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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   42218 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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There's a rapidly congealing hagiography surrounding Charlie Kirk in the wake of his shooting. Before his assassination, I was only vaguely aware of him as just another political commentator like Destiny, Bannon, Yiannopoulos, Fuentes, etc. I don't recall anyone trying to lionize him as one of the greats or anything like that. Of course, the political calculus changed the instant the bullet entered his body. Cynically, if Kirk looks better and more virtuous, then the more effectively he can be treated as a martyr, and, if need be, used as a cudgel against the left. And of course, it's best to strike while the iron is hot and the outpouring of support is at its greatest. Right-wing rhetoric once again bears a striking resemblance to the woke left of old, with the main retort being some version of "how DARE you!?!" I've seen plenty of conservatives assert that any criticism of Kirk at this moment is tantamount to saying "He deserved to get shot. Also, I 100% support political violence against people who disagree with me". This is flatly nonsense, as it's obviously valid to decry political violence while simultaneously believing Kirk was just a mundane political operative like any other.

In case you're wondering how far the hagiography is going, I'll provide some examples. Yesterday, Trump called him a "martyr for truth" and promised to award him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor that can be bestowed. Congresswoman Luna compared Kirk to previous political martyrs, tweeting a photo that placed him between MLK and Jesus while circulating a letter calling for a statue of Kirk to be erected in the US Capitol. Congresswoman Mace introduced a resolution for Kirk to lie in honor in the Capital Rotunda, and there's a decent chance he'll get a state funeral or a close equivalent. Others have angrily noted how Kirk's Wikipedia page doesn't have identical wording to MLK's assassination -- "assassination by gunshot" vs "gunshot wound" -- as if Kirk's death "was a hunting accident".(?)

I dug into some of the things Kirk has said, and I've found him to be little more than a cynical apparatchik that rapidly changed his views to align with the dominant Republican zeitgeist on several occasions.

@DaseindustriesLtd puts it like this:

Kirk was not a child, he was a cynical propagandist in the job of training unprincipled partisans, ever changing his tune precisely in alignment with the party line and President's whimsy (see the pivot on H1Bs). I admit I despised him and his little, annoying gotcha act of "debating" infantile leftists, milking them for dunk opportunities. They deserved the humiliation, but the pretense of "promoting dialogue" was completely hollow, and the massive number of shallow, cow-like people in the US for whom it is convincing depresses me.

And yeah, after doing a bit of research, that's basically what I've found as well.

One of the most steelmanned takes comes from, of all places, Ezra Klein in the NYT. He writes that Kirk was "practicing politics the right way" by being willing to "talk to the other side". This is a ludicrously hagiographic way of saying "he was a political commentator that did not actively advocate for violence". I suppose that, sadly, that last part is becoming an increasingly high bar these days.

In terms of the flip-flopping, there are several examples. Michael Tracey goes into some of them.

First, the Epstein stuff:

Perhaps most notoriously, after taking a personal phone call from Donald Trump, Charlie Kirk hopped on his podcast the next day and proclaimed, “Honestly, I’m done talking about Epstein for the time being. I’m gonna trust my friends in the administration. I’m gonna trust my friends in the government.” He then bizarrely tried to deny that he said this, or insist it had somehow been taken out of context — which it hadn’t. The context was that Trump got annoyed that a bunch of people had criticized him over Epstein at Kirk’s “Turning Point USA” conference, and then Trump called up Kirk, and then shortly thereafter, Kirk announced he was going to do the government’s bidding. That’s just what Kirk was, and the role he played in US political affairs — notwithstanding how people might now want to exalt him as a paragon of truth-telling virtue because of his untimely death.

Second, in foreign affairs:

His conduct was even more egregious in the run-up to Trump bombing Iran in June. During that episode, he pretty much served as a blatant government disinformation agent. Harsh as that might sound after he was brutally gunned down yesterday, it’s simply true. His mission was to demand uncritical faith in the US government, during a time of war — which is totally inexcusable for anyone who would consider themselves anything even remotely approximating a “journalist.” But that’s clearly not what Charlie Kirk considered himself. He instead considered himself a government media mouthpiece. On April 3, he said “A new Middle East war would be a catastrophic mistake.” Then by June 17, as drumbeats for the joint US-Israeli war against Iran were intensifying to full volume, Charlie changed his tune to mollify Trump, whom his whole identity was built around sycophantically serving. “It is possible to be an extreme isolationist,” Charlie Kirk warned his massive audience. “President Donald Trump is a man made for this moment, and we should trust him.” This was just pathetic. Turn off your critical thinking skills and place unquestioning “trust” in the US government to wage a war on false pretenses! What awesome, noble “truth-telling”!

Beyond these two bits, I've found a few more.

Third, on TikTok:

At first he was in favor of banning TikTok, saying "It's way past time to ban TikTok. It is a cancer on America." But then, after talking with some investors Trump changed his tune saying "I will never ban TikTok if re-elected, and Kirk dutifully followed. Shortly before Trump's inauguration Kirk ran a story saying TikTok was encouraging gen Z to become more conservative, and thus that Trump should "save TikTok".

Fourth, on Ron DeSantis:

DeSantis had a good burst of publicity in 2021 and 2022, and so Kirk started singing his praises as "the future of conservatism". That changed when Trump entered the primary in 2024. Soon it became clear that Trump was the frontrunner, and so Kirk changed his tune and started saying that DeSantis should drop out "for the heroes of our nation."

Fifth, on mail-in ballots:

At first, Kirk parroted the Trump line mail-in ballots were fake and easily manipulated and so everyone should vote in-person. By 2024, Turning Point Action rolled out “Chase the Vote” and a “Commit 100” early-vote/ballot-chasing machine mirroring the Trump/RNC pivot to embrace early and absentee voting (“Bank Your Vote,” later “Swamp the Vote USA”).

Finally, on political violence (and this is especially relevant given the context in which he died):

Kirk mostly gave anodyne anti-violence answers when questioned, but that didn't stop him from amplifying conspiracy theories when the shoe was on the other foot. When Paul Pelosi was attacked with a hammer, Kirk smiled, laughed, and suggested a "patriot" go bail out the person who perpetrated it so they could "ask questions". This was almost certainly in reference to the notion that Paul Pelosi was attacked by a gay prostitute, and that the whole episode was little more than a lover's quarrel.

Changing your mind is not a crime, but I start to wonder about political figures who conveniently do so exactly when public opinion shifts. Kirk was almost slavishly loyal to Trump when Trump was the avatar of the conservative movement, but was more than willing to toot DeSantis' horn when it seemed like he might be the next big thing -- despite that DeSantis was always going to have to compete against Trump in a zero-sum race for the nomination.

There's probably more I've missed, but at this point it feels like beating a dead horse.

I do think he's in the process of being exaggerated and caricatured in absurd ways - I came across this piece earlier today and I do think it's significantly overestimating him. I don't think Kirk was the Devil or a fascist or anything like that, but I do think he was an opportunist who thrived on provoking outrage and overreaction, and whose actual views were an interesting combination of chamelonic and exaggerated. His position changed regularly depending on who it was most profitable to suck up to as a young right-wing activist.

He shouldn't have been killed. What happened to him was a tragedy. But just because a tragedy happened to someone does not provide that person with any more insight or virtue than he possessed before it happened.

This is a ludicrously hagiographic way of saying "he was a political commentator that did not actively advocate for violence". I suppose that, sadly, that last part is becoming an increasingly high bar these days.

It's probably worth noting here that one of the talking points I'm seeing from people on the left is that he did advocate for violence, and that's one reason why it's okay to celebrate his death. This claim is often accompanied by a reference to quotes of his, or a quote itself, which I tend to assume is misleading/out of context, but haven't the background or interest in looking into each and every time.

It, um, also doesn't necessarily bode well for them, even if they'd say that their own celebrations of/implicit support for violence (here and previously) is somehow different... live by the sword, and all that.

According to the people on the left, their enemies already have no principles and no qualms about killing them, support for violence or not - the only reason why there's no open Holocaust on the streets is that for one reason or the other directly exterminating the left is not currently expedient for the left's enemies. So I doubt "live by the sword" will deter them.

I've seen plenty of conservatives assert that any criticism of Kirk at this moment is tantamount to saying "He deserved to get shot. Also, I 100% support political violence against people who disagree with me". This is flatly nonsense, as it's obviously valid to decry political violence while simultaneously believing Kirk was just a mundane political operative like any other.

People could also just not comment on the guy's assassination. Going on Twitter to criticize the guy 10 minutes after he gets internally decapitated live in front of his kids (rather than just saying "what a senseless tragedy" or just remaining quiet and saving the takes for a week later) does in fact amount to saying "he deserved to get shot" and both the intended audience and their political opponents are correct to interpret it that way!

No it doesn't. Conversation begats conversation. If someone posts, "RIP Charlie Kirk. He was a great conservative mind." It is perfectly okay to reply with, "actually he was a hack who believed whatever Trump told him to believe," without that being commentary on the acceptability of political violence.

You should try that at a funeral. Get video.

I wish people had a greater sense of propriety, and of actual (and not weaponized) empathy. I'm not sure we're capable of having devices that can broadcast our immediate thoughts about some major news event to the entire world. If I let myself be on social media and used it actively to spout random thoughts without a great deal of reflection beforehand, you could absolutely find moments where I reacted to something callously or wickedly, in ways I deeply regret. I usually get to the right place in the end, but I think often about what would happen if I didn't have a great system of friends and loved ones who are grounded and empathetic and draw me towards peace rather than intensity.

