Tag Archives: Charlie Kirk

An Absolutely On-Target Essay

I frequently disagree with the conservative New York Times opinion writer Bret Stephens, but a while back, he honed in on an under-appreciated aspect of America’s current dysfunctions--our lack of authentic argumentation.

Before you decide that both Stephens and I are looney–after all, sometimes it seems as if all we Americans do is fight one another–let me emphasize that this is another of my frequent diatribes about the importance of using terminology accurately. Because whatever we want to label the interminable angry and hostile encounters between MAGA ideologues and the multiple factions of citizens appalled by and opposed to them, I don’t think you can properly call them arguments.

Stephens attributes his own appreciation of proper argumentation to his time at the University of Chicago, an institution that requires its undergraduates to read the books that formed the Western tradition, to familiarize themselves with a philosophy and literature that was notable for argumentation meant to persuade, not put down.

Where did the anti-Federalists differ from the Federalists, or Locke from Hobbes, or Rousseau from them both? The curriculum made us appreciate that the best way to contend with an argument was to engage with it rather than denounce it, and that the prerequisite to engagement was close and sympathetic reading. Reading Marx didn’t turn me into a Marxist. But it did give me an appreciation of the power of his prose.

I don’t think Stephens is wrong or exaggerating when he focuses on the importance of genuine argumentation to democracy.

What is the soul of the Western tradition? Argument. Socrates goes around Athens investigating the claims of the supposedly wise and finds that the people who claim to know things don’t. The Lord threatens to destroy Sodom for its alleged wickedness, but Abraham reproaches and bargains with Him — that for the sake of 10 righteous people He must not destroy the city.

The virtue of Chicago’s curriculum is that it introduces students to a “coherent philosophical tradition based in reasoned argument and critical engagement that explained not only how we had arrived at our governing principles but also gave us the tools to debate, preserve or change them.” (In other words, students who were required to immerse themselves in these works received an actual education, rather than a job training credential; a distinction entirely lost on Indiana’s pathetic legislature. But I digress…)

It’s hard to argue with Stephens’ observation that the Internet and the digital transformation of the way we receive information has facilitated our ability to inhabit carefully curated bubbles of ideology and “facts” confirming our biases. But he argues that the deleterious effects might have been mitigated “if we hadn’t first given up on the idea of a culture of argument rooted in a common set of ideas.”

Which brings me to Charlie Kirk.

Kirk, to my way of thinking, was not a real conservative, at least in the American sense. The point of our conservatism is to conserve a liberal political order — open, tolerant, limited and law-abiding. It’s not about creating a God-drenched regime centered on a cult of personality leader waging zero-sum political battles against other Americans viewed as immoral enemies…

It’s too bad that Kirk, raised in a Chicago suburb, didn’t attend the University of Chicago. It wouldn’t have hurt getting thrashed in a political debate by smarter peers. Or learning to appreciate the power and moral weight of views he didn’t share. Or recognizing that the true Western tradition lies more in its skepticism than in its certitude.

But the larger tragedy by far is that it’s America itself that’s losing sight of all that. In the vacuum that follows, the gunshots ring out.

That last sentence sums up the central point of the essay–at least as I read it. A citizenry that has lost the ability to engage in genuine arguments–and the operative word there is “engage”–expresses its disputes and disagreements with insults and violence.

The utter inability to engage in actual debate may be the most prominent characteristic of the incompetent clowns who dominate the Trump administration, and it may explain why the administration eschews civility and relies on invective and militarized violence rather than efforts at persuasion.

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Charlie Kirk And That War On Women

In the wake of the Charlie Kirk slaying, Micah Beckwith–Indiana’s Christian Nationalist Lieutenant Governor– reportedly said “From the history of mankind, there’s always been truth-speakers who have been speaking God’s truth and the enemy comes at them – the devil and his lies. They’ll try to silence those people. Charlie was one of those people. He was speaking truth and the enemy, the devil and his minions, try to silence him. I think what’s happening is actually the exact opposite effect. I think what you’re going to see is that there are going to be many more like him that are now going to rise up and start speaking where he left off. There’s a saying in the church throughout Christendom, ‘The blood of the martyr is the seed of the church.”

I was heartened by a recent poll (paywall) that pegged Beckwith’s support in Indiana at a robust 9%. Still, I think it’s worthwhile to examine some of the “truths” that Beckwith thinks Kirk was speaking.

In a recent Substack, Paul Krugman looked at Kirk’s approach to women–an approach that is shared by Christian Nationalists, much of MAGA, and other Rightwing radicals.

