Students who called for Jewish slaughter absolutely should pay the price

A spirited debate broke out between Megyn Kelly and Vivek Ramaswamy and between Kelly and Candace Owens regarding what should happen to the college students who signed letters and took to the streets last week to say that Israelis deserved their rape, torture, murder, and kidnapping and that we should affirmatively support the sadists who target civilians. Kelly thinks that the people who made these statements should find that it affects their futures in seriously negative ways. I agree completely. Ramaswamy and Owens say that they should be cut some slack because all of us have dumb ideas. Both are wrong. However, Owens did make an important point that deserves to be recognized, which is why I’m writing here.

The trigger for the back and forth was that Vivek Ramaswamy said that companies erred when they said that they would take into account the students’ views when the students came knocking at their doors looking for employment. Kelly rightly blew him out of the water, saying that views as toxic as theirs deserve immediate consequences:

To sum up: Vivek said don’t punish them because they’re stupid. It’s better to lead them with a carrot than a stick. Megyn said stupidity like that is actually evil and deserves to be punished. At this point, Candace Owens got into the act:

That catfight is not nice, but I felt I owed it to both women to include the whole conversation. I hate it when conservatives get into these ugly disputes, which harm conservativism by making it personal instead of digging into an interesting issue. Let’s get to the substance, which is interesting because of something that Owens threw into her part of the discussion.

As I said, Kelly is correct that people who state such appalling views deserve to face consequences. Getting turned away from a job because your prospective employer views you with disgust is an entirely reasonable consequence.

Owens’ view is that because people can change their minds (as she did), it’s a mistake to impose such harsh consequences on them because young people are stupid. Why blight a young life that way? Nope. We don’t learn without some suffering. If they get a pass, they will continue to be stupid and evil.

However, Owens and Ramaswamy are right about something, which is that many people can change their minds. (Notably, many people can’t, and that needs to be recognized, too.) Some of those students may not be irredeemably evil and hold out the possibility of openly and honestly expressed remorse, repentance, and redemption.

Like Owens, I, too, was once a leftist. Life taught me, both indirectly and directly, that my beliefs were stupid. Part of why I write is as an act of repentance and a way to redeem myself. When I was stupid, I deserved the consequences of my stupidity. Now that I’m less stupid, I do my best to make up for the past harms I caused. That’s how life works.

Giving students a pass without forcing them to earn their way back into civilized society is a terrible idea. It’s also a very leftist idea. No matter how much leftists sin, they never suffer. They never lose their place in college, they never lose a job, and they’re never subject to public opprobrium. Without that pushback, they will never change.

Image: The morally broken, factually ignorant, “blame the victim” students at Harvard. YouTube screen grab.

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