Women give life, and men take it. This is the fundamental societal binary that can never be ignored. Some academics and intellectuals use this to draw together a very coherent picture of what feminists call the patriarchy. Male power, and therefore male dominance, is embedded in society as a whole. Much as I would love to deny this fact, or at least argue that it can be dismantled, I believe one clear truth has emerged from the so-called “gender wars”. Feminists are correct that there is a patriarchy, but they are wrong that it can be overthrown. It is not a cultural invention that can be willed away, it is innate, biological, and as immutable as our sex itself.
So where does that leave us? The answer is that I do not know. I have always stood with women and argued for equality of opportunity, but the debate is far from settled. Should young, childless men be placed in charge of infants in child care? Should small young women be placed on battlefields where they cannot possibly drag larger wounded men to safety? These are serious questions that demand honest reckoning, not the self-indulgent gibberish of postmodernism, nor the ideological snake oil of Critical Race Theory, Critical Social Justice or Gender Identity Theory. While we should have been debating real and urgent matters, we have instead wasted years and have been forced into an endless circus of lies, distortions and the intellectual bankruptcy of activists who mistake slogans for ideas.
On 10 September 2025, Charlie Kirk, a thirty one year old husband and father of two young children, gunned down mercilessly at a free speech event on a US college campus.
Whether his killers were motivated by his stance on transgenderism, his arguments on abortion, his criticisms of DEI or simply his refusal to bow to the orthodoxies of the age, the result is the same. A family man who stood on the principle of free speech across every contentious subject of our time has been silenced with a bullet to the jugular. He chose argument, persuasion and engagement. His opponents chose censorship, intimidation and, finally, violence. That is the moral line, and it could not be starker.
And let us be blunt about who is responsible. It is not only the man with the gun. It is the activists, senators, congressmen and women and MPs who peddle the myth of hate speech. It is the vice chancellors and principals who persecute dissenting academics. It is the journalists who write their smug columns, applauding censorship and jeering at those who refuse to bow to orthodoxy. It is the celebrities who trade in platitudes while lending cover to bullies, thugs and tyrants. Their fingerprints are on the trigger as surely as the killer’s.
Women give life, men take it. The patriarchy is real, and that does need to be addressed but now is not the time because without the freedom to speak so many stakeholders are being excluded from the most important debate society must have, honestly, frankly and in all likelihood quite acrimoniously. Until we can guarantee free speech for all and exclude the men so enfeebled that their only answer to words is the gun. We are just screaming into the void.
We either choose to loudly proclaim our freedom to speak uncomfortable truths and unpopular opinions or we slowly slide further into the putrid cesspit where speech itself is punishable by death.