I know almost nothing about the late Charlie Kirk. In case it needs to be said -- I of course abhor violence.
Anyway, one of the very few things that I do know or think I know about Kirk is that he debated undergraduate students and often showed them up as numbskulls with "minds full of mush". [That phrase comes from the 1970s movie PAPER CHASE, about first year law students -- but it seems to apply.]
Today I came across something written by Matt Taibbi soon after Kirk's murder. Taibbi has a leftward reputation -- he is a former contributing editor for Rolling Stone, and a few years back he penned a notorious essay attacking Goldman Sachs as a sort of avatar for everything wrong with capitalism. Nonetheless, in the passage below, as in a fair amount of Taibi's recent work, one hears echoes of points made by rightward folks. Perhaps, then, this is a point that deserves a broad hearing across partisan and ideological lines.
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Would Charlie Kirk have had as easy a time beating up on 19-year-olds learning helicopter piloting or chemical engineering? Maybe, but it stands out that the bulk of the people who did show up to argue with Kirk were raised in the intellectual nerf-habitats of humanities faculties, where weak arguments were routinely allowed to prevail and young people were taught to take it personally when adults didn't automatically salute nonsense shibboleths about race or gender....
The 'Is college a scam' debates are most revealing. You see teenagers and young twenty- somethings making industry arguments against themselves, in a way they would never do if the underlying subject was Big Oil, Banks or Big Pharma. Are too many kids pushed into crippling loans? Gosh, nobody pushed us, we're all of age. Do you need a degree to get the job you want? Absolutely, I'd never get satisfying work without this experience. Does a multi-trillion dollar industry that's failed its customer base and created a huge debt bubble and is massively subsidized by the taxpayer bother you? No, that's natural.
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Thank you Matt.
A fact about Kirk that has not received sufficient publicity is that he "believed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a destructive force in American politics, calling its passage a 'mistake.'" For those who don't know (perhaps including Kirk himself and no doubt most of his followers), that federal statute prohibits discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin in public accommodations and employment. Public accommodations means businesses open to the public, such as restaurants and hotels; if Kirk had had his way, we'd return to the days of lunch counter sit-ins. And Kirk is a hero of the right wing. (Let's not call people who would turn the clock back sixty years "conservative." Conservatives wish to conserve the status quo and not make any progress, but at least they would not turn the clock back.)
ReplyDeleteThe quotation in my first sentence is from https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/us/charlie-kirk-views-guns-gender-climate.html
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