USpolitics

I really like that perspective. It really sums up one of my biggest issues with kirk and his ilk. Their sophistry masquerading as constructive debate was a significant piece of the complete deterioration of constructive discussion over the past decade.

I remember when the joke was that it was just that one uncle at Thanksgiving, and now it's the whole family. There is no constructive mutually tolerable position nor is there room for accepting to all live our lives the way we want and judge privately. A society stops working when nothing can be agreed upon, Kirk was a part of a wave of people dedicated to teaching people that if you play the game right you never have to lose anything in a compromise nor do you have to consider the potential validity of the opposing side.

Even worse, Ezra Klein (someone who I assumed should have known better) actually wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times that was published under the preposterous title Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way.

I used the word ‘preposterous’ advisedly. That’s because after I made the effort to look into Kirk and the way he ‘practiced’ politics, I came to the conclusion that he was a vicious, nasty person who did anything but ‘practice politics the right way’. Yet when Klein eulogizes him, he says the following:

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. **

From what my research tells me, Klein has dramatically and completely misunderstood Charlie Kirk, and doesn’t have a clue about what it means to “practice politics in exactly the right way” or be “one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion”.

Preach on.