This past May, Kirk and Abaraonye met at the Oxford Union to debate the question of toxic masculinity. Kirk looked and sounded like the polished Oxford product, while Abaraonye appeared in sweatpants, a t-shirt, and what resembled slippers, sounding more like someone who had never gone to college—the reverse of what one might expect. Though both men were respectful, Kirk clearly won the exchange.
One needn’t even watch the 12-minute, 25-second discussion (starting at 1:06:36) to know this. No one who wins a fight bites the other man’s ear, and no one who triumphs in a debate celebrates the murder of his opponent. It seems impossible to express confidence in the head of a campus debating society who welcomed the execution of a human being for simply debating on campus. The Oxford Union members certainly regarded this as a disqualifier, with seventy percent voting for his removal.
This controversy may all seem very 2025. But Abaraonye’s intolerant ilk have dominated campuses—including Oxford—for the past century or so.
I recently published a book about one such Oxonian, titled *The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer*. Like Abaraonye, Frank Meyer joined the Oxford Union, majored in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics (PPE), and depicted himself as a free-speech martyr—even as he showed contempt for the free expression of others.
Meyer, dubbed “the founder” of Great Britain’s student Communist movement in declassified MI5 files, entered Oxford with zero Communists within the student body. He left boasting 300 members of the explicitly Communist October Club that he had started.
When George Lansbury, leader of the Labour Party (and Angela Lansbury’s grandfather), spoke at Oxford in 1932, his sponsors had to eject a shouting Meyer from the lecture hall. That year, the October Club invited H. G. Wells to campus months after his “liberal fascism” speech, which partly criticized Communism. Meyer shouted Wells down, too.
In 1933, conservatives blamed Meyer’s groups for the Oxford Union’s passage of the infamous King and Country Pledge, in which the body vowed not to fight for England. In truth, a socialist had introduced the measure. But Meyer’s group had disrupted an Armistice Day gathering of veterans, and MI5 recognized him as the leader of Communist student antiwar efforts.
As a graduate student at the London School of Economics, Meyer conspired with Krishna Menon—later one of the most powerful men in India—to rig a vote that elected him president of the student government. After the authorities finally deported Meyer (by then, like Abaraonye, a cause célèbre stripped of his presidency) in June 1934, he revealed the emptiness of his activism by going to work directly for future East German dictator Walter Ulbricht, a Communist who had already ordered murders and later ordered the construction of the Berlin Wall, on so-called “peace” efforts in Paris.
The obvious parallels between campus extremists in Britain in the 2020s and those of the 1930s are striking: both claimed to support peace while cheering violence, defended their own free-speech rights while working to strip them from others, and refused to recognize elections that did not go their way.
But a deeper lesson can be drawn—and Charlie Kirk may have understood this better than anyone—that points to the human capacity for change.
Frank Meyer acted in an even more obnoxious manner during the 1930s at Oxford than George Abaraonye does now. Yet he eventually asked the bravest question of all: *What if I’m wrong?* By 1949, he was serving as a star witness in, to that point, the longest and most expensive trial in U.S. history, which sent eleven former comrades to prison for Smith Act violations.
He helped found the American Conservative Union, the Conservative Party of New York, and the Philadelphia Society. His book, *In Defense of Freedom*, became a canonical text for the postwar right. Joan Didion credited him, when he was National Review’s literary editor, as the first to take a chance on her freelance work.
Kirk debated Abaraonye and thousands of other students who not only disagreed with him but despised him. He did so because he believed in the power of persuasion. Epiphanies happen. Second thoughts birth second acts.
Kirk’s Christianity dictated that he treat others as he would wish to be treated. The political animal within him understood that behaving humanely toward ideological adversaries makes it easier for them to embrace your position.
One senses that Kirk’s “happy warrior” ethos stemmed from a rational hope in the future, based on occasionally witnessing the benighted become more enlightened after something as seemingly minor as a polite discussion.
If lifetime Oxford Union member Frank Meyer could change after shouting down campus speakers, then the group’s 20-year-old former president-elect can, too.
A good first step in that process would be for Abaraonye to abide by the results of the no-confidence vote that he himself had called.
http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2025/10/29/daniel-j-flynn-what-oxford-unions-ousted-president-elect-could-learn-from-frank-meyer-george-abaraonye-was-removed-for-celebrating-charlie-kirks-death-he-might-yet-come-to-questio/
