025, Tyler Robinson.

The shock is not that these horrible events keep occurring; the shock is that we're still shocked.