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.
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,”
In no way do I believe what happened to him was ok. He did not deserve that, but I’m also not ok with re-writing history just bc so many seem to want us to.
Kirk was never engaging or debating. He was using his influence to control the narrative by providing misleading information with no factual evidence and no intention of changing the narrative he was trying to control or even acknowledging any evidence that countered it.
It’s what abusive individuals and authoritarians always do.
It seems like Ezra Klein is attempting to do the same. Using his platform to control the narrative, regardless of the facts. It’s exactly how state controlled media sounds in Russia, and it’s all that will remain if we keep allowing it to happen.
It deserves to be called out. Just know when people get sick of listening to it, t’s not bc Ezra Klein was “cancelled by the intolerant left who eventually eat their own.” (Although, I have no doubt he’ll probably pivot to a pundit position on Fox News to provide a balanced image).
It’s bc people are simply looking to you to keep them informed, not to tell them how to think and feel regardless of facts. Inevitably, they will smell bullshit no matter how you try to dress it up.
Eventually people just get sick of being gaslit, and either they move on rather than continuing to trust someone they know can’t be trusted or they slip into the Fox News mindset that this is normal and their only option.
“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.
Ok, he was clearly a bought and paid for piece of shit who existed to spread disinformation and now so are you. You suck, Ezra.
I can’t wait for the news cycle about this to be as dead as Charlie himself.
Fuck Charlie Kirk. Now is the time for him to be forgotten. Downvote any reference to him wherever you see it. He’s no martyr and he’s no hero, conservative or otherwise. He had lots of bad hot takes, was a terrible debater, and has a legacy of hatred and bigotry. Was his murder good or justified, Absofuckinglutely not. Should he be memorialized and revered? Even bigger no. It’s our job to make the algorithm make him go away. Don’t engage in posts about him and be sure to downvote or not engage at all. Charlie Kirk needs to not even be a footnote in a history book about conservative politics.
The wikipedia entry about him in 20 years should be “Charlie Kirk’s political takes were so bad that he was murdered by one of his own.”
The way they are sane washing this dude on NPR is wild too hear! They literally said “CK, known for being a skilled debater…” I felt sick. Like let me debate high schoolers and then call me skilled!
He was a horrible debater, and lost his temper any time he got corrected. But nobody is going to trash talk him after his assassination for fear of the wrath of Trump and MAGA.
I’m lucky I’m a gigantic former boxer(not pro or anything) and can’t get fired cause I own the business. So I’ve been calling every right wing nut that comes across my Facebook feed a pedo, and reposting a compilation video of Charlie’s hottest takes in the comments of every one of their replies.
I will trash talk him. The big headed fucker was a MAGAt politician that made a career of riding the wave of hateful and stupid politics that has been allowed to grow. Glad he is dead and sad the shooter was a one-off MAGA crazy because I was hoping for another hero like Luigi that would scare the fuck out of MAGA and billionaires.
let me debate high schoolers and then call me skilled!
To be fair, I think a lot of gen Alpha right now would absolutely trounce most Gen-Z at interpersonal debate and discussion. Gen-Z got a shitty hand growing up in the most checked-out period of American history. At least a lot of Gen Alpha from what I’ve seen have learned right away they’re basically on their own, adapted fast to things like Covid, political upheaval and unstable economics, and know already even at an early age that they need to figure out how to do everything by themselves and don’t really have as much extreme social anxiety as their older peers.
I’m sure it varies from place to place, but I don’t think this debate model that people like Kirk and Shapiro pioneered, which is going to high-schools and debating kids, will hold up long-term.
Real talk, this might be a really small thing but I know the kids are going to be alright cause I do Uber and whenever I pick up a high schooler, they are the most polite riders and actually don’t slam by car’s for when exiting.
I don’t think it’s a small thing, I’ve noticed it myself a lot, more than any young generation before today’s young teens are extremely composed and thoughtful broadly, and it does give me hope for the future.
He was an example of how dangerous “debate club culture” can be.
It teaches people that all that matters is how well you can attack/defend positions, it erases the line between right and wrong. And they carry that view into the real world and politics.
Ted Cruz was/is a master debater, because to be really good at it, you have to have a slinky in place of a spine. You have to be able to argue both sides of any issue as effectively as the opposite.
They’re only say what the person in front of them wants to hear in the moment.
Kirk was never out to learn anything, he didn’t even want to change anyone’s minds.
He wanted to reinforce the existing beliefs of his followers.
He wasn’t even that, just seemed to be if you weren’t really paying attention. Hell, in his last words he got proven wrong on trans shooters, then pivoted to blaming gangs (aka black and brown people)
He told his followers exactly what they wanted to hear in response to every question, including the last two before he was shot.
It doesn’t matter if he was right or wrong factually, he gave his followers warm and fuzzy feelings.
Exactly, and if you’d watched his long standing stuff it was always very much him debating to a crowd using bad faith arguments and taking advantage of the fact that he had a skill that’s easy to not be aware of, is completely irrelevant to the stated goal (proving that one is correct) or implied goal (coming to mutual agreement), and that most people he debated lacked. Furthermore because he was the one recording any time he loses he can not publish it. He financially, professionally, and emotionally was never in a place conducive to productive debate and discussion. And I would argue he was in many ways antithetical to the concept of university.
