The leftist who was elected president of the Oxford Union in June was among the radicals who rushed to celebrate Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Like others before him, George Abaraonye has learned the hard way that there are consequences for such depravity.

How it started

Abaraonye wrote in a now-deleted Instagram post, the authenticity of which he confirmed to the Oxford student newspaper Cherwell, “Charlie Kirk got shot loool.”

‘Where is the belief in free speech, the tolerance for opinions, the empathy?’

While Abaraonye treated Kirk’s murder as a laugh-worthy matter, Kirk treated Abaraonye courteously when they debated just months earlier at the Oxford Union.

Abaraonye, a philosophy and politics student who has served also as a “racial and ethnic minorities rep” for the university’s junior common room, later suggested to Cherwell that he had made the remark in a “moment of shock”; however, he reportedly made similarly depraved remarks in a WhatsApp group chat with other students.

Abaraonye wrote, for instance, “Charlie Kirk got shot, let’s f****** go,” reported the Telegraph.

The Oxford Union president-elect’s apparent delight at seeing a political assassination on a university campus prompted outrage on both sides of the Atlantic.

RELATED: ‘No longer welcome’: State Dept. revokes visas of foreigners who celebrated Charlie Kirk’s death

JUSTIN TALLIS/AFP via Getty Images

Speakers who were scheduled to join the Oxford Union for debate began canceling, including Liora Rez, executive director of the U.S.-based watchdog group Stop Antisemitism, and Josh Wolfe, co-founder of Lux Capital.

Stop Antisemitism noted to the Oxford Union that “employees will not be engaging with your debate society due to safety concerns and your President elect’s pro violent stance.”

Wolfe noted that he would not attend “until cultural leadership from the top celebrates peace + coexistence + civil discourse + denounces violence.”

Among those who wondered aloud about what had happened to the Oxford Union was Claire Coutinho, a Conservative member of Parliament, who stated, “The Oxford Union is meant to be one of the best student debating chambers in the world. Where is the belief in free speech, the tolerance for opinions, the empathy?”

The Oxford Union finally piped up with a condemnation, expressing sympathy for Kirk’s family and stressing that Abaraonye’s views “do not represent the Oxford Union’s current leadership or committee’s view.”

Abaraonye decided ultimately to paint himself as the victim, suggesting in a statement to Cherwell published September 11 that his heinous remarks were “shaped by the context of Mr. Kirk’s own rhetoric” and that he is now the target of “racist comments and a myriad of threats.”

How it’s going

Several weeks after Valerie Amos, the radical Labour Party politician who serves as master of University College, Oxford, defended Abaraonye and announced that no disciplinary action will be taken against him, the Oxford Union scheduled a vote of no confidence in the president-elect.

The in-person poll took place on Saturday, and the results were published on Monday.

Of the 1,746 ballots ultimately cast, 1,228 members voted to oust Abaraonye; 501 members voted to keep the radical; and 17 members spoiled their ballots. Having passed the required two-thirds threshold of 1,164, the majority spared the Oxford Union from having the radical as their leader.

Abaraonye — who previously suggested that a vote against him was a victory for hate — cried foul after his visitation by consequence, releasing a statement characterizing the vote as “compromised” and the result as invalid.

The statement says the radical “is proud and thankful to have the support of well in excess of a majority of students at Oxford, who voted to have a safe election and resist attempts to subvert democracy.”

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A man stole a car from a gas station in Cocoa, Florida, last Tuesday with a 1-year-old child in the back seat — and then seconds later returned the vehicle and apologized to the mother, police said.

William Mullis, 53, is seen on surveillance video outside a Sunoco station off U.S. Highway 1 walking toward the victim’s car, WESH-TV reported, citing an arrest affidavit.

‘In this case, she’s very lucky that this guy saw there was a child in the back seat, got a case of remorse, and decided to drive back and give her her car back with her child in it.’

Mullis drove toward the gas station exit, made a right turn on Highway 1 — but seconds later backed up, re-entered the gas station area, and parked in a space in front of the gas station store, WESH said.

The mother of the 1-year-old child ran out of the gas station store and confronted Mullis, WESH said, adding that the mother told investigators Mullis said he wouldn’t have stolen the car had he known a baby was inside.

Mullis then apologized to her and left the area on foot, the station said.

“I’m sure this is a parent’s worst nightmare,” Brevard County Sheriff’s Office Public Information Officer Tod Goodyear told WESH. “In this case, she’s very lucky that this guy saw there was a child in the back seat, got a case of remorse, and decided to drive back and give her her car back with her child in it.”

More from WESH:

Under Florida law, it is illegal for a parent or anyone responsible for a child younger than 6 unattended in a vehicle for more than 15 minutes. The vehicle can’t be running, and the child may not be left alone if their health is in danger or they are in distress.

Goodyear said it appears the child was inside the car for only a few minutes. The mother is not facing any charges at this time.

