The Education That Makes Murder Seem Righteous

How Critical Pedagogy Turns Opponents Into Enemies and Violence Into Virtue

Our moral fabric is unraveling...

How Did Murder Becomes a Moral Statement?

When I wrote my last piece about the Annunciation school shooting I thought, or maybe hoped, we’d have more than a couple of weeks to catch our breath before facing more evidence that evil is stalking us like prey: lying in wait, ready to pounce when we least expect it.

I’m not talking just about the killers — like the men who murdered Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk — though they certainly are evil individuals. I’m talking about the millions who reacted to their deaths as if they were watching a spectator sport.

First, we saw the people who shamelessly insisted on sharing the video footage of both murders, over and over again — well beyond what could reasonably be described as serving “the public’s right to know.” When criticized, some lashed out, accusing others of trying to “censor the truth,” as if there’s no downside to watching violent content, never mind repeatedly.

The videos spread so quickly that children as young as elementary school saw them — often more than once — before their parents had a chance to intervene. One parent I know, who does not allow her children to have smartphones, told me her ten-year-old daughter saw Iryna’s murder play out on a peer’s phone. The girl now has nightmares.

In Canada, an elementary school teacher responded to questions from fifth- and sixth-grade students in a French immersion class by showing them “a portion of” the Charlie Kirk murder video, and then allegedly regaling them with negative commentary about the victim.

This impulse to proliferate violent content for profit or attention (or both) is evil. Many people saw these videos without wanting to — they popped up on auto-play in their feeds or were snuck into other content without warning. Ironically, many of the same people sharing them — along with frame-by-frame analysis and commentary — claim they’re “raising awareness” about our mental health crisis, as if their own behavior isn’t making it worse.

Research tells us what happens when people watch heinous acts of violence over and over again: Desensitization to violence — sometimes to the point of fascination (as in the case of the Annunciation school shooter). Psychologists have measured this effect: habitual exposure to media violence blunts the body’s natural stress response.

“Habitual media violence exposure correlated negatively with skin conductance level during violent clips … the more participants were used to media violence, the less physiological response they showed.” (Krahé et al., 2011)

This is how we normalize the abnormal — and eventually make space for celebrating it.

But what’s most chilling isn’t just that some people spread these videos — it’s how many did, and how many felt morally justified doing so. The response wasn’t fringe, it was mainstream. That tells us something much deeper is broken: millions of people have come to believe that if their outrage feels righteous enough, then amplifying horror is not just allowed but virtuous.

And this didn’t happen by accident. That kind of moral reasoning — where your own sense of grievance outweighs the well-being of others — is exactly what our schools have been teaching under the banner of “critical consciousness” and “social justice.” For years, students have been told that silence is violence, that speech is harm, and that the greatest moral duty is to “speak out,” regardless of the cost.

This is the real horror we are facing: a generation taught to confuse emotional satisfaction for moral clarity — and trained, often at public expense, to treat dissent danger.

The Celebration of Death

Despite all I know about the moral rot at the core of American education — I was still surprised by what I saw in the hours and days following Charlie Kirk’s assassination: a flood of celebratory social media posts, many with videos depicting almost manic levels of joy, from young Americans, most of whom were still in high school or college.

What stood out most about the reaction was not just that people celebrated — but how. The themes were disturbingly consistent: He was a fascist, and fascists deserve to die. He hated marginalized people, so he got what was coming to him. He said hateful things, and people shouldn’t be allowed to do that. One down, many more to go. Good riddance. I’m not sad for his family because they supported an evil man.

I will not share screenshots or direct quotes from posts like these here. They have already been seen and shared widely, and I have no desire to give them more oxygen. Plenty of other people are hard at work shaming individual posters, and that’s not my goal. I’m more interested in understanding why so many young people — in unison — reacted this way.

What was missing was just as telling as what was said. No one offered real evidence to back up their claims. When they did cite “evidence,” it was often something Charlie had never said at all — or a statement so badly misquoted or stripped of context that it was unrecognizable. And none of that seemed to matter. For these young people, words alone — even disputed words — were enough to justify not just a man’s death, but the mockery of his family’s grief and the open wish that others would soon meet the same fate.

This wasn’t just spontaneous cruelty: it was learned. This readiness to dehumanize, to cheer a murder, to treat words as crimes punishable by death — didn’t spring up overnight. It was cultivated slowly, over years, in classrooms where students are taught to see the world as divided into oppressors and oppressed.

The Classroom Philosophy Behind the Celebration

Critical pedagogy, developed by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, teaches that the goal of education is to raise students’ “critical consciousness” so they can resist and dismantle systems of oppression. In this framework, speech is never neutral — it is a weapon. Words either liberate or oppress, and speech from the so-called “oppressor” is treated as inherently suspect, even dangerous.