First, I don't think that scenario is a central example of what we're talking about, which is mostly people just putting shitty remarks about him into the ether apropos of nothing other than the event itself. That said, how and when you communicate is as important as the literal words. If I post "RIP Charlie Kirk. He was a great conservative mind." as a little eulogy and you reply with "actually he was a hack who believed whatever Trump told him to believe" then your message was heard loud and clear.

how and when you communicate is as important as the literal words.

Is there a better time to talk about Charlie Kirk than right now? He has never been, and never again will be, more relevant than he is right now. He is the topic of the national conversation.

In the moment of somebody's horrific shooting, all that needs to be said about them is "what a horrific tragedy". You can wait a week for the blog posts and the content will probably be better for it. You might miss the timing window for some sick Twitter dunks but I think that's probably for the best.

Maybe you'd have a point if we could all collectively agree to wait for a week before opining on this sort of thing, but top conservatives like Musk and Trump almost immediately blamed "the left" (basically half of the country) for this attack. You're effectively demanding unilateral disarmament.

Why does Musk or Trump blaming the left mean specifically that "the left" needs specifically to criticize Kirk as some sort of a response (rather than criticizing Musk or Trump, for instance, given the victim isn't the one blaming the left)? "the left" could even respond to Musk and Trump the way many sensible people did by disavowing the senseless violence without qualification and leaving it at that, which defangs that attack.

Top right-wing leaders are already pushing political narratives, so it's reasonable to respond to those narratives. Something similar happened around when Floyd was killed, and while I'm sure some leftists said it was "too soon" for conservatives to make counterarguments soon after he died, the conservatives were justified in doing so given the types of arguments leftists were pushing.

  • -10

You can make all kinds of responses to the right wing narratives, but I don't see how criticizing the dead man is a necessary component of any response to how the right wing is acting unless the speaker means to tacitly add "(and so for that reason it's good that he's dead)" to the end of their response.

Because it's relevant? I'm sure some leftists claimed that Floyd's drug habits were beyond the scope of the discussion, but they would have been wrong given whether he had fentanyl in his system could have been very, very important in how he died.

What kind of criticism is relevant to him getting shot that shouldn't be understood by the right as saying "and so he deserved it"? With regards to Floyd, rightists were clearly saying he had brought it on himself and that was the entire point.

Well, the most obvious analogy here would be Kirk's support for the Second Amendment. "Kirk supported the Second Amendment, he was wrong, and his murder is a great example of why he was wrong" is a pretty straightforward argument and it's hard to twist into a claim that Kirk deserved to die.

Though there's many kinds of "bought it on himself". If you grant the premise that Kirk's public persona was particularly loathsome/evil/outrageous, then you might very well think: I don't think he deserved to die, but he brought it on himself by advocating for such horrible things, someone rasher and more hot-headed than me was bound to snap sooner or later.

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In the light of what blue sky looks like now, are they wrong?

Bluesky is not representative of liberals as a whole, and especially not top Dem leaders (with perhaps the exception of Ilhan Omar).

  • -14

Bluesky is the official twitter replacement for people who hate Musk (aka, Democrat voters). Reddit, one of the biggest websites on the internet, has essentially banned twitter in favor of bluesky via moderator coordination, and so now theoretically apolitical places like /r/nfl and /r/mlb will only link to bluesky.

It's the representation of Democrat voters online. Maybe not as a whole, but absolutely their online presence.

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.

  • -14

It's the purest, most concentrated and distilled Democrat space on the internet. It's the essence of the Democrat party, its beating heart.

Sure, the whole party is dilute with normies, but it's the people on bluesky that determine the flavor of the party.

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.

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Are "top Dem leaders" really more representative of the average leftist that actual average leftists posting on social media? I've been hearing variations on "just a few kids on college campuses" for 20 years now, and I stopped buying it years ago, sorry.

Yes, they are. Otherwise we're arguing over classic weak men. Perhaps they'll change in a decade or so, but as of now the top Dem establishment is pretty disciplined on giving anodyne answers to Kirk's assassination.

  • -15

You're effectively demanding unilateral disarmament.

This is in no way too much to ask for after such visceral political violence. If someone blew AOC's head off there's a zero percent chance I'd post some sneering crap about how I'm "not mourning" her death.

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.

  • -11

I could absolutely respond by acknowledging what a horrible tragedy this was for her loved ones and the country, and could even deny the involvement of the right, without having to criticize her at all.

I can't speak for others, but RBGs passing is the closest analogy. She did untold damage to the country and was glazed for weeks by her fans. That wasn't even an assassination and I'm still uninterested in broadcasting how much I hated her on LinkedIn. It's psychotic behavior.

... 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.

Notably, RGB was not murdered by a right-wing extremist, and her death had been preceded by a long and appalling spectacle where leftists tried to reassure one another that she was totally fine, fit as a fiddle, healthy as a horse. This was after she declined to step down during the tail-end of Obama's tenure because, according to her own side's reporting, she wanted her replacement to be appointed by the first female president.

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.

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.

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It would be trivially easy to dispute the point about shared culpability without minimizing or relishing the gravity of the event. In fact, such a rebuttal would be far more credible in the absence of those comments.

I don't know, people not waiting some minimum amount of time to be critical, and doling out "why can't we all get along?" platitudes, just can't be sustained in the attention economy. It's not the people are just so much meaner now.

So... you're reading a bunch of transcripts and concluding that he was a mainstream milquetoast conservative. Well, you'd be correct on that. But Charlie Kirk's power was not in his ideology, or his ideas, or his intellect. Charlie Kirk was extraordinary because alone among any political commentator in the US, he would go to various colleges and universities and welcome open, civil debate with anyone who showed up. This is something that our society is sorely lacking and we need more of, but there are very few people who have the courage to do it. Probably fewer now.

If your point is to dismiss him because he's not an ideological tentpole of conservatism, you are missing the big picture entirely.

He was dunk-farming on infantile leftists for clout in a similar vein that Milo Yiannopoulos exploited about a decade ago. That's not a bad thing, but it's hardly some great civic service.

  • -12

This is a high level bad take.

He want to Universities and spoke to everyone. Most college kids are dumb now - what can you do?

Milo was a piece of shit asshole - Kirk was a kid who started a company that became defining for a generation.

Kirk was a completely nice, normal conservative.

He represents the best of ‘ that side ‘ imo. That side being people on the right.

I don't see how Milo was such a piece of shit relative to Kirk, unless we're judging specifically by how much we personally agree with their political opinions. Milo was also successful, for a time, until he crashed out by ending up on the wrong side of the right-wing pedo craze if my memory serves correctly.

he crashed out by ending up on the wrong side of the right-wing pedo craze if my memory serves correctly.

Not exactly. Specifically, he was promoting relationships between older gay men and teenage boys ( even 13 years old), as someone who'd had sex with a man when aged 13 and liked it and thought it was a hugely important part of the gay experience.

I think he'd got used to the idea that being gay allowed him to get away with being a shock jockey and didn't get where the limits of that were.

Yiannopoulos has been accused of advocating paedophilia after the emergence of several video clips in which he said that sexual relationships between 13-year-old boys and adults can be "perfectly consensual" and positive experiences for such boys.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milo_Yiannopoulos

"I think particularly in the gay world, and outside the Catholic Church—if that's where some of you want to go with this—I think in the gay world some of the most important, enriching and incredibly life-affirming, important shaping relationships very often between younger boys and older men," Yiannopoulos said on the podcast. "They can be hugely positive experiences."

In the video, Yiannopoulos claimed it wasn't pedophilia as some 13 years olds are "sexually mature," saying "we get hung up on this child abuse stuff."

(...)

"And you know what, I'm grateful for Father Michael, I wouldn't give nearly such good head if it wasn't for him."

https://www.newsweek.com/marjorie-taylor-green-milo-yiannopoulos-pedophilia-remarks-1713391

Yeah, fair enough.

The most hilarious thing about this situation for me was that, for about a year preceding this, Milo's leftist critics kept trying to justify using violence against him in public speaking events because he had harmful opinions and such. Liberals kept pointing out both how evil that is and how counterproductive that is for shutting someone down. And, indeed, when Milo got got, it was entirely because he was given free speech with which to speak his mind and discredit himself in the eyes of enough people who supported him to get him shut down. Precisely as the liberals said would play out of you just give bigots like him loudspeakers and let them speak their mind.

you just give bigots like him loudspeakers and let them speak their mind

Broadly I agree with you - thus LiberalsOfTikTok but Milo didn’t get cancelled for being bigoted but for being much, much too open.

I keep seeing this take. It's one thing to do 12 hours of "man on the street" and then edit to highlight idiots and owns. I'm sure he edited for owns for clips, but how much screening was Kirk doing on people coming up to the mic? Even if it was a fair amount, unlike man on the street, he wasn't going up to randos; his interlocutors came to him. Where else should you go than universities to take on opponents? The only critique I can see is that with a quick Google (it's very bent towards shooting-related links) he didn't spend a lot of time at truly elite universities. But that said, he went to Cambridge.

I think debates should have some sort of fairness to them. It's fine if two random men on the street want to get into an argument and film it, that's fair. It's less fair if one of them is a professional talking head, and he's been researching talking points and practicing this debate professionally, while the other person is just getting into it for the first time. That's not a debate, that's an ambush.

That's not a debate, that's an ambush.

Kirk's interlocutors chose to walk up to the mic. His appearances are announced weeks (months?) in advance. Kirk had a decade of his strongest arguments publicly available. This is as far from an ambush as you can get.

It's only an ambush because those college kids think they're brilliant, generation-defining thinkers who definitely have all the answers and they're actually ignorant fools. If Kirk accomplished nothing but inspiring the faintest touch of humility and consideration in a small portion of the kids he debated, then he had more value than most of their professors.

