The barbarians are at the gates, and we created them. The kids who’ve terrorized speakers on college campuses and HR departments in Fortune 100 companies. The kids who scream and cry and throw temper tantrums on TikTok over trivial encounters with ideas they dislike. The kids who believe speech is violence AND silence is violence. The kids who took to the streets and burned our cities after the death of one man, yet now come out in explicit support of the barbaric murder of more than 1400 innocent civilians in Israel.

Why call them “kids”? Because they are OUR kids. And it’s OUR fault.

We’ve coddled and encouraged a generation of barbarians through both intentional activism, confusion, and neglect. We’ve allowed our education institutions from K-through-PhD to be captured by the enemies of civilization itself and transformed into barbarian incubators. Our media and politics have not only cheered this on, but profiteered from it at every turn.

And now, they are the barbarians inside our gates. And if we don’t do something about this right now, they will tear civilization itself to the ground. As a father of a high school senior, our family is looking at all of this in shock and horror. The stakes for my son’s future are high. And the stakes for our civilization are even higher.