North Syrett is a second-year student at the University of Ottawa studying political science. On September 10, Charlie Kirk was mercilessly and grotesquely gunned down on a university campus in Utah. His crime? Speaking. This is not allegory. Not a metaphor. It is America in 2025. A man stood before students, as he had countless times before, pleading for open and civil discourse, warning that without it the nation would collapse into violence. And then, before our eyes, his warning came true. He was silenced, for good.Ordinary, decent people grieved. They wept and prayed. But online, the cultural elites revealed who they really were. Their reaction was not sorrow but celebration, mockery, vitriol. “He deserved it,” they wrote. “Fascists get what’s coming.” These were not basement-dwelling trolls.They were teachers, nurses, surgeons, graduate students, journalists, professors, the very people who preach tolerance and democracy before applauding a political assassination..EDITORIAL: Suddenly, the Left doesn’t think cancel culture is funny anymore.I’m a Canadian. I never met Charlie Kirk. Yet, like countless others, I grew up with his voice in the background of my life. My mother played his podcast every night. His arguments, clear, fearless, often inconvenient, echoed through our home, pressing me to think for myself. And this week, as I sat re-reading Plato’s Republic for a second-year philosophy class, the realization struck like thunder: Charlie Kirk was our modern-day Socrates.In The Republic, Plato imagines a dialogue led by his teacher, Socrates, probing the meaning of justice, the nature of the soul, and the ideal form of government. Socrates is the relentless voice, pressing companions with questions, dismantling easy assumptions, insisting that truth can only be found through reasoned dialogue. Far more than a political treatise, The Republic became a monument to Socratic inquiry itself, preserving his defiance against the Sophists, who prized persuasion over truth..In ancient Athens, the Sophists were gatekeepers of learning — highly educated, highly paid teachers who trained young men in rhetoric, argumentation, and civic life. Their services were limited to the wealthy, breeding elitism, and division. Socrates despised them. He believed that by emphasizing persuasion over truth, they reduced wisdom to a commodity. Knowledge, he argued, was sacred, inseparable from the pursuit of justice — never something to be bought or sold.Both men stood alone in the public square. Both asked dangerous questions. Both were hated, not because they were wrong, but because they refused to bow to hollow dogma. Socrates was sentenced to death for “corrupting the youth.” Kirk was branded a fascist for doing the same, encouraging young people to think for themselves. One was forced to drink hemlock; the other was shot. Different weapons. Same principle..EDITORIAL: Afraid to speak: Canada’s quiet majority is biting its tongue.The tool both men wielded was the same: the Socratic method, asking pointed questions that force an opponent to examine contradictions in their own reasoning. It is less about winning an argument than exposing the emptiness of dogma. Kirk mastered this. On campuses across America, under banners reading Prove Me Wrong, he invited students and professors alike to challenge him. They presented their claims; he answered with a single, devastating question. In doing so, Kirk brought the Athenian agora to the modern quad, showing a new generation that truth emerges through confrontation, not conformity.Charlie Kirk rose to prominence fighting these very battles. From the beginning, he argued that universities had abandoned their true purpose, reducing knowledge to an ideological product. He became notorious for his campus debates, for his willingness to engage the other side face-to-face. For young conservatives, he was a champion of free speech and intellectual courage. For the establishment, he was a corrupter, a threat, a man who had to be silenced..The blowback was predictable. Socrates was mocked in comedies, branded a corrupter of youth, and forced to drink poison. Kirk was jeered as a fascist, censored by digital gatekeepers, and finally assassinated by a mob too fragile for dissent. Hemlock for one; a single projectile to the neck for the other. Different methods of execution, same principle.The cadence of history strikes with unnerving clarity. Socrates lived during an age when Athens, once the proud beacon of democracy and culture, staggered under the weight of its own contradictions. The city waged endless wars, most notably the Peloponnesian conflict with Sparta, that drained its treasury, sapped morale, and left its citizens suspicious and fractured..EDITORIAL: Teachers who celebrated Charlie Kirk’s assassination forfeit their right to teach .Political corruption was rampant. Leaders rose not by virtue or wisdom but by their ability to flatter the crowd, to tell the demos what it longed to hear. Transparency withered as demagogues cloaked their failures in rhetoric, and truth itself became the casualty of politics.Athens prided itself on being the cultural and intellectual capital of the Greek world, yet beneath the marble and poetry festered paranoia. It was in this atmosphere that Socrates was condemned — not because he was wrong, but because he asked questions at a time when the city could no longer endure questions. Athens chose security over truth, conformity over courage, and in doing so, signed its own death warrant..America in 2025 stands at a similar precipice. Its leaders squander treasure and credibility in endless foreign entanglements while its own cities rot, plagued by crime, division, and distrust.Like Athens, America masks decline with spectacle. Politicians posture, bureaucrats obfuscate, and citizens — distracted by bread and circuses of the digital age — turn on one another rather than hold the powerful to account. The promise of democracy is extolled everywhere, yet the mechanisms of democracy are wielded to punish dissent. Those who ask hard questions, whether about elections, wars, debt, or morality, are branded extremists.In both Athens and America, the hour of trial arrived not in times of strength but in times of fragility. Athens, in its desperation, poured hemlock into the cup of its philosopher. America, in its fragility, silenced its dissenter with a single bullet. Both moments reveal the same truth: a democracy that silences its truth-tellers has already begun to collapse..EDITORIAL: The assassination of Charlie Kirk: The Left’s war on dissent.Their legacies echo across centuries. Socrates’ death birthed Plato, Aristotle, and the very spine of Western thought, even as Athens crumbled under the weight of its own elites. Kirk’s martyrdom ignites a fire under a generation of conservatives, rallying them to save a republic teetering under division, debt, and decay, Athens’ ghost in America’s mirror.When democracies silence their truth-tellers, they collapse. Kirk’s blood, like Socrates’ hemlock, is a call to arms. Who will play Aristotle to his Socrates? That is on us, or the republic falls to the mob’s madness.North Syrett is a second-year student at the University of Ottawa studying political science. Of Greek descent, he writes with a deep appreciation for the classical tradition that gave the world Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.
