this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2025
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I had him grouped in the meme-tier with crowder and tim pool, but after seeing all this I think he was actually a level or two above them. Probably above Shapiro but below, say, Tucker Carlson; notably Shapiro is on the decline and Kirk was apparently on the ascent.
But yeah I think most of the left was on the same page, just thinking of him as an unremarkable media bigot who looked slightly uncanny.
Ben never realized his ascent had a terminal arc in the right wing world because he’s too Jewish. Dude is level capped.
"Dawg it's a yarmulke, homie no cap" -- Shabibo in that one rap video
I think he's also too normal? Or like the wrong type of weirdo? He's a briefcase-at-school kid in a world of irony-poisioned 4-chan fascists. He no longer appeals to anyone under 40.
He’s a neocon, 2000 era Republiklanner
Frightening that passes as “more normal” these days
I bet in a few years he'll see the light - Jesus on his pancake or whatever - and convert to fundie Christianity .
Or just move to Israel.
If it had been Dave Rubin or some twitch streamer or that antisemitic Times Square Elmo they'd have probably reacted the same. The right-wing response to his death seems like it's more opportunistic than genuine, while the liberal response is the kind of shit they say about any generic republican who dies. It's hard to judge the staying power in the moment, especially if the media downplays the seemingly fascist shooter and limits the news cycles this makes.
He was a white house insider but I don't know what degree of influence he actually had there because he himself was just a generic meat puppet for his billionaire funders. As a media figure I more or less forgot he existed until last week when I saw a DSA post about his tour. As far as I know there wasn't even going to be a counter-protest, just an alternative event which would have drawn a larger crowd. The cultural relevancy of those is stuck in the 2010s and now we have terms like "debate pervert" to stereotype his brand of Guy. Even the memes about him were stuck in 2018 and limited to small face+diaper. I'd consider him more relevant than Dave Rubin or Stephen Crowder, but a C-tier influencer compared to Ben Shapiro/Tucker Carlson/Alex Jones/Joe Rogan/streamers. What little I saw of his media presence anymore felt like decade-old boomer slop.
Even between those A-tier influencers, none of them seem individually important enough for a leftist to target. Shapiro is on the decline, Tucker is deplatformed, Alex Jones is a donkey of the week for one of my favourite podcasts, and their streamers keep getting outed as paedophiles. Any other culture warrior name I can think of is just some dipshit who will be replaced tomorrow by another dipshit saying the same things they've been saying since the 1930s.
That explains why my fucking mom liked him and like two of my other friend's moms
TPUSA's grift has always been convincing boomers that he represents zoomers. On my fairly right-wing campus the only times I saw them were a tiny booth with like three
goobers dressed like 50 year-old libertarians. They sat there with buttons that said "socialism sucks" that nobody took, nobody bothered protesting them, and the booth had less traffic than any of the student club booths or the one that sells overpriced posters.
Lesbians for Kirk