Defund The Education Institutions Churning Out Left-Wing Assassins
I have often wondered what would happen to my eight younger siblings if both of my parents were assassinated. It is not a hypothetical most people consider, but it’s one my husband and I have discussed seriously.
My parents, Rachel and Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, are prominent supporters of President Trump. In today’s political climate, that alone can invite deadly consequences.
The threat felt visceral last week when an active shooter tried to murder the president and his Cabinet at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, where both my parents were present. When the news broke, my stomach dropped. I gathered my 6-year-old sister, Valentina, and we prayed a Hail Mary together. Even before details emerged, I suspected two things: The shooter would be young, and the shooter would be educated.
The alleged killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was 26. The man who attempted to assassinate President Trump at the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in 2024 was 20. The man accused of assassinating Charlie Kirk was 22. The latest alleged shooter is 31.
These men are all young, and all attended college. The latest would-be Trump assassin specifically holds a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, earned a master’s degree in computer science, and worked as a part-time tutor, where he was named “teacher of the month” in December 2024. It is a striking amount of education for a would-be assassin. A sickness is running through the institutions that shape young Americans, most of all the education system.
Universities were originally founded in the Middle Ages as explicitly Christian institutions devoted to discovering truth through reason and moral inquiry. But that tradition has been abandoned. Today, higher education is dominated by Marxist-inspired critical theory, developed by Frankfurt School intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s.
Where classical Marxism focused on class struggle, its critical theory modern variant expands the lens to race, the sexes, sexuality, and culture. This turns every aspect of society into a battlefield of oppressors versus the oppressed. Faux academic disciplines inspired by critical theory, such as “critical race theory,” “queer studies,” “fat studies,” and “postcolonial studies,” do not function as truth-seeking fields but instead as ideological training camps designed to produce activists rather than scholars.
Students immersed in this worldview learn that core institutions — government, markets, law, and family — are illegitimate. If society is inherently unjust, dismantling it becomes a moral imperative.
This is what inspired the 2020 summer of rage. Protests quickly targeted America’s founding symbols: Statues of George Washington were toppled, and Plymouth Rock was vandalized. The goal was to erase the nation’s origin story. But the violence doesn’t stop at monuments.
After I made a mild public statement opposing socialism while a student at the University of Chicago, my classmates did not debate my ideas. They attacked my character, appearance, and family. One said they would physically stop me from voting. Another declared I deserved execution. Such rhetoric harkens back to a long history.
Revolutionary movements, convinced of their righteousness, always justify mass violence. The 20th century’s toll is staggering: Lenin’s regime killed 5 million, Stalin’s nearly 20 million, Mao’s 45 million. My own conservative Catholic family suffered financial ruin and even murder during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s for being Christian and anti-communist.
Modern voices are echoing the bloody past. Today, 34-year-old left-wing streamer and activist Hasan Piker says America “deserved 9/11,” and he wants the streets to run red with “capitalist blood.” Meanwhile, corporate media outlets legitimize Piker. In a recent New York Times interview, Piker justified Brian Thompson’s assassination with no pushback from the Times reporter.
Red sirens should have been flashing when we saw how many young people celebrated Thompson’s assassin, sending love letters to his prison cell and selling saint-like merchandise with his face. Likewise, Gen Z leftists cheered the assassination of Charlie Kirk. And now, prominent Wisconsin Democrat Kirk Bangstad, a friend of leading Democrat gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong, has offered free beers to anyone who would assassinate President Trump.
It is fashionable to claim that political violence is a “both sides” problem. But that claim collapses under scrutiny. Conservatism grounded in Christianity explicitly rejects violence. Revolutionary leftism, by contrast, has always seen violence as a legitimate tool for transformation.
Reflecting on the French Revolution, philosopher Edmund Burke wrote: “In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows.” Put differently, when intellectuals teach that society is fundamentally unjust and must be torn down, the end result is always terror.
If we are serious about addressing the rising tide of political violence among young Americans, we must confront the institutions shaping their worldview. The state and federal government can start by cutting public funding to universities that house critical theory departments and curricula. Woke universities should lose the tax-exempt status on their multibillion-dollar endowments, and the federal student loan regime — which allows universities to inflate tuition while expanding ideological departments — should also be dismantled.
The modern university’s influence reaches far beyond campus. Its ideas permeate media, government, corporations, and popular culture. This is why when the classroom normalizes violence in the name of justice, assassinations and acts of terror follow. Today, that danger is no longer theoretical — for my family or the country.