Kirk was a counterrevolutionary, a revanchist, who deftly exploited a vision of a lost American gender ideal and the accompanying feelings of dislocation and humiliation on the part of men. Specifically, he wanted to reverse what Claudia Goldin (winner of the Nobel in Economics in 2023) has called the “quiet revolution” in women’s role in American society that occurred between the late 1970s and early 1990s.

Krugman points out that Goldin’s “quiet revolution” didn’t refer to the increasing numbers of women in the paid labor force, a trend that had begun in the 1940s, and had mostly culminated by the late 1970s. Rather, it referred to a radical change in the nature of the kinds of jobs that American women held.

While many women held paid jobs by the early 1970s, young women still tended to see work outside the home as occasional and provisional, as a way to earn modest amounts of money rather than as a fundamental part of their identity. The revolution, according to Goldin, happened when young women began to think about jobs in the same way young men always had — that it wasn’t simply “work” but a career.

As a result, women lived their lives differently. And as Krugman notes, that change has had large ramifications for men. 

The changes in women’s status were results of access to contraception and the passage of anti-discrimination laws, and what Krugman describes as a “multiplier effect”— the more that women delayed marriage and childbirth, the more they trained for careers, the easier it became for others to do the same. And as he also pointed out, “rising divorce rates led many women to doubt whether marriage was a safe haven that obviated the need for an independent career.”

Charlie Kirk argued strenuously that this was all a mistake and should be reversed. Krugman quotes him: “Having children is more important than having a good career.” 

Kirk was calling on America to stop being the society it is and go back to being the kind of society it hasn’t been for generations. Or, rather, he wanted us to enact his fantasy about what our society once was like. If you imagine that America before the quiet revolution was a nation in which all marriages were happy and all stay-at-home wives were contented, you should read Betty Friedan — or the novels of John Updike.

Krugman and others have pointed out that Kirk never bothered to offer serious policy proposals. But his hostility to women’s equality clearly resonated with many young white men — “men who resent their status in modern America and believe that their lives would be better if we returned to an older social order.”

Krugman concluded by recognizing that, in today’s America, we have “a society that appears to be problematic for many men.” There is a reason Kirk’s revanchism grew his support among them.

Appealing to resentments is the whole strategy of MAGA, Trumpworld and Christian Nationalism–not by suggesting ways to ameliorate unsatisfactory situations, not by advancing policy proposals that might mitigate such situations, but by the far simpler tactic of finding some “other” to blame. 

It’s a strategy that evidently works with a significant number of Americans, and it explains the rise of “religious” zealots like Micah Beckwith and clever grifters like Charlie Kirk–opportunists who wage war on women, immigrants, gay people and people of color…

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Political Violence

As I write this, the initial accusations about the murder of Charlie Kirk have been confirmed–in an ironic way. The immediate–and not unreasonable– reaction was the assumption he’d been targeted for his beliefs. And evidently, he was–but not by  “evil” Lefists. The alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, is a young white man from a Republican, gun enthusiast family, who appears to have embraced the even-farther “groyper” Right that believed Kirk was insufficiently radical.

Obviously, as repulsive as some of Kirk’s beliefs were, they are no excuse for violence. Freedom of speech, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes reminded us, is not meant to protect only those who agree with us, it also extends to those expressing the “thought  we hate.”

Following the shooting, denunciations of political violence came from across the political spectrum. And predictably, MAGA folks expressed outrage that was entirely missing when Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro was targeted, when Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul was nearly killed, and when two Minnesota Democrats were assassinated. 

In the wake of Kirk’s murder, pundits and commentators have rushed to offer their perspectives. One that I found particularly insightful was an article by Jonathan V. Last in The Bulwark. As he began,

Charlie Kirk’s murder was not just a murder. It was an assassination. That’s the crucial point.

We often forget the philosophical underpinnings of criminal law. Rightly understood, we view crimes as being committed not against individuals, but against society itself. Thus, when someone is murdered, the offense is not against the victim and his family, but against everyone. All of us. It is an offense against nature, heaven, and man.

Assassination goes a step further. In addition to all of the above, assassination is, like terrorism, an attack on our body politic. An attack on how we choose to live together. On our system of government. Which in America’s case, means an attack not just against all of us, but against liberal democracy itself.

Last then reminded readers that this was not a “one off.” As he wrote, it had only been twelve weeks since Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband were assassinated in their home, sixteen weeks since Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim were assassinated outside Washington’s Jewish Museum, ten months since UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was assassinated in Manhattan.

And one could list other examples of near-assassinations from recent years—like the brutal beating of the husband of the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and the shots fired at an ex-president campaigning to return to office.

It is important to understand that these acts all emerged from a culture of political violence that has been waxing for nearly a decade.

