Time has dragged us into a public conversation that feels darker, noisier, and stripped of moral clarity.

Rage now travels faster than reflection, and bad ideas spread more easily than good ones. Violent rhetoric within parts of the so-called social justice movement is no longer confined to words.

Luigi Mangione, a disaffected 26-year-old with a grudge against the health care system, is accused of murdering the CEO of UnitedHealthcare in New York. Elias Rodriguez, a 30-year-old activist from Chicago, allegedly killed two Israeli embassy staffers while shouting ‘Free Palestine’ in Washington and awaits trial. Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old from Pennsylvania, attempted to assassinate Donald Trump at a rally, wounding three others and killing one bystander. And now the killing of Charlie Kirk while addressing students at a university in Utah, in front of his wife and two young children, is a gruesome reminder that the space for public debate has turned toxic, violent and deadly.

The ability to disagree strongly but with respect is dwindling. In my parents’ generation, which was shaped by the second world war and the communist revolutions of the 1950s and 1960s, debate was framed in terms of clear moral choices between good and evil.

Good ideas depend on debate. They need to be tested, refined, and argued through. It is no surprise that cultural relativism has replaced principled multiculturalism, that populist slogans pass for national identity, or that antisemitism resurfaces under fashionable new names like ‘Free Palestine’. These are bad ideas. And they flourish when people stop believing that disagreement has value.

Charlie Kirk’s murder should force us to ask what comes next. If we cannot argue with one another in words, we will begin to do so with fists and guns of which he warned of himself:

‘…find our disagreements respectfully, because when people stop talking, that’s when violence happens…’

His death shows how we are already in that reality.

Today all I can think is that a decent man was killed in front of his family and young children, and in the face of such violence the rejection of the suppression of free speech is even more important.

In the well-known words of Je suis Charlie, first declared after the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attacks symbolising unity in the face of violence and defence of free speech – today we are all Charlie.