Hello! This week we talk about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, what he meant to the GOP and the right, in general, and the space he occupied within the broader political discourse.
Hi! Signed up for the podcast because of this conversation with John (and I was, like you, very moved by that piece), and had two comments: One, re: "gamer" language, just a small data point, my teenage son is extremely online and has discord communities, and insofar as he is not a Far Cry or Helldiver player, he was not aware of what the phrases meant organically. Just in terms of the "are we just old" question you asked, I think that, from my experience as a parent, it is less that there are young people who know all the memes and old people who don't, but there are communities that form around specific games that have their own lexica and inside jokes etc but it's somewhat closed/hermetic.
The other thing I wanted to mention (and sorry this is kind of long) was re: the question of whether or not campuses had exposure to "conservative" arguments and that there was value in breaking through to the cloistered students, and / or that their "dumbfounded" reactions to the rhetorical structure of the "debate" with Kirk was an expression of "knowing nothing." I have been in higher education my whole life and for the last 30 years as instructor, at all sorts of campuses in different parts of the US. The idea that the campus is hostile to "conservative ideas" is really strange to me. Post-war campus democratization through the GI Bill, high federal investment in higher ed as a cold war tactic, and the passage of the Civil Rights Act together with the movements against the war in Vietnam (and solidarity with Third Worldism) on campuses and the creation of new disciplines like Black Studies, Women's Studies etc (almost entirely staffed outside of the traditional tenure structures) provoked and galvanized the right, and since the 1970's, almost all initial and radical democratizing gains have been fought against and undermined---at the levels of culture war (bipartisan vilification of the arts and humanities and even social sciences), financialization (including offloading federal support onto the backs of students carrying debt), casualization (the systematic end to tenure and the labor protections and academic freedom) and now explicit facistization (the intervention of federal or state government to dictate subject matter at the level of the individual class.)
The other point is that the vast majority of college students in the US attend regional community colleges, and smaller public and private regional colleges and universities. Most students are not at Yale and Harvard, or Oberlin and Brown. When suddenly all anyone is talking about is the Bahn Mi at Oberlin this is not because it is expressive of some kind of underlying culture of (whatever it was said to be, intolerant left?) but that it is amplified in the churn of media toward particular messaging ends (that, as I mentioned above, were operative since the 1970's). It is just the case that media liberals are happy to join the fracas with right-wingers when it comes to denigrating "the left" or the "excesses" or so-called "cancel culture" and for much legacy liberal media, the only "colleges and universities" that exist educate the fewest students and are the least representative of higher education in the US.
Turning Points USA was not founded as a teaching tool for critical thinking skills (which yes are indeed totally eroded and unsupported at most contemporary public and private institutions because of cultural / funding shifts that de-prioritize non-professional fields and pedagogies not driven by a rate of return ideology) but as a lobbying body to generate enthusiasm and young foot soldiers for the Tea Party. John is the expert, but I don't think the Tea Party itself was awash in great thinkers or models of inquiry. Charlie Kirk (or any of these types that could be invited by right-wing campus groups) didn't make arguments, he made / they make credal claims that project a reactionary, eugenicist, replacement theorist worldview that itself was supposed to evidence "viewpoint diversity" (a nonsense category). The objective was not "diversification of viewpoints" as much as the piecemeal undoing of the Civil Rights Act. He was murdered literally mid "thought" as he transitioned from denigrating trans people to denigrating black people. Besides this, the "debate me bro" model of discourse is fundamentally anti-intellectual and does not champion "thought" either––it is a verbal contest of speed and rhetorical tricks to embarrass or cast aspersions on your opponent. One can learn the "rules" and how to "perform" but it bears no relationship to a discussion of ideas that would take place in a discussion-based classroom. I teach many seminars on various topics in cultural, critical and intellectual history. I teach texts. We don't "debate" them, we try to understand what texts are communicating. This is incredibly difficult and ever more so under the conditions of waning literacy. The foundation of a "history of ideas"– even the most "conversative" one predicated exclusively on a Standard Western Canon – was and is texts, not the capacity for someone with a large online following to "destroy" the other guy in some bizarre online battle.
Universities invite or allow "speakers" like Charlie Kirk for 2 reasons: One, because there is some kind of independent funding that sponsors such an event, one powerful enough the university doesn't want to alienate it (or politically entrenched enough that they fear retribution from the government) or two, because it is useful for university fundraising campaigns to get a big splashy name. There was a time when that big name was Ibram Kendi (and that time is likely over) but that would not have been the a choice for most people doing research in the actual fields that would describe themselves as "Critical Race Theory." Concomitantly, there was no time and never will be a time when the university Vice President of Event Management and Recruitment would be like "our big event for homecoming weekend will center Jodi Dean." Lol. Simultaneously, it is also cheaper to have Oprah (or someone of her stature) do a speaking event even at a 20K (50K who knows) per hour price tag than to hire a tenure track professor to teach even two classes for a single semester. Most obviously, just because you hire some however "liberal coded" professional speaker to come to campus for a day that does not reflect whether or not the "campus" is "leftwing." We had Angela Davis to campus at my current institution exactly as the university was introducing extreme policing measures that resulting in high levels of risk to students of color and the broader community (that was at the beginning of the last trump administration and now the carceral systems at the university are that much more extreme). In fact it might have even been the case that Angela Davis was understood as a kind of bribe to get the abolitionist groups off the admin's back while they inaugurated a sworn force on campus.