Debate as a competition cannot be fair when it attempts to reflect healthy and positive debate because in that case the better side has an advantage unrelated to player skill. What Kirk was doing was a long campaign against consensus reality. He was particularly skilled at combining the Shapiro tactic (priming the audience by saying you’ve won by using facts and logic so that’s what they see) alongside a belligerent strategy (ie constant advancement regardless of merit) and politely phrased incendiary ideas to tilt his opponents and make them lose their cool and seem overly emotional.
He was a rhetorical stage magician
A narcissistic con artist spewing hate for profit?
So every “conservative” politician, journalist, influencer, etc, etc…
deleted by creator
I have a feeling this isn’t the only exchange where reading comprehension has left you questioning what you just read…
You may be better off not trying to read into what someone might mean. And focus on what they actually said.
For example:
Turning Point USA CEO and co-founder Charlie Kirk said of gun deaths on April 5, 2023, “I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/charlie-kirk-gun-deaths-quote/
If Charlie Kirk could answer, he’d say this is just something we have to accept and not dwell on…
You can still ask him if you want, he just can’t answer.
And according to his personally held opinions, no one should be concerned that he can’t answer.
Liberal media drives me nuts. Dude literally encouraged and excused violence. Died by the exact kind of violence he advocated. End of story.
Liberal media is owned by billionaires who are afraid of Trump. The truth dies in darkness
Add to this “… from the same person he helped radicalize.”
Thursday morning, Ezra Klein at the New York Times published a column titled “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way.”
Tell me you never listened to Charlie Kirk without telling me you never listened to Charlie Kirk.
Goddamn fascist apologists.
Did Ezra Klein really publish this? Is he stupid?
Yeah, it’s real. Here’s the link with the 404 refcode so they know where you came from.
Is he stupid? I don’t know. He makes a living and has a recognizable name, so he has something figured out. He is certainly a neoliberal stooge and a fascist apologist.
Fuck Ezra Klein
These are the BNMW/Blue MAGA Democrats apologizing for this.
What does BNMW mean?
Blue no matter who. Its a call to action/ solidarity to support any or all Democrats and is typically associated with “centrist” or “moderate” positions within the party. Specifically, it was the rallying point that was used as a cudgel to silence any criticism of Harris or her approach to campaigning in the 2024 campaign, that if you were to highlight the insufficiency of her campaign or make statements like “I don’t think Harris can win if they don’t xyz”, you would be accused of being “against Harris” or “pro Trump”, and this was specifically from the Blue MAGA/ BNMW contingent. Its now a part of lemmy-lore how moderators sided with this crowd, banning anyone critical of this view and silencing voices through out.
Classic examples of this would be jimsantanko@lemmy.ee and flyingsquid@lemmy.world
Its also, at least somewhat interesting as an aside, that after the bankrupt-ness of their ideology came upon full display after the failure of the Harris campaign to secure the election, many of the accounts expressing this view disappeared like farts in the wind (while for years they had been accusing the other side of being bots or shills). A good example of an account still active and expressing these views would be satansmaggotycumfart@piefed.world / satansmaggotycumfart@lemmy.world
Outside of lemmy, good examples of this view point can be found on podcasts like “Pod Save America”, or in clips like this one, where Jon Stewart explains the ideology most clearly:
And here is worked example, where Whoopi Goldberg says she would vote for Biden even if he was shitting his pants on stage (go to ~25 seconds in for the quote):
I also think that the kym article is pretty solid: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/blue-maga
Blue No Matter Who.
Although it should probably be “BNMWUTAAS” for “Blue No Matter Who Unless They Are A Socialist.”
“Blue no matter who”
They’re the ones who insist you have to vote for the DNC’s official candidate, no matter how unfit or reprehensible they might be.
He wasn’t practicing politics at all. Hate speech isn’t politics.
Right?
He wasn’t even a politician. He was a glorified podcaster.
All he was doing was being a little shit, stirring the flame.
Just a troll.
Taken from another perspective, of course most media outlets are going to say he was doing politics “the right way”, you know why? They’re in the fucking media business.
The idea of endless political debate about various settled issues and a general emphasis on controversy gets them more traffic to their shitty cable news networks, their terrible fucking substacks, their quippy little microblog, their shitty little YouTube channel, and their dumb ass little streaming service. It also gets more people to buy their books.
Charlie Kirk and those like him aid this entire media ecosystem by driving traffic to his affiliated media properties for his flock of the converted as well as driving traffic to liberal media properties that seek to debunk his every specious argument.
Almost nobody that is in the media business ever seems to ask the obvious questions: did what he do with his life improve the country at all? Did it improve policies? Did it improve governance? Did it do anything besides “increase engagement” and win elections?
The only good nazi is a dead one
He certainly did nazi that bullet coming.
Using the argument that he was talking to people and encouraging conversation is bullshit; he was peddling his agenda and that’s it. Was there ever an instance that anyone who he was debating brought up a point that made him change his beliefs in any way? If not, then he was just barking the opinions he was paid to propagate at people and not encouraging an open conversation with them. I’m sure there were plenty of people who proved him wrong over the years and that footage just never found its way to his propaganda network.
Guy was filth and is a better place without him.
I would argue that he was practicing politics the “right” way. That’s why our goddamn flags are half-mast. It is insane.
Of course he wasn’t practicing politics the right way. Everyone knows to debate successfully you need to keep some things to yourself.
