I am exhausted. My soul is a dried husk, battered by the relentless, gale-force winds of human stupidity that blow from every corner of this godforsaken continent. Just when I think the bar has been lowered to the center of the Earth, someone grabs a shovel. Today’s excavation comes to us from Middle Tennessee State University, a place I can only assume is a bastion of high thought and rigorous debate, provided you define those terms as “panicked capitulation” and “performative whining.”

Let’s look at the carcass of this latest culture war skirmish. Laura Sosh-Lightsy, a dean at MTSU, has been fired. Or, in the administrative parlance of cowards, she has been “removed from her position.” Her crime? She dared to utilize her thumbs to type words on the internet regarding Charlie Kirk, the poster child for turning grievance into a frantic, lucrative lifestyle brand.

Before you start bleeding from your bleeding hearts or revving up your outrage engines, let me stop you. Everyone involved in this story is awful. Everyone. There are no heroes here, only varying shades of incompetence and hypocrisy.

Let’s start with the victim, if we must call her that. Dean Sosh-Lightsy. Madame, what were you thinking? You work in academia, a sector currently viewed by half the country as a Marxist indoctrination camp, and you work in Tennessee, a state where the political climate is slightly to the right of Attila the Hun. Did you truly believe that your title offered you a shield? Did you think that posting snarky comments about a professional agitator—whose entire business model relies on finding people like you and making them famous—was a sound career move? It is a level of tactical naivety that borders on the pathological. The modern academic seems to believe that "speaking truth to power" equates to "posting cringe on social media." It does not. It equates to serving yourself up on a silver platter to the wolves who are starving for content.

And then, we have the wolves. The Right. The “Free Speech Absolutists.” The warriors against Cancel Culture. Oh, the irony is thick enough to choke a horse. For years, we have listened to the endless droning from the Charlie Kirk ecosystem about the sanctity of the First Amendment. They scream about the “marketplace of ideas.” They weep openly when a conservative student is looked at askance for wearing a MAGA hat. They have built an entire industrial complex on the premise that you should be allowed to say whatever you want without fear of professional reprisal.

Unless, of course, you say something mean about them. Then, suddenly, the marketplace of ideas closes for renovations. Then, the sanctity of speech evaporates, replaced by the ruthlessness of power politics. The moment Sosh-Lightsy opened her mouth, the very people who claim to despise cancel culture demanded she be cancelled. And they got what they wanted. They don't want free speech; they want speech supremacy. They want the freedom to offend without the burden of being offended. It is a philosophy of toddlers: "I can hit you, but if you hit me back, I’m telling Mom."

And who is Mom in this wretched analogy? The university administration. Middle Tennessee State University behaved exactly as I expect any modern institution to behave: with the spinal integrity of a wet noodle. Faced with pressure, they didn't stand on principle. They didn't defend the concept of faculty expression. They folded. They looked at the donor lists, they looked at the state legislature, and they looked at the angry mob on Twitter, and they decided that throwing a Dean into the volcano was the path of least resistance.

This is the reality of the American experiment in 2024. It is not a clash of ideals. It is a clash of grifts. On one side, we have the feckless liberalism of the academy, which mistakes moral superiority for actual power and is shocked—shocked!—when the real world punches back. On the other side, we have the weaponized hypocrisy of the new Right, which utilizes the very tactics they claim to abhor to silence dissent, all while selling supplements and merch to a base that doesn't care about the contradiction.

So, Laura Sosh-Lightsy is out. She is now a martyr for the Left, a trophy for the Right, and a cautionary tale for anyone with a brain. She will likely land on her feet, perhaps with a book deal or a spot on the lecture circuit about the dangers of fascism. Charlie Kirk will use this victory to fundraise, claiming he has slain another dragon of the woke mind virus. The university will issue bland statements about "community values" while hoping the checks keep clearing.

And I? I am left here, staring at the screen, drinking whiskey that is far too cheap for a man of my intellect, marveling at the ouroboros of idiocy. The snake is eating its own tail, and it tastes like chicken. We deserve this. We deserve all of it.