At the same time, the time and place event is posted online, so students have time to do research and prepare their points of view. I don't think asking students at colleges and universities to come prepared for a discussion is too much.

If they aren't even capable of that, they shouldn't even be attending said universities, or at the very least willingly stepping up to the mic. The problem is, a lot of students come up to the mic convinced in their beliefs with little to no reasoning, so they get stumped at the slightest bit of questioning. A simple acknowledgement of "hmm, I don't know, I guess I'll look into it more" would paint them in a less embarrassing light. But because they're not approaching with the intent of conversation so much as wanting to oppose Kirk, they inevitably come off as foolish.

Also, the format is more along the lines of a conversation and less of an actual structured formal debate. Kirk has done actual formal structured debate. So yea, he's not engaging in a debate, he's engaging in conversation.

Do any of the students look at this guy's website? This reminds me of "A Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy," where the Vogons place theif notice to demolish Eartj on Alpha Centauri and blame humans for not looking at it. It seems like these are just regular collegs kids walking by with no advance notice or experience in this kind of "public argumentative conversation"

What you're saying here doesn't make much sense. The blue-haired kids just happened to ignorantly stumble into an assembly hosted on campus, after classes are over, watch their friends get demolished, and then step up to the mic and do the same thing?

The reality is that these were fervent believers, ready to be angry and combative, who probably did plenty of research beforehand. The clips that made it to TikTok were probably the lower performers, but they were performers nonetheless. Characterizing these discussions as an intellectual giant beating up on stupid children isn't accurate.

Considering protestors routinely show up at Kirk and other conservative speaker's events, there's bound to be people on the other side who could come prepared to debate. For the everyday college student that shows up with no knowledge ahead of time, entering the conversation with some humility and open mindedness would do wonders. I thought college and universities were supposed to be a place that helps students hone their critical thinking skills.

I've seen students with leftist point of views come in and because they don't show up being aggressive, there's an actual conversation and dialogue between Kirk and those students. The ones that go viral with the gotcha moments tend to be aggressive, close minded students that come into the conversation with intent to win an argument.

Edit: I just saw this video of the student that was talking to Kirk when Kirk got assassinated, and in it he says he was at the event because he noticed Kirk was touring American universities while scrolling his videos and one of the events was at his school, which is why he's there.

I once saw a flat earther talking to students on a college campus. I thought it was interesting how many people walked up to him to argue that the earth is round, and then strung together incoherent or factually incorrect arguments.

I'm not sure what the lesson is there, but it stuck with me.

I'm not sure what the lesson is there

Debate is a skill. Most people overestimate their ability to assemble an argument on the fly, overestimate their knowledge of a subject, and even when theoretically prepared overestimate their composure when an unfriendly interlocutor starts pushing on them.

You can loose an argument to someone who is obviously, comically wrong because they more prepared and more composed in the actual debate.

That is interesting.

I think the lesson is if you want to argue with flat earthers with the intent to win the argument and fail to do so, you should accept that you don't actually know why the earth is round, then spend some time learning some reasons for why the earth is round so that in the future you are better equipped to win that argument. Or, if you have no interest and time then don't bother. Flat earth discussion has very little productivity value.

If you are unable to argue your point or dismantle the opponent's, just accept you lost the debate. It doesn't mean you're wrong, or the opponent is right. Or, just listen with an open mind. If the flat earther has a solid argument, maybe they're right. Otherwise, you'll spot the contradiction or error. If you can't then maybe you aren't understanding their argument, so just admit you need to think about it more and move on.

That's not a debate, that's an ambush.

In what other ambush scenario does the side that's supposedly being ambushed get to decide whether, how, and when to engage?

Yeah, it's not an ambush at all. He invited them to attack his prepared position, that's not an ambush.

If you walk up to somebody to get into an argument with them (even if they're encouraging you to do this), can you really say you were ambushed?

Baited, then.

It's not necessarily that unfair, because the "ambushed" side has the benefit of chosing whether or not to engage, whereas the professional looks bad if he refuses to debate someone, no one will know about the amateurs that don't show up. The amateur can research the specific point they want to make beforehand, has the benefit of researching the person they will debate beforehand... Knowing that you're going to go against someone who does that professionally, you would assume that they've already encountered every easy surface level arguments. But yeah, some people just look at "easy looking" carnival games and assume that there's nothing funny going on, just like I imagine some people look at a "debate me" event from a pro-gun person and think they never considered school shootings can and have happened. Still, they walked in it of their own accord; and it's a lot fairer than gotcha vox-pop you see on TV.

There's also a bit of a magic trick where the professional will move the scope of the discussion to a field they've prepared heavily as part of their opening gambit. It's not limited to these sort of public oral debates, but once you catch the trick it's hard to miss how common it is, even if the actual slight-of-hand is pretty hard to imitate.

That feels less like magic because it's done completely in the open. I guess most people can't put it together. What I think is more of a trick is sound engineering. I didn't watch enough of Kirk to know if it was happening at his events, but it happens on the radio all the time. The host has a big, strong, clear voice with everything tuned, while the caller is speaking through a shitty phone mic, speaking at half the volume with horrible sound quality and the host has a mute button if they don't want to just straight talk over the caller.

Control over framing is truly one of the most important parts of narrative building. In the same sense that any metaphor can break down if examined too closely, being able to set initial scopes of conversation- and refuse/refute attempts to reshape it- is an almost necessary skill in any sort of competitive/contested narrative environment.

Learning how to handle it subtly / gracefully / reasonably is another important skill, since 'I'm just going to ignore what you said and repeat my point' tends to go down badly, but framing devices ranging from timeframe and cultural contexts are significant.

Any of Kirk's content that zoomers were seeing on TikTok was of course going to be highly cherrypicked.

I don't know if he also did full unedited livestreams, but even if he did I'd hardly call it amazing. Debate is mostly fake. By that, I mean the idea that the strongest argument (or the most truth-seeking individual, or even just the most persuasive) inevitably wins is fake. It's a skill like any other -- Yglesias has gone into this on the case of Hasan.

Debate is mostly fake.

What is more real, other than raw violence?

"Debate" is a sport. It's historically connected to honest truth-seeking discourse, but often strays far from it. Twitch illustrates one degenerate mode. Competitive policy debate illustrates another.

It brings to mind the nuns murdered and raped in the Paris Commune, in the Russian Revolution, in Republican Spain. If you bring that up to a leftist today, they will twist themselves into knots into trying to justify it. Yes, even the feminists. Some pithy statement on how they were part of Christofascism or something.

Nuns.

I think it is clear that there is no level of innocence that a Communard agitator will not justify as tainted and full of sin. It doesn't matter if he wasn't a saint. There is no bottom to the depravity of which these people can find. There are many on reddit and bluesky and in real life who are fundamentally illiberal and want others dead for having ideas they dislike. That's a plain fact.

I'm... really not sure what you're trying to prove with any of this.

/begin speculation

I'm noticing that a lot of 'moderate' lefties (including my own father, sadly enough) are internally struggling with the fact that yeah, they didn't like Kirk, and would prefer he shut up, and yet having him killed this way makes it clear that they're not the good, peaceful, intellectually superior side in the conflict by default.

So they're casting around for some way to resolve this by either tearing down the victim, or criticizing the hyperbolic praise being heaped on him (as a way to indirectly tear him down), or pointing out lefty victims that didn't get this much attention, or trying desperately to make it about guns, or about righty hypocrisy, or, recently, to imply that the shooter was actually righty.

That so many of them are wedging their shoe firmly in the back of their throat, thus making the point stronger is kind of a natural outcome of their mindsets.

/speculation

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.

This so so boo outgroup I'm shocked it doesn't run afoul of the rules. Have some charity especially when you are going around demanding it from others.

The steelman answer is the right has spent the last half-decade claiming they are the party of "Truth" telling, that these lefties want to lie to you and silence you when you try to speak up. Now the right is committed to glazing Kirk and any concept of the "Truth" is out the window, and the right wants to silence you when you speak up. The "moderate" lefties are probably doing the same exact thing the "moderate" righties were doing.

  • -11

If martyrdom doesn't make one a hero, nothing can.

Kirk was a man. Not a symbol. Now the opposite is true.

Calling that state of affairs a lie is just raw unfettered denial of the human experience.

You can say neither side cares about the truth, you might even be right. But the one guy who did so enough to talk publicly to the other side in places that are meant for a debate that never happens isn't here anymore.

Who's really so afraid of what he had to say?

None of it matters now. The debate is over. We all lose.

I think martyrdom generally requires you to willingly be killed for your beliefs. Staring in the face of death for your beliefs and choosing to accept it, is an honorable and noble decision. That creates a powerful symbol. A political agitator being killed by someone who disagrees with them is frankly human politics as usual (in the grand sense). We are a nasty species with a penchant for killing other humans for being outside our tribe.

Calling that state of affairs a lie is just raw unfettered denial of the human experience.

I think the calling into question whether Kirk was a Cynical Propagandist/Political Agitator vs a Noble Truth-seeker is fair game. Doing so is not denying any human experience. And if the truth laid bare is still enough to rouse a tribe to hero-ify than that is fair game too and better for it.

But the one guy who did so enough to talk publicly to the other side

You see talk, I see preach and mock. I see a young priest going among the disbelievers not to understand and find common ground but to convert, mock, and vilify and derive popularity and monetary compensation for his efforts. I don't think such base motivations are worthy of calling it martyrdom and it makes a mockery of that very human experience.

The debate is over. We all lose.