Happy to grant that Charlie Kirk was an excellent organizer and maybe unmatched as a propagandist, like a super talented guy. His death was gruesome or horrific or not to be celebrated in an absolute sense as this kind of violence breeds more violence and chaos which is sure to redound on the most precarious among us. But there was no "intellectual" program to speak of and it is revisionism I think to map his success as a "speaker" to the saliency of his "arguments" or "thought." Propaganda as a mobilization of cliches is entirely *thoughtless* and Kirk, in the spectacle of "owning" and "getting owned" he aestheticized thoughtlessness. I think Hannah Arendt would mark this as a basis for fascism.
I had been looking forward to hearing what you guys might have to say about Charlie Kirk. Was glad to see cool-headed and logical analysis of his rhetorical strategies and tactics, rather than the fire-hose of emotion I've found elsewhere over the course of the past week. So, thanks for that. Was also interested in your discourse on discourse, and how people on the Left might better convey their (our) messages—and what messages might be best to convey in the first place, in order to score meaningful points. But I think we're always going to be at a disadvantage here because of something the three of you barely touched upon: the fact the communicators on the right are able to reach some very dark and irrational places in the minds of much of their audience. Not that the Left doesn't often use manipulative emotional appeals . . . but fear and disgust on a subconscious level are extremely effective drivers of conscious thoughts and actions.
RE: the “Retconning” of Kirk…the only thing not observed in a lot of this Discourse is that most immediate in the minds of prominent political figures who folks expect to have something to say on the topic (Ezra, Hasan, etc) was the question “will my ass be next?” and really…i think that goes a LONG way to explaining by many less prominent media figures and political hobbyist felt the Klein / etc takes were lacking.
He was basically trying to signal broadly they should do what they can to put proverbial lid back on the potential “cycle of violence” before it’s too late and he or someone else he knows *could* be singled out and killed.
Hi! Signed up for the podcast because of this conversation with John (and I was, like you, very moved by that piece), and had two comments: One, re: "gamer" language, just a small data point, my teenage son is extremely online and has discord communities, and insofar as he is not a Far Cry or Helldiver player, he was not aware of what the phrases meant organically. Just in terms of the "are we just old" question you asked, I think that, from my experience as a parent, it is less that there are young people who know all the memes and old people who don't, but there are communities that form around specific games that have their own lexica and inside jokes etc but it's somewhat closed/hermetic.
The other thing I wanted to mention (and sorry this is kind of long) was re: the question of whether or not campuses had exposure to "conservative" arguments and that there was value in breaking through to the cloistered students, and / or that their "dumbfounded" reactions to the rhetorical structure of the "debate" with Kirk was an expression of "knowing nothing." I have been in higher education my whole life and for the last 30 years as instructor, at all sorts of campuses in different parts of the US. The idea that the campus is hostile to "conservative ideas" is really strange to me. Post-war campus democratization through the GI Bill, high federal investment in higher ed as a cold war tactic, and the passage of the Civil Rights Act together with the movements against the war in Vietnam (and solidarity with Third Worldism) on campuses and the creation of new disciplines like Black Studies, Women's Studies etc (almost entirely staffed outside of the traditional tenure structures) provoked and galvanized the right, and since the 1970's, almost all initial and radical democratizing gains have been fought against and undermined---at the levels of culture war (bipartisan vilification of the arts and humanities and even social sciences), financialization (including offloading federal support onto the backs of students carrying debt), casualization (the systematic end to tenure and the labor protections and academic freedom) and now explicit facistization (the intervention of federal or state government to dictate subject matter at the level of the individual class.)
The other point is that the vast majority of college students in the US attend regional community colleges, and smaller public and private regional colleges and universities. Most students are not at Yale and Harvard, or Oberlin and Brown. When suddenly all anyone is talking about is the Bahn Mi at Oberlin this is not because it is expressive of some kind of underlying culture of (whatever it was said to be, intolerant left?) but that it is amplified in the churn of media toward particular messaging ends (that, as I mentioned above, were operative since the 1970's). It is just the case that media liberals are happy to join the fracas with right-wingers when it comes to denigrating "the left" or the "excesses" or so-called "cancel culture" and for much legacy liberal media, the only "colleges and universities" that exist educate the fewest students and are the least representative of higher education in the US.
