George Abaraonye's Oxford Debate With Kirk and His Reaction to Kirk's Death

Showing 17 George Abaraonye videos from Charlie Kirk's video collection.

George Abaraonye debated Charlie Kirk at the Oxford Union in May, pushing back on Kirk's idea of a generation of lost boys shaped mainly by red-pill media and a masculinity crisis, and arguing instead that economic pressures, austerity, the collapse of single-income households, played at least as large a role in how young men see their prospects. Months later, after Kirk was shot, Abaraonye sent messages to a group chat celebrating the shooting, later posting similar comments publicly before deleting them. The backlash was immediate: threats against him and his family, calls for his removal as Oxford Union president-elect, and a no-confidence vote that removed him from the position by a wide margin. In the interviews that followed, Abaraonye said he hadn't grasped the shooting's severity when he first reacted, apologized for the comments, and also pushed back on parts of the criticism he considered racially motivated rather than about the substance of what he had written. He has since argued that a young person's worst public moment shouldn't permanently define him, while critics point to the same debate footage, Kirk defending the very demographic Abaraonye claimed to speak for, as what makes the reaction especially hard to separate from the substance of their earlier disagreement.