Yes we do.

I think the calling into question whether Kirk was a Cynical Propagandist/Political Agitator vs a Noble Truth-seeker is fair game.

The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.

This question is indeed fair, but the second Kirk died of his wounds it became an academic issue for historians that is completely politically irrelevant.

You see talk, I see preach and mock.

I see what looks the most like dialectic that has happened on an American campus since the 1970s. It sure was preaching. But at least heretics were involved somehow.

It doesn't matter now. Discourse is dead.

This so so boo outgroup I'm shocked it doesn't run afoul of the rules.

It's not, for the sme reason your post isn't.

Now the right is committed to glazing Kirk and any concept of the "Truth" is out the window, and the right wants to silence you when you speak up. The "moderate" lefties are probably doing the same exact thing the "moderate" righties were doing.

This makes no sense as a steelman. Kirk does not represent a a detraction from the truth so great, any concept ofbit goes out the window. Anyone who claims so would have to be even more diaguated by academia, the mainstream media, not to mention the heaps upon heaps of influencers they follow themselves.

They can't be disturbed by the silencing in principle, because that would require them to have a long track record of complaints against the much worse silencing done by the left.

What outgroup am I booing? I'm booing Faceh specifically for his lack of charity and the fact that he probably can put the shoes on the other foot but is choosing to just be a partisan.

This makes no sense as a steelman. Kirk does not represent a a detraction from the truth so great, any concept ofbit goes out the window. Anyone who claims so would have to be even more diaguated by academia, the mainstream media, not to mention the heaps upon heaps of influencers they follow themselves.

This entire thread is filled was counter points, Kirk was not some virtuous truth-seeker. He was to quote Dase: "a cynical propagandist in the job of training unprincipled partisans, ever changing his tune precisely in alignment with the party line and President's whimsy". Glazing him as a truthseeker such is sufficiently large enough departure to be called out. It would be like calling Beria, "just an investigative journalist trying to bring to light all the evildoers" Calling out that calling out as some sort of lefty bootlicking fanfiction is very uncharitable. The steelman absolutely is that that anyone calling into question Kirk's virtue are doing the mirror behavior of people on the right who called out the leftist propaganda.

I'm curious, what did you think /speculation meant at the end of my comment there?

Now the right is committed to glazing Kirk and any concept of the "Truth" is out the window, and the right wants to silence you when you speak up.

By the way, here's a twitter post with over 100k likes claiming Charlie called someone a "Chink." The community note speaks for itself. The post is still up, of course, the right hasn't 'silenced' them.

The left isn't very committed to being the party of 'truth' right now, and seems damn happy with constructing an alternate reality for themselves.

I genuinely believe they can't help themselves. Maybe I'm wrong, but it fits my observations.

No offense but following this:

That so many of them are wedging their shoe firmly in the back of their throat, thus making the point stronger is kind of a natural outcome of their mindsets.

with "/speculation" is pretty much the rhetorical equivalent of being an asshole to someone and then saying "JK!!" I think the subtext(is it even subtext??) is really clear that you don't think much of your political opponents and you can't come up with a compelling reason that they don't feel Kirk is worthy of the lionization he is receiving.

The left isn't very committed to being the party of 'truth' right now, and seems damn happy with constructing an alternate reality for themselves

Sounds like the right has the perfect moment to position themselves as the party of 'truth'. Yet here they are proving that it was only ever superficial and the rest of us are stuck with two dominant tribes that have no virtue.

Yeah, this is starting to feel like an elaborate version of the mental gymnastics meme. I can get the "just because a lefty did it, that doesnt say anything about the broader left" reaction, but we're cycling through them and they're getting increasingly frantic.

And again I can understand that from a hard-leftist, but it's quite a bit more disturbing coming from the moderate ones.

I saw this one and I think my brain seized up a little.

https://x.com/alluring_nyc/status/1965893003924668506

This is a ludicrously hagiographic way of saying "he was a political commentator that did not actively advocate for violence". I suppose that, sadly, that last part is becoming an increasingly high bar these days.

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.

cynical apparatchik

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.

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.

"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?

  • -18

I did college debate as well. This is specifically a problem for prominent rightists doing open speeches or debate in front of leftists, in the last 10 or 15 years, where the rightists has a view that the left has decided is no longer in the realm of acceptable debate, ex: the current Republican presidential nominee/president is good; gay marriage is bad; 13 do 50 or anything race realist; ice deportations are actually good, etc. I can hardly think of any rightist other than Charlie who was still doing those kind of open-invite debates at colleges on those kind of topics. IIRC, Charles Murray basically stopped doing events after the attack at Middlebury.

It can take a lot of courage when there are real stakes. Have you ever made an unpopular argument in front of a committee of your 'peers' with all of them glaring at you, knowing that there's a small but serious chance you're going to get into actual real trouble but nevertheless feeling that something has to be said? It remains perhaps the most frightening thing I've done. It's been ten years but I still remember hiding my hands under the table so nobody could see they were shaking.

Now, perhaps I'm more sensitive about such things than you are, but perhaps also the venue was a bit heavier than yours. It was only university politics but equally to some extent the welfare of two hundred people were involved. Likewise, Kirk was involved in real politics and knew that he was at serious risk of being cancelled and blacklisted, even if he didn't expect to die for it.

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.

  • -13

I don't think you understand. Maybe our ages are different? Or just our environments. 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.

In contrast the debates Kirk was doing were real debates - public, exposing himself, with serious consequences. Even eight/ten years ago we kept reading stories about people being fired and teenagers getting refused from university for saying the most anodyne things. It was very, very clear then that putting your face out there as a conservative meant exposing yourself to pain - giving up any hope of a good career in the usual areas, being SWATed. Remember all those people who rang Scott's work trying to get him fired? We've just found out how not-fake Kirk's debates were but even before that he knew he was taking the hard road compared to going-along-to-get-along.

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.

  • -11

Sometimes I could be in rooms with dozens or even low-hundreds if I made it to finals

On a side note, congratulations, that sounds really impressive. You must have been good.

Cancel culture was a threat too, but being on the conservative side makes you less likely to have serious ramifications, not more likely.

This I think is where our intuitions aren’t matching up.

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.

My dissents are as follows:

  1. These grifters are a recent phenomenon, largely post 2020. The right-wing funding and broadcasting ecosystem necessary to make these people independent from left-wing funding and infrastructure, and to cushion them against left-wing cancellation attempts, grew up during and post Covid as a response to the blatant censorship going on at that time.
  2. 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. This is why it was mostly done by a motley assortment of people who had accidentally survived cancellation attempts (Jordan Peterson, Bari Weiss, Toby Young, maybe Joe Rogan?) and those who were thick and/or already Blue figures of hate and had nothing to lose (Katie Hopkins, …?).
  3. As such, becoming a public right-wing spokesman was not a sensible move for a bright person good with words. Especially before 2020, 2022. (I believe Kirk started 10 years ago?) It would have been much safer, more sensible and more long-term profitable to be a good boy, keep his mouth shut and go into a lucrative Blue industry like PR or Consulting or what have you.
  4. Therefore Kirk’s debates may have appeared pretty safe and rote by the end, but choosing to put himself into that position instead of taking the other options available to him likely required considerable courage and self-sacrifice, as did continuing with it until perhaps 2023 after which it probably became easier.

Hopefully that lays out my thoughts clearly.

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:

  1. 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.

  2. 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?

Turning point USA was founded in 2012, so 13 years ago. He was 18 then so he pretty much went all in.

From Wikipedia:

In May 2012, 18-year-old Charlie Kirk gave a speech at Benedictine University's Youth Government Day. Impressed, retired marketing entrepreneur and Tea Party activist Bill Montgomery encouraged Kirk to postpone college and engage full-time in political activism. A month later, the day after Kirk graduated from high school, they launched Turning Point USA, a section 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.Montgomery became Kirk's mentor, and worked behind the scenes handling the paperwork for the organization. Montgomery often described himself as the group's co-founder, although it was not an official recognition by the group or Kirk.

Also, the phenomena of the right-wing grifter, who is trying to patch together a living from begging for subscriptions and doing ad reads for supplements, is entirely because the right does not have the patronage ecosystem that the establishment left has. IIRC, journalists at Pro-Publica are making salaries well into the six figures thanks to support from foundations. So they don't have to sound like grifters when they speak to the public, because they have that support behind the scenes. And then there is the entire university system, which is what left-wing patronage really looks like.

We're you debating in favor of any right-leaning policies? You might be right, but I think the zeitgeist for the average conservative, even moderate ones, is heavily flavored by a decade of events like James Damore (pilloried for an IMO milquetoast view, definitely not violent, on STEM demographics) or Nick Sandmann (a literal kid with the audacity to get photographed standing awkwardly between two groups of vastly less polite protesters) getting dragged through the media, or no shortage of other such cases. Maybe forgive such folks for thinking it's unsafe to express such opinions in the public square.

Doubly so since Kirk seems to have just been literally shot and killed for doing so.

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.

But I, like Kirk, was in an environment where I was never going to run a serious risk of being ostracized.

Are you seriously trying to suggest, at this of all times, that he wasn't running any risks?

that he wasn't running any risks?

... of being ostracized? Yes I will suggest that, because it's true.

"Going out in public" and debating people is hardly something that takes immense courage. I did policy debate in college -- where's my statute?

You have to actually demonstrate courage by confronting people who want you dead with nothing but your words.

I did policy debate in college -- where's my statute?

Get a bruise doing it and we can consider a plaque.

Before this, public figures generally didn't worry that much about their personal safety.

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.

  • -14

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.

