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Yes, this is it. Personally, I might have the talent for it, or been able to develop the talent, and perhaps once was on that path, but I don't have the guts to put myself out in public and go around debating leftists in person at venues across the country. In terms of virtue points, maybe I get 8 for honesty and he gets 5 points, but he gets 10 for courage, and I get like 2, so he beats me.
Russell conjugation: I'm a team player, you are a PR spokesperson for the movement, he is a cynical apparatchik/propagandist.
He was a charismatic and courageous movement spokesperson. He was not a first-class intellectual; nor was he a paragon of truth-telling virtue/disagreeable autist.
If Kirk basically trusts Trump, there isn't anything necessarily cynical about changing his tune on Epstein when Trump did. I'm basically the same way, and I don't have anything to gain for changing my opinion. I assumed there was a deeper conspiracy behind the Epstein thing, like he was running a blackmail ring. But if the Trump people have looked into and not found anything, then that increases the probability that there wasn't actually a blackmail ring. I don't think Trump is hiding is own deep guilt, because if Trump was guilty of anything more than bad taste with regards to Epstein, I think the Biden administration would have revealed it. What Kirk and Trump are most guilty of is in promoting the idea that there were releasable "files" in the first place, and not just a lot of sealed grand jury testimony and raw interview transcripts full of known-to-be-false statements.
"Going out in public" and debating people is hardly something that takes immense courage. I did policy debate in college -- where's my statue?
Before this, public figures generally didn't worry that much about their personal safety. Random crazies have always been a threat, but they're relatively rare compared to all the public figures going out into public. Maybe that's slowly changing as the US becomes more sectarian?
Get a bruise doing it and we can consider a plaque.
This is nonsense, you're old enough to remember people like Milo, Shapiro and Peterson getting threatened off campus, the armed thugs running Evergreen, Carl Benjamin stealing a flag off antifa thugs coming to brawl him off stage, Andy Ngo getting concrete milkshaked and so on. We talked about it all at the old place.
The only difference is that ten years and a few attempted presidential assassinations later, we've graduated to people who can mount scope rings on their guns and actually aim them.
Murderous communists have been there the whole time, and that's why even Kirk had an extensive security detail. Just not one with counter snipers.
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.
Cars aren't dangerous, you can list off individuals accidents, but people drive to their destinations unharmed everyday.
Sure they have safety belts, but golf carts also have them, and it's not like they're going on the highway or even regularly breaking 20 mph.
What? Make your point clear please.
Political discourse is and always has been a dangerous activity, it's always been recognized as such, and the arguments you're deploying to deny this reality are ridiculous.
Even banks and insurance providers disagree with you explicitly as a matter of policy.
All this in the service of denying the courage of a man who actually died doing this dangerous but necessary thing. It all seems very futile.
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.
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.
It sounds like nothing short of people getting gunned down like it's the years of lead in very early memory, in your own country, would convince you that politics is dangerous.
The difference between mere public appearance and politics is that there are organized murderous groups that want you out of the picture. Not just nutters. But you conveniently just pack all these in the nutter bundle to avoid having to deal with the fact that there are perfectly sane murderous actors.
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