It’s been a year since Charlie Kirk died, and Ezra Klein’s sycophantic eulogy for the reactionary provocateur still lives in my head:
“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. 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. Slowly, then all at once, he did. College-age voters shifted sharply right in the 2024 election.” — Charlie Kirk Did Politics The Right Way
As soon as Klein published these words, those with a deeper understanding of Kirk’s life and purpose challenged him. The subsequent conversation between the New York Times opinionist and Ta-Nehisi Coates exposed Klein’s intellectual shallowness and, by extension, liberals’ reflexive instinct to praise illiberal conservatives in pursuit of unreciprocated bipartisan respect. The entire mainstream media followed along with overzealous tributes to Kirk and his memorial service, which CNN called a “shining path to MAGA’s future.”
The gushing praise for Kirk embodies the American intelligentsia’s sympathetic view of the conservative “free speech” push that dominated the political culture of the last decade. Embodied by conservative icons such as Ben Shapiro, Bari Weiss, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Charlie Kirk, the most reactionary elements of the Republican Party wrapped themselves in the banner of ‘Free Speech’ and whined that anybody who didn’t listen to them was canceling them. Always eager to prove They’re Above It All, the media commentators sided with the reactionaries, declaring, “We disagree with what conservatives say. But we respect their commitment to intellectual debate in the Marketplace of Ideas™️.” I cannot convey how annoying all this was. Every day the Times or Post would gush about the brave conservatives fighting with Facts & Logic on college campuses. Meanwhile, they’re doing whatever this is.
Klein’s eulogy of Kirk recalls the infamous 2017 New York Times profile of Ben Shapiro, which adored him as a “provocative Gladiator,” and “the cool kid’s philosopher.” That same year, Shapiro was hailed as a free speech warrior in the Times by who-else-but Bari Weiss. When Weiss quit the Times, claiming she was ‘canceled’ by her editor, which is a lot like saying you were ‘canceled’ by your lawyer because your lawyer told you to stop talking to the cops, the media yet again rushed to paint her as a victim. The Washington Post compared her resignation — which was entirely her decision — to McCarthyism. Milo Yiannopoulos, a leading conservative intellectual who coined genius phrases such as “Feminism is Cancer,” received endless praise for his commitment to ‘free speech.’ And by ‘free speech,’ he meant his ability to get paid to speak on college campuses that no one wanted him at.
In traditional liberal media fashion, their sanctimonious praise for the conservative ‘free speech movement’ was equal parts pompous, gullible, and wrong.
As the first and second Trump administrations have shown, conservatives hate free speech. Their commitment to free expression lasts as long as they can use it as a cudgel to force others to listen to their shitty ideas. As Frank Wilhoit said, “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” Free speech for me, but not for thee.
Yinnopolous, Weiss, Shapiro, and Kirk didn’t debate on college campuses because they saw them as bastions of intellectualism, where the sharpest and brightest forge their ideological swords in the crucible of debate. They went to colleges because hungover 20-year-olds were the only people they could outwit. Anytime someone with a fully formed frontal lobe challenged them, they crumbled. When Kirk was invited to debate graduate students at Cambridge, he was exposed. In the video below (starting at 31:33), Kirk argues abortion is immoral because ‘life starts at conception,’ and a zygote’s DNA is “created” at conception. But as the medical student — who is neither a doctor nor a professional debater — explains to him, DNA isn’t created. It’s fused. With his entire argument refuted, Kirk can’t say he was wrong, so he kept changing and arguing his position based on what the graduate student just taught him. Equally embarrassing, much of Kirk’s anti-choice argument rests on a supposed religious decree in the Declaration of Independence. But he’s in the United Kingdom, so saying abortion is wrong because George Washington said so (he didn’t) is nonsense.
This exchange highlights that Charlie Kirk was never interested in intellectual exchange. Which is why he sucked at debate. As he feels his argument crumble, he tries to trap the grad student with simple questions — “Do you believe murder is wrong?” “Should we kill dementia patients?” These deflections work well for Kirk when he’s talking to stoned college kids who will take the bait. But when anyone with actual knowledge of the topic ignores the theatrics and continues pressing him on his misunderstanding, he has no answer. So, Kirk looks to the moderator and asks for the time to expire, just like a beaten boxer begging to be saved by the bell.
Kirk’s struggles with knowledgeable opponents are common throughout the conservative movement. Whenever reactionary debate bros (a gender-neutral term) engage with informed opponents, they’re decimated. Ben Shapiro built a career on dunking on crying undergrads. But when he went to debate at Oxford, he was ripped to shreds with pretty basic questions. In the example below, Shapiro was asked why he opposes gay marriage. He predictably responded that governments should only support couples who can raise children. But he had no answer when asked if he planned to divorce his wife after their children were raised. (If you watch the rest of this video, most of the arguments go the same way.)