More comments

I mean, give Kirk some credit for absolutely practicing what he preached. Guy was married, two kids, clearly devoted Christian, didn't even use foul language which a lot of the right indulges in. When South Park started ribbing him, he leaned into the joke! He was not one to play victim.

And of course he put himself out there, he was the guy sitting down and talking directly to people, face to face, not 'hiding' behind a camera, only talking through the screen.

Maybe calling him "The Conservative Mr. Rogers" is a bit much. BUT. This is an example of the sort of role model that males might actually find appealing and would pull them away from, e.g. the Andrew Tates of the world.

And one thing I learned in the wake of this is that Kirk was WAY more popular, including among young people, than I anticipated. Despite his flip-flopping on Tiktok, he had 9 million followers on the platform.. Turning Point USA was and is a LARGE Org, well funded. And, as we can now see, pretty well-liked among normies.

And no, being 'better' than Andrew Tate doesn't qualify you for sainthood, but... I will actually make the claim he was at least a step or two above ANY left-leaning commentator you could name.

I looked around and realized that the left doesn't have a real Charlie Kirk equivalent. There is no lefty figure who actively seeks out havens of conservative thought to openly challenge their consensuses, to their face.

I mean, you have Sacha Baron Cohen, he goes into right-leaning spaces... but he's doing it explicitly to mock and parodize them, not to have dialogue.

You have your Jon Stewarts and John Olivers that use their platform to preach without permitting response or critique to them, just endless lecturing and jokes.

Your Hasan Pikers who interact with a self-selected audience in chat, and rarely allow a single contradicting thought to penetrate the bubble.

Your AOCs, your Bernie Sanders', and Mamdanis who WILL go out in Public, and love to do photo ops and heap criticism on the right from the heights of their podium... but once again will not enter any arena where they don't have a clear popularity or numerical advantage.

No, Charlie Kirk wasn't just unique on the right, he was something that ONLY appears on the right.

I don't know of any lefties who ever put themselves in "the lion's den" and attempted to make the case for their ideals directly to their ideological opponents.

What's that say about the state of the left's intellectual honesty? I dunno. I never credited them with much. The lefties who found their way into this space, (Anyone remember Darwin?) they haven't fared well when pressed on their ideas without the ability to falsify a popular consensus.

I think Charlie Kirk is a better man, more deserving of national honor on his popularity alone, and certainly a more consistent and principled man (even if one of said principles was 'don't openly contradict Trump') than literally any lefty you could name. In a time where so, so many public figures are getting outed as sex pests, pervs, frauds, and generally slimy people, I actually think Charlie Kirk was precisely what he presented himself as.

If we want to start pulling people down, we know that there's ample material with which we could smear, e.g. Martin Luther King Jr. But that wouldn't erase their positive accomplishments.

And more directly to the point, he's probably the least deserving of being killed for his speech than most of the righty commentators I can think of, who are often more vicious in their rhetoric.

I mean, you have Sacha Baron Cohen, he goes into right-leaning spaces... but he's doing it explicitly to mock and parodize them, not to have dialogue.

Is this not what Kirk was doing? He got popular from doing dunk videos mocking and parodizing leftists. He wasn't going to campuses to engage in some sort of virtue-find-the-truth-discourse. He was a debate bro/arguments-are-soldiers type who would never have admitted he was wrong. There was always some gotcha or rhetorical trick to dunk on his opponents and end the debate. Has he ever, on screen, in these debates admitted he was wrong, or that he didn't have the answer? I'd love to see evidence to that effect.

There was always some gotcha or rhetorical trick to dunk on his opponents and end the debate.

This is definitely not true. There were many conversations where he simply pointed out the crux that placed them at an impasse and wished them well. It was much more often the interlocutor that terminated the discussion.

he simply pointed out the crux that placed them at an impasse

Having been in discussions like this before, this is many times just that rhetorical trick. It often involves subtly strawmanning their argument and the connecting it to some disfavorable idea. You essentially create this gordian knot and that demand they untie it despite it not really being their argument in the first place.

Since he clips most of his stuff, if you find some I will watch it to be proven wrong.

Nobody ever 'admits they were wrong' in a standard internet-style debate.

The point is, as ever, to provide something persuasive to the onlookers.

And I think his main strength was simply demonstrating to College students, who otherwise feel like they're surrounded by peers who believe one thing and are pressured to play along, that there are in fact people who think like they do and thus relieve that pressure and contradict the appearance of consensus.

It helps that most college students are in fact pretty stupid about why they hold their beliefs and thus its pretty easy to pull 'gotchas' on them.

And ironically he had a Groyper problem for a while, where guys who were further right than him would try to point out how his positions were inconsistent. And they were much better at tripping him up than the average college student.

That... is not what Sacha Baron Cohen is achieving with his work.

Nobody ever 'admits they were wrong' in a standard internet-style debate.

And I find that state of affairs deeply depressing and not at all worthy of praise. I don't think just because there is mud we should lionize the pig that goes and rolls in it.

And I think his main strength was simply demonstrating to College students, who otherwise feel like they're surrounded by peers who believe one thing and are pressured to play alone

I too was once a right of center college student among a fairly lefty student body, I don't think watching some agitator coming to my school ever made me feel a release of pressure. Because it was never just an intellectual debate, they always smuggled their own worldview in and tried to assert it was correct. Ie. Peterson: "We need to think about the boys, and how they need to follow traditional gender roles(smuggled assertion) It was like trading one oppressor for another.

That... is not what Sacha Baron Cohen is achieving with his work.

I mean his whole lifestyle was funded by him going out and essentially mocking the intellectually disabled. He dunks on his outgroups, clips it and sells it to his ingroup for laughs and fame. This is Sacha Baron Cohen's whole schtick too. Calling it some higher calling of opening the minds of young kids is just the in-group party line to hide the stink of mud.

he was something that ONLY appears on the right.

ANY left-leaning commentator you could name.

Well, you listed some examples of people who you don't think meet the criteria, i think probably the most comparable person on the left is Destiny. For all his moral shortcomings, both alleged and photographed, the guy does essentially the exact kind of events Kirk was doing.

I'm not fully aware of the dem college campus debatelord universe but i do imagine there are more examples if i was to look into it. IIRC there was a whole traveling circus of these types who got into an internal struggle session the week they were supposed to start a collegiate tour earlier this year (which, yes this is funny but it also shows that there are more personalities in this space than i am familiar with)

You can say a lot of things about the dire state of the broader left wing's willingness to engage in debate, but there are a number of people of varying levels of success and organizational prowess either doing or trying to do what Kirk did, so i think you are putting too much emphasis on how uniquely brave his actions were.

RIP though, he didn't deserve to die for his beliefs, and certainly not by public execution.

At one point, it seemed like Destiny was making good faith effort to engage in discussion with the other side. He went into debates with people on the right like Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Actual Justice Warrior, etc. Talking with high profile right-leaning individuals is in a sense more courageous than talking to random students. I haven't seen Destiny go viral for debating random students. Does he even do live open mic events? I've only seen him in on like discord calls.

As it turned out, it was not done in good faith and it was just an attempt to get more people over to his side. It seems Destiny is no longer interested in maintaining decorum with members from the opposite side. Destiny literally mocked the firefighter killed at Trump's rally. Kirk didn't mock anyone dying on the other side. I don't think Destiny has made any attempt to reach out to the right in a long while.

EDIT: See @eee solid criticism's below on my take on Destiny. I have crossed out my previous statement and updated with clearer statement.

He has literally done events at college campuses with a Change My Mind table in the style of Stephen Crowder at least twice. I wouldn't say it makes up most of his content though.

I find your accusations of bad fatih puzzling. He likes debating things. He agrees to debate people and then debates them. How exactly is he acting in bad faith? Does he edit his videos dishonestly to misrepresent his debates? The whole purpose of a debate is to convince people that you are correct. You seem to be saying that because he does debate for the purpose of convincing people that he is correct is an example of him acting in bad faith. That does not make any sense. If you want to say he is acting in bad faith you need to show something like him representing that he has some goal or purpose, and then acting in ways in contradiction of that. Not that he acts in some way other than you personally approve of.

That is fair. Let me clarify. If you try to paint yourself as someone extending an olive branch to the other side and try to get them to see your side via debate, only to change your tune and start celebrating the death of regular civilians just because they are on the other side of the political side of the isle, you're no longer trying to convince people via discussion. Evidence for him extending out the olive branch is him going around the right wing circuit engaging in debates without him talking shit about the people he is reaching out to during the 2022-2023 time period.

Destiny's attitude towards regular people on the right has completely shifted since. On numerous occasions he's celebrated or made fun of the deaths of regular ordinary citizens (the fireman at Trump's rally that got killed, the children that died in the texas flooding, and now Charlie Kirk to name a few examples). The only reason I can think of that he would do this is because this is rage baiting and that gets him more attention, which is how he makes money. The way I see it he wasn't able to increase his viewer count from people on the right to the level he wanted otherwise he wouldn't have changed his tune. It would be one thing if he were to talk shit about the people he debated, it's another to start insulting the population you were once trying to reach out to.