Schools and universities embraced these ideas long ago, building “safe spaces” and “microaggression” protocols that train students to respond to words not with debate, but with outrage and demands for silence.

bell hooks (1952–2021), another influential thinker in teacher training, took this further. In Teaching to Transgress, she wrote:

“I know that it is not the English language that hurts me, but what the oppressors do with it, how they shape it… how they make it a weapon that can shame, humiliate, colonize.”

Teachers influenced by hooks are encouraged to disrupt norms like politeness and “respectability,” which she framed as tools of oppression. In practice, students are urged to shout down viewpoints they dislike and excused when they try to silence speech they believe might harm the “marginalized.” Classrooms become places where dialogue collapses and the moral response to disagreement is not engagement but eradication.

Charlie Kirk himself warned about this very danger:

“When people stop talking, really bad stuff starts. When marriages stop talking, divorce happens. When civilizations stop talking, civil war ensues. When you stop having a human connection with someone you disagree with, it becomes a lot easier to want to commit violence against that group… What we as a culture have to get back to is being able to have a reasonable disagreement where violence is not an option.”

I can think of no clearer example of projection than calling someone a “fascist” to justify celebrating the horror of a bullet permanently silencing him — while he was offering students the chance to prove him wrong. “Fascists” are the ones who do the silencing, not the ones asking for dialogue.

Empathy Education — For Me But Not for Thee

This is where many parents feel betrayed. For years they’ve been told that schools are teaching empathy through Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) programs. But the empathy being taught is conditional. Much like Herbert Marcuse’s “repressive tolerance,” SEL encourages students to withhold compassion from those labeled “oppressors.” Because these programs are built on Freirean and hooksian foundations, they explicitly tie “empathy” to “social justice” outcomes — meaning some people’s pain counts, while others’ does not.

When we teach children to divide the world this way — into good people and bad people, the deserving and the disposable — we shouldn’t be surprised when they grow up to see a man’s murder as righteous.

The Need for a Villain that Justifies Rejecting Truth

The tell was in their reaction to being confronted with the truth. When people tried to show them what Charlie had actually said — sharing transcripts or full-context video clips — many refused even to look. It was as if they needed him to be evil.

My friend, therapist and author Pamela Garfield-Jaeger, put it perfectly:

“I am realizing how intentional the misrepresentation of Charlie Kirk is. I’m watching people explain or give context to his quotes over and over, but those who spew the hate don’t care about context. They NEED to hate Kirk. They WANT to hate him. They are so empty inside that they need to feel morally superior, even if their belief of superiority is based solely on lies.”

Pamela is right — the hatred is deliberate — but I would go one step further: this hatred is trained. Whether they are college students, recent graduates, or middle-aged adults, nearly everyone under 50 has been educated in a system dominated by critical pedagogy. They were not left to form their own moral compass; they were given one. They were trained to divide the world into oppressors and oppressed, to see certain speech as violence, and to treat hating the “oppressor” as a virtue.

A Moral Code Built on Opposition

What we are facing is not just a culture war — it is a moral inversion. This philosophy tells students they are good, not because of the virtues they practice, but because of the enemies they oppose. It assures them that as long as they are “fighting oppression,” cruelty, censorship, and even celebrating death can be framed as moral acts. This is not compassion. It is a moral code that uses empathy as a weapon.

The Pipeline Is Still Running

Despite years of push-back from parents and pundits, this problem is not going away — it is expanding. Teacher-training programs are embedding “critical consciousness” as a core feature of their curriculum. At UC-Merced, for example, required education courses explicitly focus on “inclusive pedagogy” and empowering students to advance equity agendas.

And high school reading lists are dominated by contemporary “struggle lit” — books centered on identity, oppression, and systemic injustice — even to the point that some districts require students to pick from a “Social Justice” category in their summer reading.

If these are the books, the teachers, and the frameworks shaping students today, we are not witnessing the last gasp of this movement. We are seeing the next wave being prepared.

What Comes Next If We Do Nothing

This is why I say we have not reached the apex of this phenomenon. The next wave is still in the classroom, learning to divide the world into saints and sinners by group identity, to treat dissent as harm, and to feel righteous in their rage. We are cultivating not only intolerance but a readiness to dehumanize — and when a society teaches its young to dehumanize, violence is never far behind.

The evil we saw in the celebration of Charlie Kirk’s death was not an end point. It was a preview.

If we do not confront this moral inversion — if we allow schools to keep teaching that some lives are expendable and some voices must be silenced — we will see more celebrations like the one we saw this month. And next time, the target may not be a public figure but a neighbor, a teacher, a child. The only antidote to this darkness is to teach truth, courage, and the dignity of every human being — before it’s too late.