Ours is a society built, in part, on the notion that free speech is both practically beneficial for our culture and intrinsically good.
A true commitment to free speech is, however, a rather unusual value.
It isn’t merely the case that repressive, totalitarian regimes don’t value speech as we do. As we’ve seen recently, even a “Western democracy” like the United Kingdom is often seduced by other values that it prioritizes over free speech, leading it to impose systematic punishment for mere ideas—or even jokes.
At least during my lifetime, we Americans have been special (perhaps unique) in the preeminence we assign to free speech. But all it takes to undermine this core value is the proliferation of the simple, misguided idea that disagreement justifies violence; that it is acceptable to use force to silence, injure, or even kill someone for expressing an idea that is contrary to the ideology that you hold dear.
This poisonous philosophy can metastasize quickly into related ideas like “my enemies are Nazis” and “we all know that it’s ok to punch Nazis!” and “I’M going to punch a Nazi!!!”
It’s a short walk from there to “killing those who threaten my ideology—the one true ideology, naturally—is actually a public service, and it is my duty to do it. For the common good, of course.”
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) released its annual college free speech report yesterday. One of the top-line findings: “A record 1 in 3 students now holds some level of acceptance – even if only “rarely” — for resorting to violence to stop a campus speech.”
One in three.
Not one in three violent criminals. Not one in three profoundly mentally ill people. Not one in three radical extremists.
One in three college students.
One in three college students will NOT say that violence is never acceptable to stop a campus speech.
A speech.
Respectfully, people who talk about “toning down rhetoric” miss the point. I understand that argument, and I don’t advocate for inflammatory rhetoric, either, but the real lesson students—and everyone—should be learning is to be resilient in the face of ideas we don’t like.
Resilience, not violence.
The “cure” for speech we don’t like has always been more speech.
Unfortunately, a very different lesson has been taught to and adopted by an increasingly large portion of our populace, particularly the college-educated. Namely, the destructive idea that “speech I don’t like is violence.” And, relatedly, “actual violence to counter speech I don’t like is justified.” See, e.g., the latest FIRE report.
Even today, in the wake of the horrific murder of Charlie Kirk, the response to that act is instructive. When you hear prominent voices equivocating, or focusing on what they deem to be Kirk’s so-called “hate speech,” ask yourself if these individuals actually believe in the principle of free speech, or if their beliefs align more with those of the one in three college students FIRE identified.
And therein lies the much larger problem. The people who tacitly—or explicitly—believe that violence is a reasonable reaction to certain speech have reached critical mass. This trend must reverse. And fast.
Unfortunately, such trends seldom do recede quickly, taking almost as many years to unravel as they did to build.
Today’s assassination of Charlie Kirk—on a university campus, amid an event premised on peaceful, cross-ideological dialogue—not only disturbs and shocks us; it confirms our most pessimistic fears about the direction of our country.
A society that even tacitly allows someone to be killed for their words or beliefs alone has crossed a moral Rubicon. We must insist, with every fiber of our civic conscience, that speech is never violence, violence is never speech, and ideas alone never justify violence.
If there is reason for hope in this dark hour, it is that Charlie Kirk’s death may serve as a defining pivot: not to yet more violence, but to a renewal of the bedrock principle that disagreement deserves engagement, not eradication.
If we choose to turn away from that principle, we risk irreparable damage to a country built on the courage to speak and the resilience to listen.
We’re nearing that most cherished of American civic traditions: the dignified, peaceful transfer of power that follows an uneventful, orderly election.
A few hours after Election Day 2020, with the notion of a “stolen” vote already the hottest topic in politics, I 
The Axis of Ego 
The Company Man, Revisited
Tonight, December 13, 2025, will mark the final appearance of John Cena as an in-ring competitor.
After he completes his Saturday Night’s Main Event match against Gunther, his run as a performer will be complete.
The fact that his last match will air exclusively on the Peacock streaming service in the U.S. (and on YouTube internationally) is an appropriate footnote that speaks to the business’s transformation during Cena’s long, wildly successful run.
Cena has achieved innumerable milestones during his career, including a (canonical) record 17 world championship reigns. He has been loved, hated, and, ultimately, loved again. He has been vociferously cheered and lustily booed—perhaps uniquely so, often at the same time.
That long road ends tonight, with Cena still relatively young, still in good health, and still popular. As he has hinted, this, too, is unique.
Professional wrestling has long been associated with retirements that don’t quite stick. Even high-profile, perfect send-offs like the ones that men like Ric Flair or Shawn Michaels received at WrestleMania aren’t permanent once the “itch” returns, creditors come calling, or Saudi Arabia backs up a truckful of oil money to your front door.
A wrestler still in his 40s (hardly ancient by pro wrestling standards) vowing that he’s about to have his last match inevitably receives a healthy and justified measure of skepticism from wrestling fans who have seen this play out hundreds of times before, only to have the competitor in question come back for a “special appearance” or a final nostalgia run.
Cena seems different. When he says that this will be permanent, I believe him.
And that makes me reflect on a piece I wrote in the early days of this blog, titled “The Company Man.” It’s still the most-read post in the history of this blog. The piece ran in 2012, when a significant portion of the WWE audience despised Cena, even though he was positioned solidly as both a “good guy” and as the company’s main attraction. There, I said:
I made the point that, by 2012, the “Super Cena” criticism of him as a perpetual winner was unfounded and had been for some time. Yet, they booed him. They booed him because he represented a “corny” character, consistent with the less-edgy creative direction that the company took several years earlier.
I concluded the piece by saying:
Now, we’re here.
Happily, I think Cena’s intermittent absences from WWE since I wrote that piece have, indeed, made the WWE fanbase’s collective heart grow fonder. The teenage and 20-something male demographic that largely led the anti-Cena sentiment of the late 2000s and early 2010s has also gained perspective and perhaps mellowed with age. Cena not being “cool” or “edgy” enough for them when they were 17 or 21 or 25 doesn’t matter anymore. Meanwhile, the children who cheered Cena back then never stopped.
Over the past half-decade or so, Cena has enjoyed fan reaction that is as increasingly positive as his appearances are increasingly infrequent. Thankfully, a combination of time, perspective, evolving business sensibilities, and the receding of anger over the pivot away from “Attitude” has allowed the audience to fully appreciate Cena in the way he deserves.
Cena is perhaps the last true wrestling hero in the mold of the performers and characters who helped define and elevate wrestling for decades.1 Cena obviously isn’t the last great wrestler in the technical sense. There is a greater number of athletically gifted performers in the business now than there have ever been, and Cena would be the first to admit that that was never his strong suit.
Rather, he may be the last great believer—the rare top guy who treated wrestling not like a job, not even like a profession, but like a responsibility. An obligation to himself, to his company, and to the public.
He was the standard-bearer for the WWE through an era that insisted on irony, and he did it without irony himself: showing up, taking the heat, taking the losses when asked, and never once blinking on the values he sold to kids—even when “smart” teens and young adults mocked those same “corny” values.
In a business whose history is rooted in the con, he was the real thing—and the older we get, the more we understand how uncommon that is. When the bell rings tonight, it won’t just be the end of a career; it’ll be the end of a particular kind of trust.
As the business continues down a road of erasing the lines between on-screen and off-screen “reality,” Cena is the last performer to come from an era before those lines were fully blurred who also lived up to the unrelenting “good guy” character he portrayed.
Put more bluntly: the last time is now.
I miss him already.
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