As for bad faith tactics in debating, I'm going to point to one example that soured my impression of him. https://www.themotte.org/post/752/smallscale-question-sunday-for-november-5/158604?context=8#context

To summarize, Destiny's debate opponent made a claim, then Destiny proceeded scroll through his phone trying to prove the opponent wrong, while the opponent is still talking. He pretty much picks the first statistic he can find that can prove he is right, but he does so by lying about the order initially to make it seem like the opponent was right, oh wait, just kidding it's the other way around. This is poor manner in a debate. Behavior aside, I also looked into the data and I walked away with more questions than answers, I certainly would not be comfortable using that particular stat unless my goal is to just win an argument in a debate at the moment

To quote myself

I like to think I'm a somewhat intelligent guy, but this exercise has shown just how untrained I am in information gathering and fact checking. I supposed to the next step is to call or contact experts or at least the authors of these articles but honestly I feel like that is a lot of work for something that at the end of the day is just a result of me wanting to find the source of a fact mentioned in a random two hour debate from the internet. I suppose for informal discussions this level of research is more than can be reasonably expected, and if you were trying to write a book or video or anything that you want to share to the public, you should do your due diligence to make sure you aren't spreading misinformation.

But in every speech and conversation, we are constantly referencing a bank of information we have accumulated in our life times. And we shouldn't have to walk around having to fact check every little thing we come across, because knowledge is near limitless. I think Destiny is one of the more reasonable twitch streamers when it comes to political content, and for him a 30 second google search was enough to decide on the facts for a point in a debate, while I spent 15 minutes looking into the data only to come up with more questions than answers. I'd rather not have to go through this exercise every time I'm questioning what someone is saying, and perhaps the answer is stop listening to that person, but at the same time I'd also rather not disengage in conversation just because I'm being lazy.

You can see I was far more amiable to Destiny when I made that post. I gave the guy a chance. Watched his debates. Lurked on his subreddit for a while. Sorry, but I don't want to listen to a guy that wishes the worst on those on the other side of the political spectrum, and he's a guy that primarily focuses on trying to win an argument, not seeking the truth. In essence, he's a guy that maximizes heat and minimizes light.

Are Crowder, Shapiro, and even Kirk trying to change people's minds via debate at their events on college campuses? No, they are there to rile up lefty college students that have never in their life actually had their beliefs challenged and completely fail to defend them to clip farm. I think Destiny approached it more honestly and wanted more real engagement than they normally do, but I see this as very weak evidence of Destiny's persona and ethos.

If you had evidence of Destiny saying like we live in times that are too polarized and people should be more civil and settle things through calm debate and then tweeted like Destiny tweets you might have a point. However, I have not seen him talk like that and he established himself primarily from internet bloodsports debatebro culture. He's a pig that loves playing the mud. I've never seen him say you shouldn't play in the mud. You are right, he does ragebait a lot on twitter. What I'm not seeing is him making a big stink about how everyone needs to get along and sing kumbaya and then acting like he does on twitter. If someone presented themselves like Peter Boghosian--someone at least outwardly trying to have real conversations and have people question and validate their beliefs--and they acted like Destiny you would have a point. But Destiny doesn't present himself like that.

If you want to paint Destiny like you are it wouldn't even be hard, but you haven't even attempted to do it! He was a pretty niche figure and most mainstream people would not want to give him the light of day. The places he does get debates are places like Minds Fest and Better Discourse.

Here is how Minds Fest 2023 was billed:

“Minds is bringing people together IRL from across the social and political spectrum to facilitate real conversations, human connection and the evolution of ideas. MINDS: Festival of Ideas will feature prominent voices who will come together to have civil dialogue on the important topics of the day. The goal of the event is to create a space to engage honestly with others in open dialogue surrounding divisive ideas in hopes to bridge the current divide and create a path to a healthier discourse and reduce extremism.”

Here's someone describing Better Discourse:

The Better Discourse conference seeks to help create a space where important issues can be discussed, and common ground can be found.

Discourse between differing viewpoints is part of the American Way. Engaging honestly with others in open dialogue about the topics which divide us can help bridge the divide and create a path to a healthier country.

We’ll bring together great minds across the left-right spectrum and find common ground. Or not. Either way, this healthy discourse seems sorely needed and too often ignored.

Both of these basically sound like they espouse the kind of ideals that you are ascribing to Destiny and he's actually spoke at both of them. Did Destiny try to keep a high quality of discourse and decorum at either? Not really. He acted basically the same as he always does. Hell, basically heckled and disrupted a panel he wasn't even on. I'm sure if you want to you can find parts in these talks where he is behaving badly but I don't care to watch them again.

That he could not behave himself and he did not really try would be easy to spin as duplicitous or engaging is bad faith. Personally, I think the organizers invited him knowing exactly how he behaves and expected him to act that way given they invited him back the the next two years.

If you want to make this argument, make it! Instead you are just gesturing wildly at the form of an argument without ever producing one.

Thank you for the solid feedback. I guess I should've made a stronger argument.

The reason I didn't make a more substantial argument is because it's been two years since I last watched Destiny, and I didn't want to spend hours looking through past debates and effort posting about Destiny to justify a minor point I made. I still don't feel like it. If I felt like it and I had the goal of trying to convince people something about Destiny I would've made a top level post with the appropriate amount of effort and evidence.

But I'll acknowledge you have brought up some valid points, and perhaps I was too charitable in assuming Destiny's motive around 2022/2023 when he was engaging in debates with popular figures from the other side, which caused me to react more negatively to his subsequent behavior within the last year than I would've if I hadn't had that charitable impression of him. I'll adjust my parent comment with an edit.

Are Crowder, Shapiro, and even Kirk trying to change people's minds via debate at their events on college campuses? No, they are there to rile up lefty college students that have never in their life actually had their beliefs challenged and completely fail to defend them to clip farm. I think Destiny approached it more honestly and wanted more real engagement than they normally do, but I see this as very weak evidence of Destiny's persona and ethos.

Kirk founded an organization with the purpose of advocating for conservative politics amongst a younger generation, and you don't accomplish that without changing young people's minds about politics. Even if I were to grant you that they are there to primarily clip farm, that does not constitute evidence that they are not trying to change people's minds via debate at their events.

I disagree that Destiny approached it more honestly on the grounds of his attitude towards the people he is engaging in. Nothing Kirk has said comes remotely close to the inflammatory description of the regular people of the other side that Destiny has. If there has been, then it would've already been used as ammunition in the current campaign to bring down his image. I don't know about Crowder or Shapiro, but I doubt there's anything to the same degree either. Why do you think Destiny approached it more honestly and wanted more engagement than Crowder, Shapiro, or Kirk?

I appreciate your honesty. FWIW I do agree that Destiny does not optimize for truth. I just don't think he's ever said he optimizes for truth and while I would not go quite as far as saying he tries to maximize heat he does certainly enjoy it and is deliberately very spicy on twitter. He is terminally online and streams like 80% of his life and has an entire website devoted to describing the positions and values he holds. Given that, I do not think it is fair to say he ascribes to some ideal and then does not live up to it (or even attempt to) without some actual evidence that has that ideal.

If anything rather than trying to bridge the gap between right and left in politics he was trying to bridge the gap between left and far left. These seem to be nearly mutually exclusive to each other. He a podcast called Bridges with notsoerudite that I personally never watched, but it got burned to the ground by him being a gooner. He was also working with some political group with Brianna Wu that I don't remember the name of that was basically trying to get him, Hasan, Vausch and other left-wing adjacent influencers to work together to get Democrats elected rather than constantly fighting with each other. This also blew up but before the sextape things even came to light.

I will also admit that I am not about to go watch hours of Destiny, Kirk, Crowder, or Shapiro content to provide specific citations to things. I have way better things to go than that, but I do want to do my best to respond to your questions. I never watched much of Shapiro/Kirk/Crowder so I could easily be misrepresenting them. I would say I am more familiar with Destiny's content but did not follow him closely and I haven't re-watched the Destiny college visits since they came out.

My impression of the first set is they are intentional provocative to make the students look emotional and they are the ones with facts and logic. They churn through students without letting one student have much back and forth and then put out 10-20 minute long videos featuring 2-3 students with who knows what cut out. It mostly consists of trying to railroad them into gotchas or emotional outbursts.

Destiny, on the other hand, approached the content in a completely different light. He had like 4 students he talked to for 30 minutes-an hour each. The videos had their full conversations without editing things out. When the students did not express themselves well or maybe could not cite a fact well before he responded he would try somewhat steelman them first. He even had follow-up conversations with some of the students after the fact. It seemed more like coaching someone or a friendly game where you are trying to introduce someone to a game rather than slaughter them.

I also see Destiny's twitter ragebait as something nearly completely separate from this. That he acts like people on twitter act while on twitter and acts more reasonably in other places seems expected. He probably does it to a more extreme degree than most people, but people acting differently in different social situations is not as all unexpected. Him being an edgelord on twitter probably does make some people more hostile and less willing to talk to him, but I don't think he cares.

More comments

He pretty much picks the first statistic he can find that can prove he is right, but he does so by lying about the order initially to make it seem like the opponent was right, oh wait, just kidding it's the other way around. This is poor manner in a debate.

I cannot speak to the manners of formal debate, but it seems to me that this is a reasonable practice. It underlines and attempts to short-circuit the bias of the human mind. If you were delighted to have a number that supported you, it is that much harder to turn around and argue that the number proves nothing when it goes against you.

That is an intelligent observation. Really clever. I don't agree with being intentionally deceptive just to make your argument stronger. That's manipulation, not truth seeking.

I suppose in the context of the debate, Sean ought to have been better prepared with actual stats of his own for the particular claim. It let Destiny set the frame.

For what it's worth, I think Destiny was right for the wrong reason. The numbers he's quoting are different from the numbers Sean was thinking of, but the numbers Sean probably was thinking of to support the idea that federal funding on defense is higher to the degree that it would tip the scale to make his argument was also wrong. So Destiny uses invalid stats to prove his position, which means it doesn't actually disprove Sean's point, but he was right by default because Sean was wrong to begin with.

