TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
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User ID: 373
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
12hr ago
I gave you a bunch of public, conspicuous and escalating acts of political violence against specifically mere speech and you dismissed it out of hand.
Anecdotes are not data. I also came up with a list of random celebrities that have been attacked, but I don't think that would be sufficient to establish a hypothetical counterclaim that being an apolitical celebrity is actually more dangerous than being a political figure. Note I wouldn't actually make that claim, I'm just using it to prove a point about the dangers of relying on the availability heuristic.
While the Years of Lead or the Troubles would definitely qualify to make politics "dangerous", I don't think you'd need to go that far to show danger.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
12hr ago
Yeah, fair enough.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
12hr ago
I think we can agree on this: There has grown up in the last few years a certain creature called the “Right-wing grifter” who make lots of money serving the right-wing need for influencers and talking heads, and are somewhat well-protected by having a right-wing funding stream that is loyal to them.
Yep, we can agree on this.
These grifters are a recent phenomenon, largely post 2020.
Disagree here, somewhat. I'll readily concede that the grifter-industrial complex has grown in size over time, but it was always kicking around, just in somewhat different forms. Milo Yiannopoulus was before 2020. People like Bannon had been kicking around way before 2020. Young Earth Creationists predate Bannon and largely followed the same gist, scratching out a living with their seminars, roadside museums, and homeschooling education material.
The internet supercharged the grifters through 1) realigning the cranks from being on both sides to mostly being a Republican-only phenomenon, thereby creating returns-to-scale through whole ecosystems. And 2) the internet facilitated easier dissemination of material through stuff like Substack, TikTok, YouTube, etc.
Before that time, becoming known as right-wing and especially becoming an active mouthpiece for right-wing ideas in public was very risky, because you were exposing yourself to the constant risk of cancellation and you were giving up any future within Blue-controlled institutions.
I agree that being right-wing gets you more likely to get kicked out of Blue-controlled institutions, but with 2 big caveats:
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The fear was much less pronounced pre-Woke, and really was only an omnipresent concern during peak Woke, roughly 2017-2019. Kirk started TPUSA in 2012.
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The fear is less of a concern for mainstream conservative views than it is for someone like a Groyper. Kirk has always been aggressively mainstream from what I've seen.
And of course I'd say that being right-wing has little bearing on getting you kicked out of Red-controlled institutions, which was what Kirk quickly wrapped himself in.
As such, becoming a public right-wing spokesman was not a sensible move for a bright person good with words.
You could say this about any of the grifters. Maybe it's true in a vague sense, but I'm not sure how much "good with words" translates from pandering to right-wing kooks to pandering to lefties. Some might say "it's just words", but the audiences expect something very different, and I'm not sure one could easily cross apply such skills. Maybe you can, maybe you can't.
Therefore Kirk’s debates may have appeared pretty safe and rote by the end
They were always safe and rote because of what I've said above: Once Kirk had made a name for himself on the Right, threats of a Left wing cancellation dropped considerably.
The biggest disagreement I have with your points overall is that you could plausibly apply it to any of the grifters/influencers. Do you also think Milo, Bannon, Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, etc. are also worthy of the silly deification that Kirk is receiving right now?
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
13hr ago
Declaring something "obviously false" doesn't make it so.
Both places are small. Both places have views that make the rest of the party recoil. Again, this is all pure weakmanning.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
13hr ago
I can agree with this post in vague terms, but the problem is with the definitions. What does "celebrated political assassinations" start and end? If it's specifically limited to political violence, then great, but the problem is that plenty of right-wingers want to extend that to functionally mean any criticism of the deceased, or anyone pushing against their narratives. Heck, I'm sure there are plenty who think my post yesterday goes too far by daring to criticize the idea that perhaps Kirk was not as great as MLK x Jesus.
The past few years should have made it clear to anyone that much of the Right's dedication to "free speech" is just as much of a lie as the Left's. For many, it's just a cynical ploy to gain support from moderates while their true feelings are that censorship is actually amazing, and that the Left was just censoring the wrong people.
Like, I could also support censorship of "fascism" in vague terms, but the Left quickly expanded the meaning of that word to functionally be "anyone who disagrees with me".
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
14hr ago
"Ciao Bella" can be a number of things, but one of them is a HoI4 meme.
I'm someone who plays HoI4 a lot and I've never heard this. Can you link an explanation?
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1d ago
leftists tried to reassure one another that she was totally fine, fit as a fiddle, healthy as a horse
I recall the exact opposite, actually. I remember leftists trying to tell her "step aside you old hag" in polite but forceful terms, and when she didn't there was pretty widespread worry that she had screwed them all (which she definitely did lol).
People were wailing and gnashing teeth about how she should have resigned during a D president while her body was alive and conducting day-to-day activities, because her hubris and that of Blue Tribe's elite structure brought ruin to their tribal works.
Yes, I don't disagree with this.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1d ago
It would be equally easy to say that e.g. the Groypers on Nick Fuentes' comment section are the "most concentrated and distilled Republican space on the internet", and that it's those people who are determining the flavor of the party.