Shapiro is the most obvious example of the right’s fake commitment to intellectual pursuit. During this trip to Oxford, he witnessed an anti-genocide protest calling for a ceasefire in the weeks immediately after October 7th. This prompted him to write a book, Lions & Scavengers, which argues that modern society is a clash between two groups: those who seek to uphold The West and those who want to destroy The West. (All these guys are obsessed with Western Civilization, by which they mean White people.) Here’s how Shapiro described his idea for the book to, you guessed it, Ezra Klein, who invited the reactionary on for a conversation about “political de-escalation.”
Shapiro: “What really led off the book is what happens in the introduction. Right after Oct. 7, I was slated to debate at the University of Oxford, and I went into London. My security team told me it was actually too dangerous for me to be in London proper. I had to stay about an hour and a half outside of London, at a beautiful estate that is now turned into a hotel, for safety reasons.
It was that weekend that there was a gigantic protest — what I would characterize controversially as a pro-Hamas protest — in the middle of London. And the groups that were protesting were people who ranged from very far left on social issues, who would certainly not agree on social issues with people who were standing for Hamas, people who were fans of Hamas, people who were just opponents of capitalism.
And it occurred to me: Why are all these people marching together? What do they have in common?” — We Are Going to Have to Live Here With One Another
This lays bare Shapiro’s lack of curiosity. If I saw a group of unrelated political or cultural tendencies protesting for a single cause, my first thought would be to find out why. What is bringing these people together? What cause is so righteous, so in line with basic humanity, that groups traditionally opposing each other support it? But that is not what Ben Shapiro does. Rather, he sees people protesting his emotional support apartheid state, and immediately jumps to the insane conclusion that they all want to “destroy Western civilization.” This is anti-intellectualism. No attempt to learn, no attempt to understand where everyone else is coming from. Just a reactive response to something that you didn’t understand, which made you feel uncomfortable. There is no intellectualism on the American right. They’re not trying to solve political problems. Only dressing up their fundamentalist religion as secular debate points to trick people into believing them. To the extent it exists, the conservative intelligentsia is a bunch of guys who figured out that if they wore a jacket and didn’t say slurs, they could manipulate the media into listening to them. After all, Shapiro’s book is called Lions and Scavengers: The True Story of America (and Her Critics). But as he told Klein, the idea came to him while he was in Britain. Good job admitting you’re a fraud, dumbass.
The Debate Me Right was never interested in debate or intellectual exchange. Rather, it cynically used liberal ideas of what politics “should” be to cover its true aims. Contrary to what Ezra Klein said, Charlie Kirk didn’t believe in persuasion. He believed in belittling your opponent, increasing anti-intellectualism, and then channeling that reactionary energy into illiberal force. Such violence was what Kirk wanted. Days before January 6th, the Turning Point USA founder tweeted that he was sending eighty buses to “fight” for President Trump. Kirk was instrumental in a violent insurrection to overturn a democratic election. One man who rode a TPUSA bus was later indicted for beating a cop with a fire extinguisher. January 6th was the epitome of reactionary violence, a crucial element of American conservatism. Early in his career, Kirk created a “Professor Watchlist” that did more to chill campus speech than anything in recent memory. Anyone could list a “woke” professor (usually a Black person or woman), and immediately a gang of anti-social conservatives would launch a cyber stalking campaign to get them fired, threatened, or worse. But the intelligentsia turned a blind eye to the reality of the conservative movement in favor of a simplistic excuse that elevated their own importance while helping fascism reach the mainstream.
Broadly speaking, liberals misunderstand the resurgence of American fascism as the result of persuasion. As Klein wrote above, Kirk “broke” the Democrats’ hold on college-aged voters, which he attributes to Kirk’s sharp wit and lightning-fast retorts. Klein is right that 18- to 24-year-olds shifted to the right in 2024. But it’s more likely they refused to vote for Harris because of her Gaza policy than because some chud podcaster with a face too small for his face asked “wHaT iS A wOmAN??” over and over. College kids didn’t even like Charlie Kirk, or his ideas. A poll taken shortly after Kirk’s death found that only 30% of college students agreed with his views, while the overwhelming majority strongly disagreed with him. Believing Kirk and other rightist Debate Bros are unstoppable persuasive titans is a convenient excuse for pseudo-intellectual liberals, as it lets them off the hook for failing to stop Trumpism. There’s no shame in fighting hard against a powerful opponent and coming up short. But that’s not what happened over the last decade of politics. Rather, the liberal and conservative intelligentsia shat their pants, fell in their own filth, and let the most detestable politician in living American history beat them over and over. This was because they were intellectually unable to understand what they were dealing with. Ezra Klein thought Charlie Kirk was going to campuses to “change hearts and minds.” He wasn’t. He went to college campuses to dunk on college kids, upload it to YouTube, and get middle-aged White Republicans so angry that they’re willing to stage a coup in D.C. or call a professor they’ve never met and scream the N-word when they pick up. Liberals think they’re fighting conservatives with ideas. Conservatives don’t give a shit about ideas. They’re putting immigrants in concentration camps and calling anyone who disagrees with them a domestic terrorist. The left tried to warn them. But they didn’t listen.
