Oxford Union Ousts President Over Insults to Charlie Kirk
The murder of an American activist tore apart Britain’s hallowed free speech club.
The Oxford Union Society and Turning Point USA are different in a lot of ways. One is British and the other is American. Turning Point is an incubator for Republican activists, and the Oxford Union is a nonpartisan institution founded by Oxford University students in 1823, making it older than the Republican Party itself. But both are focused on hosting political debates for college students, often with the most sensational framing possible, so it was only a matter of time before the streams crossed.
On Tuesday, the union announced that its members had voted to remove President-elect George Abaraonye, an undergraduate, following a media storm over his comments on the assassination of Turning Point founder Charlie Kirk. In an Instagram post, Abaraonye accused outgoing President Moosa Harraj, a graduate student, of running a "compromised" vote. Abaraonye implied that the remote voting system had been rigged, and promised to contest the results.
Approached in person, Abaraonye and Harraj both declined to comment.
Abaraonye, who had debated Kirk at the Oxford Union in May 2025, laughed at his debate opponent's death on his personal Instagram story and in a 1,000-member freshman group chat. Predictably, those comments were leaked to the press and became part of the trans-Atlantic controversy around Kirk's murder. Abaraonye offered an apology, albeit one that still blamed Kirk for spreading hatred, arguing that his joke was "no less insensitive than" Kirk's rhetoric.
The British branch of Turning Point threatened a "direct action campaign" against the Oxford Union if Abaraonye was not removed as president, and even U.S. Sen Ted Cruz (R–Texas) weighed in to demand Abaraonye's ouster. The union, which condemned Abaraonye's comments, complained in a statement that he was receiving "racial abuse" and "threats to his life." Abaraonye filed a no-confidence motion against himself—the British equivalent of impeachment proceedings, voted on by all Oxford Union members—as a sign of how confident he was in his popular support.
In other words, American political controversy was tearing apart a storied institution in Europe. All politics is local politics, the saying used to go. With social media, a different saying seems more apt: When America coughs, the world gets a cold. But the blowup at the Oxford Union was not only about the fatal shooting in Orem, Utah. It became a referendum on free speech and its consequences, mixed in with the characteristically complicated and cutthroat internal politics of Britain's most famous free speech society.
The vote had an unusually broad turnout. Many of the voters were wearing their matriculation gowns, indicating that they were freshmen who had just been inducted into Oxford University earlier that day. Alumni flew in from as far afield as Hong Kong to participate.
Oxford Union members who spoke to Reason on Saturday, the day of the vote, agree on the basic outline of the controversy. (All of them asked to be anonymous, citing union rules against speaking to the press.) Although Abaraonye made morally wrong comments, they said, it was a forgivable mistake that was blown out of proportion by outside actors. Where they disagreed was on how to respond to those outside actors.
While Abaraonye's supporters wanted to stand up against what they saw as a smear campaign, his opponents argued that the future of the union was more important than one man. A current officer in the union said that the union risked losing donors and high-profile speakers because of Abaraonye's "ego." Former President James Price had already publicly resigned as a trustee of the union; The Telegraph reports that donors have been threatening to withhold money and several speakers have withdrawn from planned Oxford Union events.
"Most of the people who care about this are either stupid or racist, but when the issue becomes about you personally, you should just resign," sighed one alumnus who came to vote.
An undergraduate member, on the other hand, said that the threats and pressure only strengthened his resolve to keep Abaraonye in office. Another cast his defense of Abaraonye in surprisingly nationalist terms, arguing that the Oxford Union should be an institution for training young British elites; he saw the outgoing leadership as unwilling to stand up for the union because they are largely graduate students "who are going to fly off and get a job elsewhere."
Abaraonye's supporters were particularly annoyed by the union's decision to allow remote voting, which the two undergraduates called a form of last-minute ballot stuffing. The decision was made at a tense standing committee meeting on Thursday night, with plenty of shouting and interruptions. Abaraonye cited that decision in his call to contest the results, and some of Abaraonye's supporters retaliated by filing a no-confidence motion against Harraj, the outgoing president.
The Oxford Union has survived recent pressure campaigns. Last year, Indian nationalists protested against a union debate on the independence of Kashmir, and a student filed a no-confidence motion, citing the union's tolerance of Kashmiri "terrorist" rhetoric. A few weeks later, the Oxford Union hosted an extremely heated debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which provoked a police investigation into alleged pro-Hamas comments and threats by trustees to shut down the union if a full video of the debate was posted online.
But the controversy around Abaraonye was unique, both in the scale of the backlash and its focus on one individual. Rather than demanding censorship of a topic, the outside actors were condemning a specific action by an officer of the union. And no one in the Oxford Union was really defending Abaraonye's comments, not even Abaraonye himself.
Small wonder the union decided it would rather lose Abaraonye than its financial and reputational future. The no-confidence vote was also a test of whether undergraduates or graduate students and alumni held more sway. But at the end of the day, this struggle was incited by the delayed spillover of an American tragedy. A cancellation campaign that has already largely left the headlines in America has taken on a life of its own in an entirely different country.
