- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
cross-posted from: https://ibbit.at/post/51941
Thursday morning, Ezra Klein at the New York Times published a column titled “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way.” Klein’s general thesis is that Kirk was willing to talk to anyone, regardless of their beliefs, as evidenced by what he was doing while he was shot, which was debating people on college campuses. Klein is not alone in this take; the overwhelming sentiment from America’s largest media institutions in the immediate aftermath of his death has been to paint Kirk as a mainstream political commentator, someone whose politics liberals and leftists may not agree with but someone who was open to dialogue and who espoused the virtues of free speech.
“You can dislike much of what Kirk believed and the following statement is still true: Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him,” Klein wrote. “He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion. When the left thought its hold on the hearts and minds of college students was nearly absolute, Kirk showed up again and again to break it.”
“I envied what he built. A taste for disagreement is a virtue in a democracy. Liberalism could use more of his moxie and fearlessness,” Klein continued.
Kirk is being posthumously celebrated by much of the mainstream press as a noble sparring partner for center-left politicians and pundits. Meanwhile, the very real, very negative, and sometimes violent impacts of his rhetoric and his political projects are being glossed over or ignored entirely. In the New York Times, Kirk was an “energetic” voice who was “critical of gay and transgender rights,” but few of the national pundits have encouraged people to actually go read what Kirk tweeted or listen to what he said on his podcast to millions and millions of people. “Whatever you think of Kirk (I had many disagreements with him, and he with me), when he died he was doing exactly what we ask people to do on campus: Show up. Debate. Talk. Engage peacefully, even when emotions run high,” David French wrote in the Times. “In fact, that’s how he made his name, in debate after debate on campus after campus.”
This does not mean Kirk deserved to die or that political violence is ever justified. What happened to Kirk is horrifying, and we fear deeply for whatever will happen next. But it is undeniable that Kirk was not just a part of the extremely tense, very dangerous national dialogue, he was an accelerationist force whose work to dehumanize LGBTQ+ people and threaten the free speech of professors, teachers, and school board members around the country has directly put the livelihoods and physical safety of many people in danger. We do no one any favors by ignoring this, even in the immediate aftermath of an assassination like this.
Kirk claimed that his Turning Point USA sent “80+ buses full of patriots” to the January 6 insurrection. Turning Point USA has also run a “Professor Watchlist,”and a “School Board Watchlist” for nearly a decade.
From 404 Media via this RSS feed
Question for americans. Why the fuck is this even allowed on campus or encouraged by colleges? Like, his whole bit seemed to be to set up a kiosk on campuses and then use it to completely antagonise people he knows full well will almost all disagree with him. What value does this have? The dude made a career on trolling colleges. This shit never had any value, it contributed nothing beneficial to the lives of students, what the fuck is the point in allowing it?
This is due to the fact that right wing clubs are usually the only ones that actually get any funding. This means that they have the money to rent out spaces, hire catering, and do all the things that other clubs do but they are bringing in outside money. It also means that their members are usually getting scholarships, which again brings money into the school. As well, as legally, they cannot discriminate based on political views.
For example, the college that I was just going to is extremely progressive, with many of those progressives being borderline socialists (I usually did my best to hide my power level being in STEM). However, much to the dismay of the student and faculty admin (of which if you sit with them long enough and say the correct words, they will openly shit-talk, which is technically illegal, but I’m not saying anything) here are three different conservative campus groups and one libertarian group. These are the Young Christian’s Association, Turning Points USA (they are literally at every bumfuck nowhere campus), and the Young Republicans.
Now, several of the people who are in leadership are shared throughout the orgs. But their primary deal seems to be bringing random conservative radical preachers to campus, and anti-trans activists. Which is very funny, because the majority of the student government is trans. But they have to let them have a space for their speaker, and they usually book the biggest venue, for like turnout that is like a third of the space, which is funny compared to when Matt Mercer came through campus and people had to be turned away from trying to get in because it was going to violate the fire code.
I still don’t fucking understand how holding academia to the highest standard by rejecting a literal clownshow is politically biased. If they want to hold something that is suitably academically boring in a quiet room inside with a controlled environment where everything can be nice and academic then sure, let them, but the issue I’m taking is that the entire format is designed to actively ridicule and undermine academia. They’re taking this shit show onto campus and then they’re using everything they get from it to actively undermine academia across the country. This is reason enough to ban them on grounds of undermining the entire thing. That’s not political bias it’s preservation of what an academic environment is supposed to be.
This freak show isn’t beneficial to academia and absolutely nobody has to tolerate it. Why not just disallow this format completely, for anyone. It’s a joke. 100% spectacle.
I have pointed out to them that no other club does this kind of thing with speakers, but they would rather not risk the lawsuit as that is really what it is all about, trolling for lawsuits against schools as they are funded by a billionaire and these small campuses are not.