Destiny, of course is now legendary for getting cucked HARD by his wife (they did have an "open relationship", but holy shit), having a teen son who hates him, and possibly having chatted sexually with a minor, and STILL possessing explicit sexual material of said minor.

Intellectual consistency to the point of self-destruction, it seems. I had him, among others, in mind when I spoke of public figures being "outed as sex pests, pervs, frauds, and generally slimy people..."

Anyway, he isn't necessarily intellectually inconsistent or cowardly, but not someone you'd really want to honor as a paragon of your side's virtues.

good thing i wouldn't hold him up as one, but my point isnt that he his a virtuous person or even that he represents my views. That he is on the left and participating in the kind of live events you claimed that NOBODY on the left would DARE to even attempt makes the whole diatribe about how people like him don't exist seem kinda silly.

Being cucked is the same sort of ideological consistency Kirk had being married with kids. His son hating him is understandable from my PoV but not a universal indictment of him, and I'm not a fan of playing the CP gotcha game when 17 year olds say they're 19 or whatever.

Your overall point - that the left has few-to-none Kirk equivalents - is correct overall. But I think Destiny counts as at least one dark mirror example.

the guy does essentially the exact kind of events Kirk was doing.

No he doesn't. He sits in a room, alone, in front of a camera. That is nothing like showing up in person in front of a hostile crowd after receiving death threats.

dem college campus debatelord universe

That's because there is no college campus universe, the dem debatelords do it from the safety and comfort of their couches.

i think you are putting too much emphasis on how uniquely brave his actions were.

They were, both unique, and brave.

Infaccurate

Fair enough. I found a few other instances from 2022 and 2023, so clearly I'm not up on my lore.

What does “clearly devoted Christian” mean here? Did he advocate for everyone to give their surplus to the poor? Did he sell his guns and pledge non-violence? Did he apply pressure to safeguard civilian casualties in the wars we fund? With his 12 million net worth and four homes, including a 6 million dollar mansion, I can find no evidence that he ever made a personal donation of any kind. I just searched his 70k tweet account and he never once made any comment about the suffering of civilians or children in Gaza, though just recently he had a rabbi come on his show to claim there is definitely no one starving.

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The lefties who found their way into this space, (Anyone remember Darwin?) they haven't fared well when pressed on their ideas without the ability to falsify a popular consensus.

I'd like to think I've fared pretty well, for the admittedly limited time I've been here!

We appreciate your presence!

I'd say broadly so; I often have different axioms and life experiences but your ideas are largely coherent and reasonably argued.

I'd add that the past five years or so (especially post-Musk takeover of Twitter) have given the Right enough of a voice to make it clearer where the Motte and Bailey is for both sides - fewer left-wingers now come into debate fora completely unaware of the existence of right-wing arguments and assuming that they will obviously win just by their obvious correctness. It's more common now for left-wingers to optimise their arguments at least a little more for persuasiveness and defensibility, which I would say is very positive and what the Motte is intended to encourage on both sides.

Bernie did a series of well received town halls in Trump Country, and he was literally just in Lenore, West Virgina, population 1300 that went 74% for Trump, I don't think you can rule him out so easily.

A willingness to talk to the other side might be a low bar, but it seems to be a bar that so many have difficulty meeting. How many people in the realm of politics are making the effort to reach out to everyday people of the other side and have a discussion? Even if one were to think he's an intellectual hack creating viral moments by dunking on uninformed college students, do not regular everyday college students have the right to talk to someone with a different political perspective? What conservative voices exist in college and universities, which is populated by professors of increasing left-leaning ideologies? Universities invite left leaning speakers all the time without having to constantly worry about protestors against said speaker. Kirk died talking to students on campuses.

I don't know how I feel about flip-flopping criticisms. On the one hand, yes, a certain type of flip-flopping can be evidence of a lack of pillar of values shaping a world view. On the other hand, that's an uncharitable way of describing people that update their views and change their mind based on new information or changing circumstances. There's flip-flopping your core values, and then there's flip-flopping the results of applying your core values.

On Epstein:

Here is a video of Kirk saying all the Epstein files should be released. This was just a few days ago. https://instagram.com/reel/DOda98IEjzx/

Does this shift the needle in any way? Is he a flip flopper or someone that just kowtows to party lines? I guess this could be considered more evidence to the flip-flopping allegation.

Foreign Policy:

The Iran situation was not in the public consciousness when Kirk made his comment in April. His comment about a war in the Middle East is applied to a different set of circumstances than to that in June. If I recall, in the end the US did not deploy a large number of ground troops in Iran and the whole thing wrapped up relatively quickly compared to something like Afghanistan. I imagine when people say US involvement in a war in the Middle East, we're trying to avoid another Afghanistan or Iraq. It's hard to say the situation with Iran is similar in the reasons that might have motivated Kirk to say we should avoid another war in the Middle East.

TikTok:

This does seem like a valid example of flip-flopping. To play some defense though, Kirk's demand for banning TikTok is preceded by fan accounts being banned for hate speech, so I suppose he might have had a TikTok is not a free speech platform angle here. By the time he changes his mind, he acknowledges TikTok can be used to reach out to millions of zoomers. I think a more thorough examination into the reasons why Kirk may have wanted to ban TikTok can make this a better example of flip-flopping.

De Santis:

After a certain point you rally behind the candidate that has the greatest chance of wining. This is politics 101. I don't think this is a great example of flip-flopping. It's a stupid move to continue to support a weaker candidate in an attempt to be more principled, which would result in an increased likelihood a candidate from the opposite party who holds even less values you agree with becomes president instead.

Mail-in Ballots:

The article you linked does not strongly support your claim. Kirk made a post that he thought was evidence of mail-in voting shenanigans. I think a more valid criticism would be that he didn't do his due diligence to fully vet the source. It's absurdly stupid to make up something false because it can be so easily proven false, so it's more likely he jumped the gun on spreading a story that he thought was real.

I don't really know about Chase the Vote. Did they get people to do mail-in ballots? I checked Arizona and that state has early in person ballots. I guess if they ended up getting early votes via mail-voting this could be considered a strong example of flip-flopping considering how much of a role distrust of mail-in voting had for the republican side. That being said, nowhere in the article you linked does Kirk say should only vote in person.

Political Violence/Pelosi

Here's more of the Paul Pelosi quote

I'm looking at Politico.com, I looking at the New York times, I'm looking at all these places, and there's a little bit of mention here. For example, Politico says, ‘top Republicans reject any link between GOP rhetoric and Paul Pelosi assault.’ Of course, you should reject any link!

Why is the Republican party — why is the conservative movement to blame for gay, schizophrenic, nudists that are hemp jewelry makers, breaking into somebody’s home or maybe not breaking into somebody’s home? Why are we to blame for that exactly?

And why is he still in jail? Why has he not been bailed out? By the way, if some amazing patriot out there in San Francisco or the Bay Area wants to really be a midterm hero, someone should go and bail this guy out. I bet his bail’s like thirty or forty thousand bucks. Bail him out and then go ask him some questions. I wonder what his bail is? They’re going after him with attempted murder, political assassination, all this sort of stuff.

I’m not qualifying it. I think it’s awful, it’s not right. But why is it that in Chicago you’re able to commit murder and be out the next day? Why is it that you're able to trespass, 2nd degree murder, arson, threat a public official, cashless bail, this happens all over San Francisco. But if you go after the Pelosis, oh you're [???] immediately

Note the last line. Actual murderers and other high stake criminals go out on bail all the time. You're trying to spin this as evidence is his endorsement of political violence, but Kirk is making his statement in context of a city that literally bails out criminals all the time. I didn't see anything in here that endorses political violence.

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.

Kirk didn't die for flip-flopping on policy positions, though. Kirk died talking to college students. Even if you think he was arguing for a wrong point, discussion is the pathway to truth. In that sense, I think there is an argument to made for that he is a martyr for truth.

I'm not in disagreement that there are flaws or things to criticize about Kirk. But I feel like this is like calling Martin Luther King a criminal and thus an awful, bad person (which is something Kirk did say).

There's a rapidly congealing hagiography surrounding Charlie Kirk in the wake of his shooting.

When we get the practically a state funeral, gold-plated coffin, and mayor kneeling and weeping while touching the coffin as if venerating a relic, come back to me on this. If it does happen, feel free to call me an idiot.

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.

“If not more so”?

just here to push buttons, aren’t you?

That seems a rather uncharitable interpretation? He said that Floyd hagiography ≥ Kirk hagiography, and that seems very hard to argue against to me.

He said Floyd hagiography is possibly sillier than Kirk hagiography. Not that it is.

Given that one was a drug-addled serial criminal and the other a controversial but otherwise law-abiding speaker, any comparison that Floyd hagiography- and its attendant violence and racism- isn’t categorically orders of magnitude worse is insane or trolling.

It is uncharitable, but I think my lack of charity is roughly correctly tuned to Anti’s past issues in the forum.

It's a sign of times that the "silliness" of the "hagiography" associated with a law-abiding conservative figure can be equivocated with the silliness of the hagiography associated with a drug-addled serial criminal, when:

  1. To the extent hagiography of the former exists, it was dialed up to eleventy for the latter
  2. The former died of intentional murder, the latter unintentional murder or drug overdose
  3. The video of the former's death was much more graphic (if it were a movie scene, viewers might complain it's unrealistic gore-porn as to how much of, how quickly, and how far Kirk's blood spurted out). The latter's video was PG-13 and relatively boring.

Such an equivocation would make sense, though, if one believes Black Lives Matter More, or if one really dislikes conservatives.

I don't understand how you get that from what I wrote.

