Sept 18, 2025
LOS BANOS, CA –After serving in the United States Navy, I went on to study at UC Berkeley. Like many students there, I was required to read a long list of authors and academics whose theories were already beginning to reshape American institutions. They were heavy with jargon, light on wisdom, and relentless in their drive to reduce the human condition to abstractions about power.
But in the middle of that grind, there was a reprieve: we were asked to study the lyrics of Bob Dylan. Dylan wasn’t an academic. He wasn’t trying to build a theory of human life. He was a poet who captured the heartbeat of his generation. His words reflected the turmoil of the 1960s — civil rights marches, generational conflict, the war in Vietnam — but they did so with clarity rather than dogma.
One line in particular has always stayed with me: “The line it is drawn, the curse it is cast.”
That line is about moments of reckoning. Moments when the debate is no longer theoretical. Moments when the stakes are exposed for what they are. In Dylan’s time, it was the line between a segregated past and an integrated future, between blind obedience and a demand for accountability.
Today, we are living through another moment when the line is being drawn. The assassination of Charlie Kirk made it visible to anyone with eyes to see.
A Different Kind of Ideology
Dylan was writing about the collapse of traditions that had stood for centuries. Segregation, rigid hierarchies, unquestioned authority — these were old orders being challenged by new movements.
Today’s crisis is the reverse. The ideology now trembling under scrutiny isn’t ancient. It’s barely twenty years old.
It grew in university lecture halls. It spread through social media. It was dressed up as “progress.” It taught that identity is everything, that truth is relative, and that words themselves are violence.
For a while, it looked unstoppable. Universities enforced it through speech codes. Corporations adopted it in boardrooms. Politicians parroted it in campaigns. And anyone who disagreed was told to sit down and be silent.
But then came the fruit. Division. Intolerance. Censorship. And now, violence.
The Tragedy of Charlie Kirk
Charlie Kirk was gunned down not by someone clinging to the old order, but by someone radicalized by this new one. The shooter wasn’t motivated by faith, tradition, or loyalty to ancient systems. He was animated by the toxic belief that silencing your opponent is justice, and that violence is a righteous response to speech.
That belief didn’t come from nowhere. It was cultivated in classrooms where debate was treated as dangerous. It was reinforced online where dissenters were mobbed into silence. It was celebrated in a culture that equated disagreement with harm.
Kirk’s death is therefore more than a tragedy. It is a revelation. It shows where this ideology leads. It draws the line between free society and something far darker.
The Conservative Response
And yet, the response from conservatives has not been to declare war. Despite what many in mainstream media would have you believe, conservatives have not demanded vengeance, censorship, or violent retaliation.
Instead, the answer has been to double down on principle.
When Attorney General Pam Bondi — a Trump administration official — suggested cracking down on “hate speech” in the wake of Kirk’s death, it was conservatives who corrected her. They reminded her that giving government the power to decide what words are acceptable is a direct path to tyranny. That’s not our tradition. That’s not what America stands for.
This is a crucial point. Conservatives today understand something that Dylan’s generation had to learn in the streets: once you empower institutions to silence speech, they will not stop with your enemies. They will come for you next.
The line has been drawn — but the conservative answer is not more lines, not more bans, not more walls. It is peace, open debate, and a return to liberty.
The Warning
But here is where caution is needed.
It is right and proper to call out this ideology for what it is: extreme, toxic, unsustainable, and opposed to human nature itself. It is right to say plainly that it cannot continue, that it leads only to destruction.
But in fighting it, we must be careful not to violate the very principles we are defending.
If we answer censorship with censorship, we betray free speech.
If we answer hatred with hatred, we betray human dignity.
If we answer violence with vengeance, we betray justice.
That is the danger of moments like this. In the heat of reaction, we can go too far. We can let righteous anger tempt us into the very abuses we condemn.
The line has been drawn. But which side of it we stand on will depend not just on what we oppose, but how we oppose it.
Why This Moment Matters
Charlie Kirk’s assassination is not just an attack on one man. It is a moment of truth for a nation. It forces us to confront the ideology that fueled it. And it forces us to ask how we will respond.
The ideology itself is brittle. It seemed powerful because it captured institutions, but its hold on ordinary people is thin. Already, millions are waking up to its failures. Already, many are recognizing that the fruits are bitter — that a creed which begins with censorship ends with blood.
The reckoning is coming. But the question is whether it will be a reckoning that restores liberty, or one that replaces one tyranny with another.
A Return to First Principles
The answer must be the former.
We must return to the truths that have carried this nation through greater trials than these:
- That every person is created equal and endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights.
- That liberty cannot endure without the freedom of speech, press, and conscience.
- That justice must rest on equal protection under the law, not the shifting winds of ideology or power.
- That the pursuit of truth depends upon free inquiry and open debate, never on censorship or coercion.
These are not theories invented in faculty lounges. They are not slogans to be tested on social media. They are enduring truths, proven across centuries and cultures.
The line has been drawn. On one side stands the brittle creed of identity politics and compelled speech. On the other stands freedom, debate, and dignity.
The Call of the Moment
We must choose wisely.
It is tempting in the aftermath of tragedy to seek security at the expense of liberty, to demand retribution instead of justice, to silence those who silence us. But that is the road to ruin.
The better way is harder. It requires restraint. It requires clarity. It requires holding fast to principle when it would be easier to abandon it.
But it is the only way to ensure that the line we are drawing now is not just another boundary in an endless cycle of ideological battles, but a true return to the foundations that make freedom possible.
Conclusion
Dylan’s lyric still rings true: “The line it is drawn, the curse it is cast.”
The curse is the ideology that led to Charlie Kirk’s assassination. It has been cast across our institutions for two decades, and its fruits are now clear for all to see.
But the line is ours to draw. It is the line between coercion and freedom, between vengeance and justice, between ideology and truth.
Charlie Kirk’s death is a tragedy. But if it wakes us up to the path we are on, it may also be the beginning of renewal.
The times are changing again. The line has been drawn. The question is not whether we will cross it, but whether we will hold it — firmly, peacefully, and with the courage to defend liberty without becoming what we oppose.