“I have three kids. I have four grandkids, and it’s a pain to take the kids out of the car when you’re going in for just a short period of time,” Goodyear added to WESH. “But this kind of reinforces you never know what’s gonna happen. You never know who’s watching you.”

Mullis was arrested and booked into the Brevard County Jail for grand theft of a motor vehicle and kidnapping/confinement of a child under 13 years old, WOFL-TV reported, citing jail records and the arrest affidavit.

Jail records indicated Mullis was still behind bars Tuesday morning. WESH said he’s being held without bond, and his next court date is in early November.

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The story that modernity tells itself is one of technological progress. We have told this story for so long, with such unwavering conviction, that we have forgotten it has an author. When the Nobel committee awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in economics to Joel Mokyr, they were not merely recognizing a historian. They were footnoting the author of our prevailing narrative, a 17th-century English statesman who never invented a single device, but who successfully marketed ideas so potent that they would remake the world in their image. The story of our prosperity, Mokyr insists, begins with Francis Bacon.

It begins, more precisely, with a frontispiece. The engraving on Bacon’s 1620 “Novum Organum” depicts a ship sailing past the Pillars of Hercules, venturing out from the known world into an uncharted ocean. The motto beneath, “Many will travel and knowledge will be increased,” was not only a prediction but an exhortation. Before Bacon, knowledge was largely a matter of contemplation and study of classical authorities. He saw these as dead ends. Knowledge, he declared, ought to bear fruit in production. Its purpose was not merely to understand the world but to gain “dominion over creation” for the “relief of man’s estate.” Ipsa scientia potestas est. Knowledge itself is power.

This created the feedback loop that defines modernity: Scientific theory leads to new technology, and new technical problems spur further scientific inquiry.

This was the core of what Mokyr calls the “Baconian program”: a philosophical revolution that reframed humanity’s relationship with nature. Nature was no longer a given order to be accepted, but a set of secrets to be extracted, a force to be subdued. Bacon spoke of putting nature “on the rack” to force her to confess her laws. The goal was utility. The method was to marry the rational and the empirical, to unite the philosopher in his study with the craftsman in his workshop. In “The New Atlantis,” he imagined a research institute called “Salomon’s House,” dedicated to inventing things. He was, in Mokyr’s description, a “cultural entrepreneur,” and the product he was selling was a particular vision of the future.

This product sold remarkably well. From the mid-17th through the 18th century, the Baconian program became the organizing principle of the European intellectual elite. The Royal Society of London, founded in 1660, adopted Bacon as its patron. Its members were not to take anyone’s word for the truth; they were to experiment and measure instead. Across the continent, a network of thinkers in the “Republic of Letters” spread the gospel of useful knowledge through correspondence and journals. The monumental French “Encyclopédie” was a direct descendant, an audacious attempt to catalog and disseminate all practical human knowledge, from mining techniques to political theory. The very idea that sharing knowledge leads to progress became an article of faith. This was the “Industrial Enlightenment,” a culture that not only hoped for improvement but actively engineered it.

RELATED: God made man in His image — will ‘faith tech’ flip the script?

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The Industrial Revolution, in Mokyr’s telling, was not an accident of capital or coal. It was an intellectual achievement, the consequence of this cultural rewiring. James Watt did not improve the steam engine in a vacuum. He was a product of a new culture, a skilled mechanic familiar with the latest scientific theories on heat and pressure. His separate condenser was not a feat of solitary genius, but a manifestation of Bacon’s call to unite “know-why” with “know-how.” This created the feedback loop that defines modernity: Scientific theory leads to new technology, and new technical problems spur further scientific inquiry. The economic growth that followed was not just an increase; it was a phase change. It became sustained and exponential because of the cultural engine continuously driving it.

America inherited this engine and supercharged it. Benjamin Franklin was the archetypal home-grown Baconian, an inventor and scientist celebrated for his practical ingenuity. The nation’s founding ethos was steeped in the promise of both geographical and scientific frontiers. The 20th century saw the program institutionalized on a massive scale. Vannevar Bush, persuading the government to fund basic research after World War II, called science “the endless frontier,” an echo of Bacon’s ship sailing into the unknown. The Manhattan Project, the moon landing, the invention of the microchip — these were all expensive, elaborate vindications of a 400-year-old premise. The smartphone in your pocket is a Salomon’s House in miniature, a device built on centuries of accumulated knowledge, from quantum mechanics to materials science, all marshaled for the purpose of utility.

And yet one is left to wonder about the price of this story. The Baconian program gave us the power to relieve our estate, but it did so by teaching us to view nature as a resource to be exploited, a standing reserve for our own declared needs. The instrumentalism that gave us vaccines and the internet also gave us a world where we have become alienated from the very ground on which we stand. Bacon’s faith in progress was infectious, but it sidelined other ways of being, other stories that valued contentment over control, harmony over dominion. Mokyr’s great contribution is to show us that the modern economy is not a force of nature, but the result of a choice made long ago. He reminds us that the contemporary world we inhabit was first imagined. We live inside a 17th-century dream.

​Tech, Culture