Last acknowledged the presence of political violence in the past, specifically enumerating the attacks on Steve Scalise, Gabby Giffords, Ronald Reagan, JFK and RFK and MLK, and the vicious attacks on Black citizens during Jim Crow. But he pointed to a crucial difference in the way public officials responded.

The difference is that until recently, elected high officials condemned political violence as a matter of course. Their condemnations were not always sincere, but they were nearly universal. They understood that political violence is a wildfire. It spreads. And if it breaks containment, it cannot be controlled. Once unleashed, it burns everyone.

I found one paragraph in Last’s brief essay to be both undeniably true and chilling. As he wrote,

We don’t have to rehearse the litany of how we got here; we can leave that to another day. But we all know what we know. Things have changed and it’s not hard to pinpoint the moment when the normalization of political violence re-emerged among our political elites. To pretend otherwise would be to hide our heads in the sand—to deny the plain political reality of the moment.

That “plain political reality” is what keeps me up at night.

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Forget The Dog Whistles

This political season, the racism is blatant and unembarrassed. For those of us who had naively thought America was emerging from that particular form of mental illness, the willingness to appeal for votes on the basis of bias–the number of MAGA political commercials identifying the candidate as an “out and proud” bigot–has been astounding.

And heartbreaking.

Here in Indiana, gubernatorial candidates have accused each other of–gasp!–sympathy for Black Lives Matter, which they insist has called for the killing of police. That accusation has been repeatedly debunked–but interestingly, none of the rebuttal ads have defended the organization. Mike Braun, who has been the target of most of those accusations has responded with ads highlighting his support from law enforcement organizations–not by defending the organization against a nasty and purposeful lie. The linked article from the BBC traces the origin of that lie to (where else?) Fox News, and reports on the response from Black Lives Matter:

“We’re targeting the brutal system of policing, not individual police,” the statement reads. “We seek a world in which ALL Black lives matter, and racial hierarchy no longer organizes our lives or yours. This is a vision of love. As Black survivors of White supremacy, our hearts go out to all victims of violence.”

Attacks on Black Lives Matter are, rather obviously, thinly-veiled efforts to paint all Black folks as murderous beasts–and a message to bigoted voters that the candidate making the accusation is one of them. But it isn’t simply the sudden willingness of MAGA candidates to shed any pretense of civility and/or anti-racism. It’s also the creepy identities of those providing the candidates with funds and other support.

Turning Point USA has been in the news several times; it is a far Right advocacy organization that has most recently been identified as a major supporter of Bernie Moreno, the MAGA nominee for U.S. Senate in Ohio.

Moreno wrote that he was “honored to be endorsed by Charlie Kirk and Turning Point Action.” Moreno said that “[f]ew have done more to fight back against the radical left than they have,” and he looks “forward to working with them to defend for our America First conservative values in the US Senate.”

In 2023, Kirk repeatedly featured Moreno as a guest on his popular podcast and consistently promoted Moreno’s candidacy to his 2.9 million followers on X. At the end of 2023, Kirk donated the maximum legal amount of $5,000 to Moreno’s campaign through the Turning Point PAC.

At the same time, Kirk, known for his embrace of fringe views and conspiracy theories, launched a sustained attack on Martin Luther King Jr.’s life and legacy. At a December 2023 convention hosted by Turning Point USA, Kirk said that King “was awful” and “not a good person.” Kirk’s critique extended not just to King himself but to the civil rights movement itself. “We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s,” Kirk declared, trashing the legislation that outlawed segregation in public places and many businesses.

In his convention speech, Kirk blasted the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as an effort to “re-found the county” and “get rid of the First Amendment.” He criticized courts for enforcing the law, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. “Federal courts just yield to the Civil Rights Act as if it’s the actual American Constitution,” Kirk complained.

The article continue with a description of Kirk’s continued and highly publicized crusade against King, against the MLK holiday, and against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. And this is the man and organization from which Moreno “proudly” accepted endorsement.

Turning Point’s crusade against King and the civil rights movement did not appear to impact his relationship with Moreno. On March 14, 2024, Turning Point Action donated $100,000 to the Buckeye Values PAC, Moreno’s Super PAC.

Nor is there any remaining question of Moreno’s own racial opinions:

Moreno himself has also had controversies involving racial issues. When he launched his campaign for Senate, Moreno floated the idea of reparations for white descendants of Union soldiers that were killed during the Civil War. “They talk about reparations. Where are the reparations for the people, for the North, who died to save the lives of Black people?” Moreno said. “I know it’s not politically correct to say that, but you know what, we’ve got to stop being politically correct.”

Bottom line: Every voter casting a ballot for a MAGA Republican this year is either explicitly endorsing racism or indicating that the voter does not consider the “out and proud” racism of the MAGA movement to be disqualifying.

They’re no longer hiding behind dog whistles.

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