If the second Trump term has shown us anything, it’s that the Republican Party is undeniably illiberal. It deports people for what they say, incarcerates teenagers for thought crimes, and punishes colleges that divest from Israel. Congress recently passed legislation stopping federal funding to any school that does an “academic boycott.” This single piece of legislation from the federal government is a greater 1st Amendment violation than anything done by so-called “woke” college kids. The entire media world lined up to cheer on Bari Weiss. Klein praised her “eye for talent,” while The Atlantic declared she “triumphed over her critics” by snagging the CBS News editor-in-chief role. Weiss perfectly encapsulates the right’s free speech charade. For years she claimed she was fighting for free ideas and multi-pluralistic democracy. Now that she is steering CBS News straight into the iceberg with openly racist attacks on Muslims, all can see that she was a liar and a fraud, whose only skill was manipulating dumb rich guys into giving her money. Unable to persuade normal college kids to support Israel, Weiss had to start her own university and self-select conservative students for her ideas to have purchase. For all the talk of a need for “intellectual diversity” at colleges, Weiss’s university is as intellectually undiverse as it gets. A recently published course syllabus is filled with neoliberal and technofascist propaganda, but not much else.
In more ways than one, the conservative pretense of free speech died with Charlie Kirk. Before his body was even cold, the right began a mass cancellation of anyone and everyone who didn’t praise Kirk as the next MLK. Unlike left-wing “cancel culture,” which was mostly Twitter hashtags, right-wing cancel culture was supported by every level of the Republican government, making it an actual First Amendment violation. Over 600 Americans were fired, censored, or professionally reprimanded by a conservative witch hunt fully supported by the Republican Party, all the way from local lawmakers up to the president. Vice President J.D. Vance specifically called for cancellations, saying “Call them out, and hell, call their employer.”
All of this came as the Republican trifecta had moved to crush dissent and launched a wave of domestic repression that recertified America’s place as one of the most authoritarian countries on earth. After Kirk died, conservatives no longer needed to wear the mask. Their ploy worked. Safely in power, pretenses were put aside, and they pivoted to the true conservative goal of conservatism: using state violence to punish speech that opposes their neo-segregationist project. Once conservatives stopped pretending, the media stopped talking about conservative free speech beliefs, despite spending the better part of a decade pushing it. Rather than admit they were duped, they simply moved on altogether.
I’m not glad Kirk is dead. I don’t think it’s okay to murder people because of what they say. But he did get exactly what he advocated for. Kirk said over and over that school shootings were the price we had to pay for the 2nd Amendment. His life ended by being shot at a school. The shooter was a White Mormon kid from a gun-loving Republican family, so the right has no one to blame but themselves. You advocated for unlimited access to firearms, and this was the cost. I’m critical of the liberals, but they tried to warn you!
While Ezra Klein and the media lionized Charlie Kirk as an intellectual titan, that’s not how he will be remembered. Over the last year, Kirk has been mocked, degraded, and memeified. Of course leftists are poking fun, but it’s the right’s fault Erika Kirk immediately tried to leverage her husband’s death into a media career, and every conservative podcaster began fighting over who could claim the mantle of Charlie Kirk’s best friend. A year after his death, leading conservative media figures who surrounded Kirk are still accusing each other of having a role in his death (untrue) or being closeted homosexuals (true). Twitter is very much looking forward to the ‘Kirkiversery,’ in which they will roast Kirk with the disrespect he deserves. Charlie Kirk’s life was not dedicated to free speech or open debate. He trolled, derided, insulted, and demeaned anyone who wasn’t a conservative White male. He was just another gutter racist, whose last words were cynically weaponizing racism to excuse gun violence; seconds later, he was killed by White-on-White gun violence. What a bitch.
Charlie Kirk dedicated his life to making American politics more violent, disrespectful, and hostile. He died violently, and will rightfully be mocked for being killed by the culture he helped create. In the end, Charlie Kirk got exactly what he asked for.
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I suspect that the reason Klein and others rushed to eulogize and lionize Kirk was not because the latter was "practicing politics the right way" or other such nonsense, but because they cynically and stupidly bought into the whole "the vibes have shifted right/go where the cool kids are" narrative that took hold among people who should have known better after November 2024.
My wife is a journalist; she now focuses on women's issues/health, but she spent much of her career on Entertainment/pop culture, editing and contributing to some big outlets. She told me more than once that most (not all, but most) journalists are a terminally online, insular bunch, vulnerable to groupthink, echo chambers, and trends, across the political and cultural spectrum. Now, this may not be an Earth shattering revelation, but the point I'm making is that a) its far worse than you think, and b) Hanlon's Razor strongly applies here. Klein's career depends 100000% on being "relevant" and "hip to what the vibes are." He also has ZERO idea of how most people actually perceive or engage with politics, which is why Coates was able to beclown him so during their debate.
TL;DNR version: The media didn't so much say, "oh well," as it just stupidly thought, "well, the cool intelligensia want 2k words on why Kirk dunking on naive 18-year olds is good for America, so we gotta give it to them 4 da clickz."
Couldn't agree more. He had a right to to go on college campuses and do what he did, but claiming that he was doing it to have good faith debate is fucking ridiculous. Not to mention he thought the Civil Rights Act should never have passed so thats pretty cool!