Turning Points USA was not founded as a teaching tool for critical thinking skills (which yes are indeed totally eroded and unsupported at most contemporary public and private institutions because of cultural / funding shifts that de-prioritize non-professional fields and pedagogies not driven by a rate of return ideology) but as a lobbying body to generate enthusiasm and young foot soldiers for the Tea Party. John is the expert, but I don't think the Tea Party itself was awash in great thinkers or models of inquiry. Charlie Kirk (or any of these types that could be invited by right-wing campus groups) didn't make arguments, he made / they make credal claims that project a reactionary, eugenicist, replacement theorist worldview that itself was supposed to evidence "viewpoint diversity" (a nonsense category). The objective was not "diversification of viewpoints" as much as the piecemeal undoing of the Civil Rights Act. He was murdered literally mid "thought" as he transitioned from denigrating trans people to denigrating black people. Besides this, the "debate me bro" model of discourse is fundamentally anti-intellectual and does not champion "thought" either––it is a verbal contest of speed and rhetorical tricks to embarrass or cast aspersions on your opponent. One can learn the "rules" and how to "perform" but it bears no relationship to a discussion of ideas that would take place in a discussion-based classroom. I teach many seminars on various topics in cultural, critical and intellectual history. I teach texts. We don't "debate" them, we try to understand what texts are communicating. This is incredibly difficult and ever more so under the conditions of waning literacy. The foundation of a "history of ideas"– even the most "conversative" one predicated exclusively on a Standard Western Canon – was and is texts, not the capacity for someone with a large online following to "destroy" the other guy in some bizarre online battle.
Universities invite or allow "speakers" like Charlie Kirk for 2 reasons: One, because there is some kind of independent funding that sponsors such an event, one powerful enough the university doesn't want to alienate it (or politically entrenched enough that they fear retribution from the government) or two, because it is useful for university fundraising campaigns to get a big splashy name. There was a time when that big name was Ibram Kendi (and that time is likely over) but that would not have been the a choice for most people doing research in the actual fields that would describe themselves as "Critical Race Theory." Concomitantly, there was no time and never will be a time when the university Vice President of Event Management and Recruitment would be like "our big event for homecoming weekend will center Jodi Dean." Lol. Simultaneously, it is also cheaper to have Oprah (or someone of her stature) do a speaking event even at a 20K (50K who knows) per hour price tag than to hire a tenure track professor to teach even two classes for a single semester. Most obviously, just because you hire some however "liberal coded" professional speaker to come to campus for a day that does not reflect whether or not the "campus" is "leftwing." We had Angela Davis to campus at my current institution exactly as the university was introducing extreme policing measures that resulting in high levels of risk to students of color and the broader community (that was at the beginning of the last trump administration and now the carceral systems at the university are that much more extreme). In fact it might have even been the case that Angela Davis was understood as a kind of bribe to get the abolitionist groups off the admin's back while they inaugurated a sworn force on campus.
Happy to grant that Charlie Kirk was an excellent organizer and maybe unmatched as a propagandist, like a super talented guy. His death was gruesome or horrific or not to be celebrated in an absolute sense as this kind of violence breeds more violence and chaos which is sure to redound on the most precarious among us. But there was no "intellectual" program to speak of and it is revisionism I think to map his success as a "speaker" to the saliency of his "arguments" or "thought." Propaganda as a mobilization of cliches is entirely *thoughtless* and Kirk, in the spectacle of "owning" and "getting owned" he aestheticized thoughtlessness. I think Hannah Arendt would mark this as a basis for fascism.
I had been looking forward to hearing what you guys might have to say about Charlie Kirk. Was glad to see cool-headed and logical analysis of his rhetorical strategies and tactics, rather than the fire-hose of emotion I've found elsewhere over the course of the past week. So, thanks for that. Was also interested in your discourse on discourse, and how people on the Left might better convey their (our) messages—and what messages might be best to convey in the first place, in order to score meaningful points. But I think we're always going to be at a disadvantage here because of something the three of you barely touched upon: the fact the communicators on the right are able to reach some very dark and irrational places in the minds of much of their audience. Not that the Left doesn't often use manipulative emotional appeals . . . but fear and disgust on a subconscious level are extremely effective drivers of conscious thoughts and actions.
RE: the “Retconning” of Kirk…the only thing not observed in a lot of this Discourse is that most immediate in the minds of prominent political figures who folks expect to have something to say on the topic (Ezra, Hasan, etc) was the question “will my ass be next?” and really…i think that goes a LONG way to explaining by many less prominent media figures and political hobbyist felt the Klein / etc takes were lacking.
He was basically trying to signal broadly they should do what they can to put proverbial lid back on the potential “cycle of violence” before it’s too late and he or someone else he knows *could* be singled out and killed.