People claiming it's fair to paint small, hyper-sectarian factions as "the REAL outgroup" would be wrong in both instances.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1d ago
... and people also started talking about RBG the moment she died, both positively and negatively. Plenty of people opined how she should have resigned during a D president before her body was even cold.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1d ago
I assume you were doing your debate-club stuff in a small room filled with only debate people who accepted that one person was going to have to take the opposing side of the argument.
Mostly correct. Sometimes I could be in rooms with dozens or even low-hundreds if I made it to finals, but there was always the understanding that my arguments would take a certain shape just based on the rules of debate. It wouldn't be much of a debate if both sides agreed with each other!
In contrast the debates Kirk was doing were real debates
I do not see his dunk-farming as "real debates" in any meaningful sense. The danger he faced was similar to what any other public figure faces when they go out into the open, that there might be a low probability, high magnitude event where a crazy person tries to attack them, like what happened to John Lennon, Tupac, Dave Chappelle, or Steve Buscemi. Cancel culture was a threat too, but being on the conservative side makes you less likely to have serious ramifications, not more likely.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1d ago
Being any sort of public figure has been a dangerous activity as a baseline. I don't judge political discourse as being significantly more dangerous than a celebrity. I might buy that it could be somewhat more dangerous, but not orders of magnitude relative to how well the person is known. Again, perhaps that's changing now, but political assassinations had been surprisingly rare in previous decades.
Feel free to present evidence to the contrary.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1d ago
that he wasn't running any risks?
... of being ostracized? Yes I will suggest that, because it's true.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1d ago
I don't understand how you get that from what I wrote.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1d ago
What? Make your point clear please.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1d ago
For what it's worth, I believe the attempted hagiography around Floyd was just as silly, if not more so, than what's happening now with Kirk.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1d ago
We're you debating in favor of any right-leaning policies?
Sure, every once in a while. But I, like Kirk, was in an environment where I was never going to run a serious risk of being ostracized. In my case it was because we all knew debate was a silly game, while in Kirk's case it was because his conservative audience wanted him to say edgy right-wing stuff.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1d ago
Now let's say the left was using this silence to make brazen claims about how AOC was one of the greatest people who ever lived on par with MLK or Jesus or Lincoln, and also that every right winger was complicit in her death. Would you maybe feel the slightest urge to respond?
I mean, you could just say "no" to win this specific argument, but I must say I never found the idea that we must wait X number of days before speaking about an event particularly convincing when either side makes it.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1d ago
It can take a lot of courage when there are real stakes.
Sure, I don't disagree with this. And the policy debate I did was fake. But the debates Kirk did were also fake. And almost all political debates of this sort are fake. It's a performative skill you can build like any other. There were no stakes. If Kirk has a bad performance, he could just cut that from the TikTok highlight real. At worst, he might run some risk of someone else filming him mess up and counter-dunking on him, but social media algorithms would be unlikely to serve that to Kirk's audience in any case.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1d ago
It's the representation of Democrat voters online.
It is not. That's pure weakmanning. It's a representation of a specific faction of woke Democrats that like censorship, credentialism, and catastrophizing.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1d ago
Is this supposed to be speculation of why I made this post? Even if it's just talking about various unnamed leftists more broadly, it's still ridiculously "boo outgroup".
"People I disagree with are having terrible fits of cognitive dissonance, but instead of resolving it by admitting I'm correct, they desperately throw out red herrings and non-sequiturs, thereby making my point even stronger!"
Uh huh.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1d ago
Sure you can list off individual incidents, but again they pale in comparison to all the public figures that have ever done public events in the past decade+.
And yes, as I said there have always been crazy people, but it hasn't been an undo concern for politicians relative to other public figures. Sure, they have security details, but Taylor Swift also has a security detail and it's not like she's running for office, or even regularly giving political hot-takes.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1d ago
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1d ago
As I said, a little flip-flopping is not a bad thing. I've certainly changed my mind about some things over the past 10+ years. But the nature in which it occurs, and its frequency, are both very important as to whether it's genuine or cynical. In Kirk's case, his changes were both frequent and abrupt. Oh, he just got a call from Trump and suddenly decided that the whole Epstein affair was silly and not worth talking about right when Trump was trying to bury the whole thing? Uh huh. Sure.
This type of thing is fine if Kirk and people talking about him were honest that he was just a government mouthpiece, but they keep trying to build him up as a "martyr for truth" when he demonstrably wasn't.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1d ago
Bluesky is not representative of liberals as a whole, and especially not top Dem leaders (with perhaps the exception of Ilhan Omar).
Couldn't agree more. The "don't speak ill of the dead" reasonably applies to the deceased's immediate family, but trying to do mass censorship of all online discourse on the topic is just ludicrous. So yeah, it'd be incredibly rude to go up to Kirk's parents or to his funeral and call him a shithead, but that does not apply to the internet at large for the same reason most Americans don't really care about dying orphans in Africa: empathy falls off rapidly with distance.
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