I have also opined that the way this was stopped at Berkeley was by Black Bloc protestors making it too expensive to insure the school due to rioting during the Milo speech (my how his star has fallen, it’s almost as if deplatforming works or something). Of which people agreed, but ultimately were too attached to their degrees to do it, which is understandable, most of them are too poor to go elsewhere.
Perhaps if insurance costs rise due to this incident we might see something similar lol.
Right i see so it’s lawsuit trolling? Must be a law activism route to countering it then? Get the precedent set and then it can fuck off forever.
Or insurance works too i guess but my main issue here is with the administrators of these colleges. They’re not improving academia by allowing this, they’re harming it. I honestly think I would feel the same if it were in the other direction too, it’s not an academic environment, it’s not what academia should be about.
Currently there is not, as if I remember correctly they actually won some of these lawsuits back in like 2015 when this shit started in earnest. You can’t counter sue them, and most conservative kids come out of private colleges, who don’t have to uphold free speech doctrine to get state and federal funding, so it’s not like you can do it back at them.
Oh I agree, but admin on these campuses are extremely lazy business managerial types. They do not redirect the boat for anything until it blows up directly in their faces. They would rather have a group that directly threatens the rights of their most active students than deal with having to make the argument and have a spine.
I don’t hold any esteem for academia, as you seem to. Academia is primarily about replicating the class structure, and that is pretty much the only thing it does well. And in that regard, it is teaching progressive students that the best thing to do against wack job conservatives is to just shut up and try to ignore them, which is exactly what they want you to learn. So in that regard they are wildly successful.
That said, I may or may not have started a group that goes around during busy hall periods
and covertly tears down all of their signage. Not all at once of course, but somehow at the end of the week none is left but in the art building where it is definitely going to paid attention to.
I can’t explain myself properly without going into details that would be doxable. Britain is split into a two track system, one where proles are educated and one where boug are educated, each gets an entirely different education and the system is designed to keep the two classes from mixing which helps keep the proles from ever seeing the other class. I didn’t go to prole school like I should’ve done though, I went to boug school and very much got a culture shock and an education in how different I was from them. My view of academia however is probably quite different in that I gained a lot of opportunity I wouldn’t have had without it.
Yeah, academia here is mostly an excuse to get drunk away from your parents and if you are a diligent student you will read about half of the books they give you, none of which will apply to your future job, which you got because your dad is friends with the companies HR manager or you worked on the floor there during the summer because your parents think having a job ‘builds character’.
That was not my experience btw, I got a liberal arts degree on scholarship, did not have the connections to get a job, decided against grad school, then fell into the trades until I put myself through a STEM degree, then used the connections I made through industry clubs to land a job. But that is the typical college experience in the U.S.
Also keep in mind boards of regents are full of local bourgeois and the governor’s idle relatives and whatnot. In most cases they would align ideologically with TP and don’t really care about “the academy” in the first place, they’re the people that have been gutting it for 50 years. They view it as a useful pool of financial assets and real estate with some annoying professors and students attached
Utah is a red state. Over 60% of Utah residents identify as Mormon (LDS). It was likely requested by the students that he goes to their school.
Utah Valley University (where Charlie was shot) is a public university. Public Universities are publicly owned and considered to be a public space. Public spaces are protected by the First Amendment. This is the same reason why protests happen on University campuses, as example anti-war protests.
Liberals actually do believe the “Marketplace of Ideas” bullshit. This is not just an American thing. I’ve seen students at Cambridge and Oxford say the same thing. Liberals believe that you have to listen to every idea and that naturally the “good” ideas will prevail.
The US has traveling college campus preachers. These are religious zealots who stand on campuses and hold up signs (usually with slurs) that say every student is going to hell. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_campus_preachers
Reactionaries in the US do not believe that Charlie Kirk is an extremist. They think he’s just a good guy. There is a Charlie Kirk inside every American right winger. He says the same shit that every chud believes, even if they don’t say it.
American right wingers think that being an asshole is a good personality trait and celebrate Kirk of that.
Charlie Kirk is backed by capitalism and the status quo.
Usually the minority segment of active conservatives are actively lobbying for that sort of thing, and college admins are loathe to look like they have a “liberal bias” so they are inordinately tolerant of pandering to rightists. They might also think it advertises their college and even some of the people who hate the speaker might want the event in order to argue with them.
Fuck this political bias shit. Their bias should be to academics and educational outcomes, if that has a liberal or conservative bias who gives a fuck, they’re an educational institution. This shit is clearly beneficial to nobody and makes a mockery of academia. Like… By design, the entire point is to harm academia.
I agree, but we’ve already seen how so many universities are terrified of having a target on their backs.
The whole “debate me” schtick is pretty tame. As other commenters have mentioned, universities are one of the last remaining public squares in the country and also easy sources of left-leaning young adults who don’t have a lot of rhetorical savvy. But there are groups who take things much further. When I was in undergrad a decade ago, a Christian group came to campus and drove around a bunch of panel trucks with pictures of aborted fetuses.