- 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.
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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.