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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   42901 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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I gotta say, I had never even heard of Kirk before the shooting. Maybe this is because I deliberately try not to engage in politics anymore (except on the Motte), don't know. It's completely possible I'm years out of date on this stuff. To be honest, I still don't know much about him at all.

Now I'm seeing all of my leftist friends rattle off lists of why Kirk was basically in bed with Hitler. It makes me wonder if they'd heard as little about him as I had, and are simply regurgitating the talking points they heard other leftists say after his death, essentially as a mechanism for virtue signaling.

For an additional data point, I "knew" this much about him before the shooting. I'm a trad social conservative, centrist on economic issues.

  • He was some debate guy who went to colleges and did gotcha stuff
  • He was the leader of Turning Point USA, a boomercon "college Republican org" that was about 20 years behind the times in terms of grasping the current political climate
  • TP USA was the org that regur published cringe "wow imagine if the situation were reversed" style memes that were widely mocked both on the left and the online right

I'm trying not to get taken in by the St Charlie mythos that is popping up overnight. He seems like a decent family man and I don't think he was "evil," but he was definitely a talking head and political activist, two occupations that many Americans find vaguely distasteful on both sides of the aisle. That doesn't make his assassination any less horrifying or, frankly, radicalizing to me, but I'm resisting turning him into a Lei Feng or Horst Wessel in my mind.

I've come to the conclusion that the reason he flew under my radar was because he was doing normal, boring, decent things in a relatively respectful manner. I keep seeing people call him a provocateur, and it's true that he could be aggressive, but from what I've seen his style wasn't conducive to soundbites; in fact, everything allegedly bad that he said came from a longer nuanced speech which had to be quoted in full to be understood. The kind of speeches that no-one who was habitually media-savvy would make.

I think a lot of people are going to experience what happened to Stephen King, where they assume that he was some kind of hard-right debate bro caricature who said the wildest things, and find out that, no, this was just an articulate, well-prepared guy who took thinking and discussion seriously, and put much more effort than expected into being charitable with his opponents.

It makes me wonder if they'd heard as little about him as I had, and are simply regurgitating the talking points they heard other leftists say after his death, essentially as a mechanism for virtue signaling.

Bingo -- I'm in Canada, Extremely Online, and at least 99th percentile in 'knows about US CW' -- had never heard of the guy. So when my normie friends are talking about what an extremist he was, it's not an opinion they've formed themselves.

I think part of the reason Kirk wasn't brought up here in the Motte despite his enormous popularity is that he's not known for having insightful, original thought, Instead he was good at getting ideas out to young people. His positions are mostly moderate republican and ultimately he's a political activist, albeit an effective one. So unless he's part of a culture war event of substance, there isn't much reason to talk about him. The only thing of interest I can think of that might have been worth discussing prior to his assassination would be his role in founding Turning Point USA and the role he played in helping get Trump elected.

I think normie leftists don't know him, but the one's that engage with leftist influencers probably did know him a little. I think you are right that most of them are regurgitating talking points, considering just how many of those talking points break down when you examine them in context.

I think normie leftists don't know him, but the one's that engage with leftist influencers probably did know him a little. I think you are right that most of them are regurgitating talking points

I wonder if it's close to the way I know Jimmy Kimmel. The only clips I've seen from him in recent memory are him crying when trump won (about all the soon-to-be-victims he's sorry that our country let down), and then him in various clip compilations of establishment narrative control. I don't really know what he's actually like. But after just about every single topical youtube video I watch, one of the algorithmic suggested 'related' videos that pop up will be the latest official Kimmel monologue clip, including him looking smug with a headline about his latest wrecking of Trump/Elon/reds.

People here have been trying to come up with a 'flipside' hated/effective figure to investigate how those on the right might react similarly or differently. With the usual candidates of AOC or Hasan, or even for me maybe Schiff or Chris Murphy, I would still be appalled by a murder, and at least not celebratory from a random lightning bolt death. But with Kimmel, for whatever reason, it's starting to get warmer.

Maybe it's something along the lines of someone who is a volunteer activist culture warrior (rather than an obvious partisan politician or a clearly delineated fox/msnbc participant), who gets big visibility and always presents themselves as smugly winning & wrecking. That seems to be the same kind of flavor of irritated rage that plenty of people get instinctively from seeing a small bit of Kirk, even from just a thumbnail.

I agree with this, but I think the reason more is about a Hanania article that goes "Liberals read, conservatives watch TV". Obviously, reading just about any comment here on The Motte is a lot more insightful than letting the YouTube algorithm take you away. And if you're a conservative who likes to read, you're just not going to have any opinion on him at all, because he was more of a TV personality. Since you're trying to understand deeper aspects of the culture war, and most credible news sites are left-leaning, you will have much more to say about all the news articles with framing that pisses you off, rather than Charlie Kirk, who while his argumentation was good, he was still just using the same statistics and lines of argumentation we've seen many times and showing it to people outside of this bubble.

I only know Kirk as the smallface meme of a smugfuck conservatard parodied as dunking on strawmanned liberals. In otherwords, a modal mottizen. Which is why the reaction of liberals to basically be gloating that Kirk is dead is one part personally impactful since I'm not that far removed from Kirks relatively anodyne willingness to entertain novel arguments and impatience with devoting too many brain cells to argue into infinity against categorically bad faith opinions. The end state of that difference in opinion should be 'fuck that guy', not 'cap that fool'. Frankly, most liberals don't really know Kirk either. He's a totem, a standin for Trump and all the men they hate. The bad taste jokes of Kirk dying doing what he loved aren't funny they're schaudenfraude (understandable) escalating into wishcasting for every other conservative to die (bad). Political violence when its social is corrosive to a country. Culture arms races for privileged access cripples any measure of prosocial cooperation. An actual arms race cripples cooperation while also destroying whatever makes the spoils have value in the first place.

I suppose as a measuring stick I should say I also had not heard of Kirk before his death, although I think I had heard of Turning Point.

That's how my wife describes her knowledge of him as well, didn't know him, did know Turning Point. I personally had never heard of Turning Point, myself.

I was aware of Kirk but more as 'Shapiro clone with a moon face' and some vague Prager-associated memories of him getting lashed for something about Slavery (but I may have misremembered them) but now I've done a bit of research he's less obnoxious.

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