The Oxford Union once staged the greatest debates in the world. Churchill. Malcolm X. Reagan. Thatcher. The Union was where future leaders sharpened their claws, where ideas collided in front of the most ambitious students on earth.
Now? Its incoming president tells a 1,000-person university-wide group chat he only ran for office because he hates the place.
It began when The Oxford Standard leaked screenshots of George Abaraonye celebrating the assassination of Charlie Kirk. That story set off an international storm.
Today we can exclusively reveal more: a new batch of screenshots showing the president-elect’s contempt not just for those on the other side of the debate, but for the Union itself, for Britain, and for the role he campaigned to win.
The screenshot isn’t just reckless. It’s clarifying. The Union is no longer led by students who want to defend it or even respect it. It is run by people who openly hate it, who treat the presidency like a joke, who see the institution not as something to preserve but as something to burn down.
When your worldview is shaped by the conviction that certain institutions are inherently evil, preservation looks like betrayal. Change, in that frame, ceases to be persuasion and becomes demolition. George made that explicit in a speech where he said, quote, "To effectively create change in the world we desire, sometimes there is nothing required but violent retaliation. This is a view I wholeheartedly agree with. Some institutions are too broken, too regressive, too oppressive to be reformed. Like cancers of our society. They must and they should be taken down by any means necessary."
Those are not the words of a reformer. They are a playbook for wreckage. He frames the Union as a target, yes, but the logic does not stop there. Once contempt becomes policy, institutions everywhere become collateral: museums, courts, newspapers, charities, firms. What starts as glee at burning the Union becomes permission to pull the fire alarm on any institution that offends, turning dismantling into doctrine and nihilism into strategy.
Prestigious institutions used to be led by people desperate to defend what made them great.. Now they are led by people desperate to dismantle them.
In the same chat, Abaraonye heart-reacted to a post about the Queen’s death. As for labelling the Queen being complicit in genocide, war crimes, and famine? His response: “based.”
This isn't a debate. It isn’t even criticism. It’s just absurd. It is contempt. Contempt not just for Queen Elizabeth II, but for Britain itself, for continuity, for the traditions that built the country and Western civilization.
The Union was designed to protect civil discourse, persuasion, and free speech. Today its leader-elect mocks all of it and champions values that are antithetical to what made Britain and the West great.
The posture is always the same. To run the Union, you must first profess disgust for it. To sit at the table, you must mock the table. To rise up in the world is to perform disdain for the institutions and values you are supposed to protect.
The collapse is not just ideological. It is aesthetic. The Union was once a stage for sharp suits and sharp words, for young intellectuals who dressed as though they understood the seriousness of the institution. Now its president-elect shows up unkempt, dressed like he is headed to a late-night kebab run, not to the debating chamber that once hosted heads of state. The clothes match the contempt. Standards of appearance fall in the same way intellectual and debate standards fall: when nobody believes the institution deserves respect.
This is not just an Oxford story. It is the story of our age. Legacy institutions, whether universities, newspapers, or governments, survive not because of what they do now, but because of what they once were. They are zombie brands. They live off prestige accumulated by earlier generations. They coast on inertia. And they are being captured by people who openly despise them and want to destroy them.
Look around. Harvard’s leadership spends more time issuing statements on identity politics than defending free inquiry. The New York Times fired an editor for publishing an op-ed by a sitting senator. The last U.S presidency become a geriatric weekend-at-Bernie’s cosplay. The pattern is the same: the institution survives, but the spirit is gone.
The Oxford Union was never flawless. It was always a little self-important. But at least it believed in itself. Its leaders fought to defend the space because they believed debate mattered.
Now, the leaders don’t even bother with the performance. They run so they can bring it down and climb the CV ladder at the same time.
The Union today is not the Union that hosted Churchill or Malcolm X. It is an institution eaten from the inside by people who want the clout but not the responsibility. They are not guardians. They are looters.
That is how institutions die. Not with outsiders storming the gates, but with insiders squatting inside, selling off the furniture, posting memes, and laughing as the roof caves in. And it is not just the Union. It is the wider university, once priding itself on intellectual rigour, now dogged by whispers that merit is giving way to something else entirely.
“Prestigious institutions used to be run by people desperate to defend them. Today they’re run by people desperate to dismantle them.”
George himself said it plainly: some institutions are “cancers of our society” that “must and should be taken down by any means necessary.” That is the philosophy now sitting in the Union president’s chair.
And the Oxford Union, once the crown jewel of student debate, has become just another institution marked for demolition.