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I'll add my own experiences with Kirk to the posting.
So as a terminally online right-wing Zillenial I had of course heard of Charlie Kirk. That's just the algorithm picking up on my demographics/beliefs, you're going to see Charlie Kirk. Up until 2024 though I hadn't ever really engaged with his content. I'd seen a few clips, and honestly I more-or-less threw him into the box of "generic right-wing commentator pwns teh libs lolxd." Might be dating myself a bit with that one but oh well. I'd developed a strong distaste for that kind of video as early as high school, so I never really revisited Kirk until recently. Enter election night 2024. Me and a group of friends are hanging out in discord, gorging ourselves on information. We're looking through half a dozen electoral streams, we have the NYTimes election meters up on everyone's screens, twitter screencaps are flying, the comments are coming thick and fast. The main question we have though, is who do we watch? CNN and MSNBC are out, Fox news is boring, TYT commentators are annoying, BBC has one token conservative getting ganged up on by six liberals and that's kinda fun to watch for a bit because he seems to be holding his own, but nothing really captures us. Then we try Louder with Crowder, and it's awful. Screaming, shouting, buzzer noises, just disgusting. Finally I turn on Charlie Kirk, fully expecting more of the same. And it is hands-down, without a doubt, the single best election coverage I have ever seen. It was masterful. Calm deliberate discussion, a clear right-wing bias of course but that doesn't bother us. It was... amazing. He was talking over the issues with people who seemed genuinely intelligent, he had a wonderful manner of speaking, it was just genuinely a joy to watch. We never switched away, not even after the election was called for Trump. That's how gripping it was. I think it was 4am Eastern before we finally switched him off and all went to bed.
The first I heard of Kirk's assassination was when I was in the gym on the treadmill. I have my phone turned off at work, and don't really check it until after I get home and am in the gym. So it was about 5:30pm. The first notification I had was one of my friends from that night saying "we're never going to get to watch Charlie's election stream again." I didn't understand at first, not until I started looking.
I'm usually one of the people decrying parasocial relationships with media figures. They don't know you, they don't care about you in the same way you care about them, and they never will. But despite myself I had grown attached to Charlie Kirk, if only for the fact that when every other podcast, streamer, and what-have-you was desperately trying to grab viewers by being as loud and aggressive as possible, Charlie Kirk was doing actual reporting. I am truly saddened by his loss, not just for the obvious reasons, but because he was acting the way I'd want commentators to act in an ideal world. We are lesser for his passing.
Yes, this is much of the same experience I had. I expected him to be the same type of irreverent, obnoxious right-winger like Crowder, or the Hodge Twins, or those videos from PragerU, or whatever other person with spicy-sounding one-liners gets posted to Facebook, judging from what I had heard of him from all those TPUSA memes. Unlike the others, I don't feel like he put out useless platitudes with no thought behind them. He actually had a masterful understanding of when an argument would or wouldn't apply, based on the reasoning put forward by the debaters. That's part of what made it shocking even reading right-wingers posting here on The Motte, with people downplaying him as being some milquetoast guy who didn't believe in anything. Even the right-wingers here had not watched him and had no idea who he was.
I notice a similar dynamic with Joe Rogan. People who listen to Joe Rogan know that he's not particularly political. He's an MMA weed smoker who is genuinely curious about all kinds of things, making him an excellent interviewer. But some former acquaintances from college said they would never listen to him because of how extreme he is. I fear that this is one of the most damaging ways that the "lefties don't understand righties but righties understand lefties" study can take effect. Just learn about who people are from osmosis, what could go wrong?
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I had also always put him in the same bucket as Crowder and Shapiro, one of these generic “own the libs/facts don’t care about your feelings” debate bro types. Strangely after his death I discovered my wife had frequently watched him on TikTok and thought very highly of his intelligence and eloquence.
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