Setting his murder aside for a moment, Charlie Kirk was a kind of Scissor Statement Savant. He could say a spicy phrase, and would say it in such a way that it would be interpreted to mean entirely one thing to the reds and an entirely different thing to the blues, and then the reds and blues would argue like crazy about it on social media because they were talking past each other, and then Kirk would farm the engagement clicks and use that to magnify his brand.
I can post a lot of examples. You can identify your own examples by looking at your own social feed identifying liberals saying "Charlie Kirk said X!" where X is some awful thing. Then if you ask perplexity.ai if he said that, it'll tell you "well, no, he didn't, but he did say this other thing Y." For instance:
If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.
– The Charlie Kirk Show, 23 January 2024
In the context of the great DEI kerfuffle last year, the reds are going to hear this phrase and mentally substitute, “I sure do hope that the pilot of the airplane who is delivering me safely to my destination wasn’t selected for a reason other than his competency, given the media reports that airlines were doing exactly that,” while the blues are going to hear that and mentally substitute “Charlie Kirk says black people are too dumb to fly airplanes.” And then the blues and reds get mad and talk past each other, and Kirk farms (farmed) the clicks.
I was half way through writing this very thing down when I stumbled randomly into that exact exchange on Twitter.
This is the nature of all of the online discourse about Charlie Kirk’s positions, as far as I’ve been able to tell. In each of these cases, the context or perspective can lead one group to think he meant X and another group to think he meant Y. It's a subtle kind of very intelligent engagement trolling. And it is for that reason that I disagree with many opinions expressed in the media yesterday that Charlie Kirk was promoting productive discourse.
He was promoting peaceful discourse, but the ways in which he promoted it were very unlikely to produce cross-tribal understanding, while being very likely to produce clicks.
My liberal friends went completely ape shit over this article:
Their mental version of Kirk was “Nazi” so they fail to engage at all with Klein on this. They’re mad that Kirk’s to-them-extreme opinions are being whitewashed by liberal media brands in the wake of his murder. I have a theory on this, that I haven’t heard expressed clearly by anyone else yet.
I think the reason Gavin Newsom, Ezra Klein, and a lot of big liberal authors wrote things yesterday in support of Kirk is not so much that they agree with Kirk on anything, even his methodology, but rather because they realize that they do the same thing to build their own brands, and they're afraid of getting plugged in the neck too. Klein says essentially that in his closer:
I wanted Kirk to be safe for his sake, but I also wanted him to be safe for mine and for the sake of our larger shared project. The same is true for Shapiro, for Hoffman, for Hortman, for Thompson, for Trump, for Pelosi, for Whitmer. We are all safe, or none of us are.
There’s a weasel word in that closer: “shared project.” Klein might envision this shared project to be “democracy” or whatever, but in truth the “shared project” of all of them is engagement farming for profit by driving cultures further apart. He wants the world to stay safe for the culture war profiteers. As we’ve mentioned repeatedly here, the culture war gets all the clicks.
Murder is bad and I don't endorse murder and do actually agree with Kirk's stated and intended position on a few of the things he's said. Off the top of my head, I agree with Kirk that some amount of blood is worth it to keep the Second Amendment around. I also agree that the Gulf Wars were incredibly stupid and the result of very bad people having outsized influence in Washington. I disagree with him about some other stuff. But I do think that his death should act as a reminder to other culture war profiteers that they are engaging in a dangerous game that might not be good in the end for their families if the war goes hot.
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I want to apologize to paid subscribers for being quiet this summer and not posting a lot of material. I was getting engaged, remodeling my house for my fiancé and her daughter, moving them in, helping her start her new teaching job, and planning a wedding. Also, apparently, spending far too much time 100%ing Cyberpunk 2077 on Switch 2. With all of that wrapping up (wedding is less than two weeks away) I’ve finally got time to write again, and these past two weeks have seen four new articles. I have ideas for many more, which I discuss with my readers (and they discuss with each other) on the publication’s private Slack server. You can gain access to it by becoming a paid reader.
There are well over a hundred people yammering away in there right now, and I’m a very active participant. Members get to contribute ideas to articles in real time as they’re written, and many of the ideas for stuff in this publication come from the group. And if you don’t want to pay, then just stay on the free plan. All articles here will forever remain free to read.
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I’ve seen “zomg reds are more violent than blues” graphs thrown around originating with the ADL recently in the last few days, but the ADL likely cooked the numbers by including Neo Nazi Jail Shankings in their totals. This is a more reliable study, which shows reds were hugely ahead on the political kill count for decades, but the blues started to post numbers in Obama’s second term. The study cuts off in 2020 and I haven’t seen an objective kill count study for the last five years.
This article in TFP goes deep on the timeline for when the media started to pivot away from factual reporting and into opinion steering, which was the groundwork for it falling entirely into culture war.
Boys are falling behind in grade school and college. Lots of people wonder why, and I’m sure that’s multivariate. But a new study used double blind data to determine that around 12.5% of it is literal gender bias by teachers.
I’m going to keep sharing Jeff Asher’s stuff until everyone gets it. Not only is crime cratering nationally, it’s also cratering in Washington DC and the pretense for putting the National Guard out there is just as silly as the pretense for calling for additional gun control measures.
Two great Astral Codex Ten articles hit recently.
The second one is classic Scott, and hilarious.
If you missed the short window where Grok went Nazi, this article has some screenshots and discussion.
"If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.
– The Charlie Kirk Show, 23 January 2024"
Speaking as a (now retired) airline pilot, DEI hiring does, indeed, lead to mediocrity.
Oh, and hearty congratulations.
Congrats on the pending nuptials.
I really should poke my head back into the Slack, it has been too long.