Oh yeah, if there's any kind of spectacle like this for Kirk it will be every bit as ludicrous (depends on how close he was to Trump, I guess) but the martyr-myth-making machine was chugging away merrily on the left before this.

I think everyone here recognizes that the George Floyd sanctification was extraordinarily pathetic and even humiliating for the US. It will be very hard to beat, frankly impossible in this case, not least because Kirk was a normal and respected person (no matter how little worth I personally see to his political work) and Floyd was scum of the society. But this is not a good reason to try.

Caps on high skill immigrant workers might be worth the tradeoffs, but I think we as a society should acknowledge they are serious tradeoffs.

Let's say the US has X amount of specialized talent and thus they can only do Y amount of productivity with in a year. If companies in (or investing in) our country are so productive and there's enough market demand that they want to do creation over Y, then limiting access to talent over X puts a cap on growth.

Now I know, the general response is "because those jobs should go to the locals!" but the thing is, talented local people already have jobs. If they're hard working and capable, then they're mostly already doing their part in achieving Y (or doing something else in another industry) because companies want them.

As any hiring manager knows nowadays, the job pool is mostly incompetents, liars, lazies, addicts, or otherwise unwanted because of a serious flaw. It's the same way that dating apps like Tinder are mostly used by the unpleasant and unwanted, the good ones are already picked through. Of course just like the apps there's often some amount of pickings but they're limited and get scooped up quick of course and we're still overall limited to Y production. Even during periods of layoffs, companies don't tend to fire their best talent, they fire the weaker ones so even picking through those is still trying to find a diamond in the rough.

Now maybe that's what we as a society want, jobs programs for the lazy drug addicted idiots being put in roles above their worth, and we're willing to sacrifice efficiency in key industries for it. And maybe it's worth it if we put hard limits on economic growth and only allow Y production no matter how much market demand exists. Maybe it's worth it in the same way that some leftists felt promoting some minorities above their skill level was worth it.

But that's a discussion with some hard tradeoffs is it not?

This whole argument relies on the idea that foreigners are higher skilled on average than Americans - what proof do you have of this prior?

No, it relies on the fact that American talent is very well tapped. Once that marginal talent is mostly taken, there is more elsewhere that's willing to come because we pay workers far far more. Far more than even "worker friendly" socialist places.

Or at least it used to be that every high school counselor in the US was an effective magnet for figuring out which hick-born genius should go to MIT or CalTech and build rockets or computers.

There's literally billions of them. 85k get H1B visas per year. With a barely working filter we should be able to skim the cream. And yes, complaints abound about how we don't always get obviously exceptional people. They somehow found a way to screw up this much selectivity.

Working now at a major tech company, the foreign born engineers are pretty capable. They did something right.

Or the idea that perhaps we should have functional immigration pipelines specifically for high-skill workers, rather than almost ignoring human capital in our immigration process.

As any hiring manager knows nowadays, the job pool is mostly incompetents, liars, lazies, addicts, or otherwise unwanted because of a serious flaw.

OK why would you believe the international labor pool is different than this description? Again the argument relies on the idea there is some difference between domestic and foreign labor pools otherwise there’s no point of bringing foreign workers.

The general pool of foreign workers does not have to be identical to the pool of foreign workers we bring in. We can and should be selective.

The top 10% of people who would come to the US if they had a chance are genuinely more skilled than the median American, and there are enough people who want to come to the US that we could pull from that top 10% for a long, long time. We're a country of immigrants, and we should be strategic about that.

It doesn't need any difference between the labor pools. America has 1000 great workers (toy example), India has 3 times the population, same quality labor pool, so they have 3000 great workers (TOY EXAMPLE), then, assuming America can actually find a need for, say, 2000 great workers, then the only way we could fill those jobs is by importing great workers.

I don't agree with this and think the high-skill immigration argument is 99% fake, but the argument works even if the labor pools are exactly the same.

They even work if the labor pools are very different and the foreign country is way worse. Say the top 10% of American workers is the same as the top 1% of Indian workers, the US is still operating with a fundamentally limited pool of around 20 million top 10% workers, if we need/want more than that, we can import them from the 9 million top 1% of Indian workers.

But why would you expect that the American labor pool is full of lemons but the Indian pool is not? Sure assuming identical distribution of talents there are 3x but why then are Indians not subject to lemon effects that OP claims make it hard to hire qualified Americans?

OP’s argument is that it’s easier to hire overseas workers because the international labor market is different so you don’t have the lemon problem you have in the US. Why does OP believe this?

The other part is that the firm has the option to open a subsidiary office somewhere else and hire locally there. This is a substitute for trying to recruit those folks to physical move stateside.

That has lots of drawbacks: there will be additional overhead for travel, management, legal, compliance and whatnot. The remote office will be less productive (all told) and probably at a weird time zone.

Still, people forget that even in the world of tariffs, there's literally zero legal penalty for a US company to just open an office abroad and hire people.

My personal issue with a lot of the 'high skilled immigrant' discourse is that a huge chunk of high-paid positions in the modern economy are essentially vapor atop vast flows of rent-seeking. I've done pretty well out of the tech economy personally, but there's massive chunks of jobs which don't really have much of an objective function.

This is further exacerbated when you import from certain countries where there's a cultural understanding of intense gaming of KPIs and little-to-no interest in actually 'building' anything. I have sympathy from the people from those countries, as their internal political economy means it's very hard to get ahead in a vast sea of standardized tests and affirmative action, but it's on them to go remake their country into somewhere nice to be instead of needfully KPI-maxing into high ranks of the Western Celestial Bureaucracy in companies that essentially just exist. Most of these jobs could be adequately performed by a local, or a flow chart.

Now maybe that's what we as a society want, jobs programs for the lazy drug addicted idiots being put in roles above their worth, and we're willing to sacrifice efficiency in key industries for it. And maybe it's worth it if we put hard limits on economic growth and only allow Y production no matter how much market demand exists. Maybe it's worth it in the same way that some leftists felt promoting some minorities above their skill level was worth it.

There's a strong argument that this has outsized effects in said 'key' industries when placing a lower-skill worker into the process results in higher-than-acceptable failure rates for complex products and complicated processes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O-ring_theory_of_economic_development

And this gets worse if those 'key' industries feed into other industries. You know, like if power production gets spotty b/c your plants have too much downtime, which brings down every other industry. Or factories can't put out enough intermediate goods that are needed in other projects, and this bottlenecks productions in other areas.

Explained in excruciating detail here:

https://mgautreau.substack.com/p/nice-things-and-why-we-cant-have

So there's certainly an argument that you should pull in as many high-skill immigrants as possible.

But now there is the question of where to stick the low-performers were they won't do as much harm.

And perhaps the big one, what happens to the country you just brain-drained high skill immigrants from if they don't have enough such people left to maintain domestic industries...

But this also assumes there's no major risk of... deliberate interference/sabotage. Now I'm thinking of the especially high-sensitivity 'industries.' Who is maintaining nuclear arsenal? Building fighter jets and tanks? Keeping your government's communications and networked systems secure?

You NEED, as in NOT OPTIONAL, loyal, high skilled, 99% reliable workers in these industries. So does every other country. And they are also motivated to compromise your supply chains if they can. So maybe they send a few high-skilled immigrants over with specific instructions on how to make things break.

So yeah, bringing in high-skill immigrants is almost conclusively a net good for all involved to the extent you can support more and more complex, high value, high-wage industries across the board and thus vastly improve the productivity of your entire economy.

This is, as I gather, the beautiful good intentions of the H1B program.

But this is a very fragile system at these important points of failure, if you let in lesser skilled immigrants (who present as high-skilled), this can break important stuff. If you let in high-skilled immigrants who ultimately want to benefit their home country over yours, they can steal or break important stuff intentionally.

And this will break many other things downstream of the initial failure.

And the more such critical industries your country depends on (i.e. the more developed/complex the economy) the more places where such breaks can occur.

Filtering. Filtering. Filtering. How good are you at it, and do you have the political stomach to do it as aggressively as necessary.

Now I'm thinking of the especially high-sensitivity 'industries.' Who is maintaining nuclear arsenal? Building fighter jets and tanks? Keeping your government's communications and networked systems secure?

I often see people bemoan the seemingly small number of American citizen engineers at tech companies, but I can say that of my friend group going through a highly-ranked engineering school, if anything most of the eligible candidates have ended up working in defense or adjacent spaces. Most of these places keep a low profile: "don't put that you work here currently on LinkedIn" is something I've heard, um, a few times, and few at Lockheed are bragging about GitHub followers or making the Hacker News front page.

You go to work, do reasonably cutting-edge radar/hypersonics/robotics work for 40-ish hours, get paid reasonably and stably, and you don't talk about it otherwise, which I think unintentionally skews the narrative of engineering more broadly (a bit).

I'd guess recruiting is done more directly, possibly even in-person as well, so candidates are 'guaranteed' their spots and never actually enter the job search market in the first place.

I often see people bemoan the seemingly small number of American citizen engineers at tech companies, but I can say that of my friend group going through a highly-ranked engineering school, if anything most of the eligible candidates have ended up working in defense or adjacent spaces.

"Seemingly" is doing some work here -- there's a fair number of second-generation American (dot)-Indians and Chinese at tech companies. Though an ethnonationalist wouldn't count them.

Most of these places keep a low profile: "don't put that you work here currently on LinkedIn" is something I've heard, um, a few times, and few at Lockheed are bragging about GitHub followers or making the Hacker News front page.

A lot of engineers in tech are mostly unaware of this market for various reasons -- it only accepts citizens, it feeds largely from different schools (including my own alma mater), it's secretive. There's definitely some movement from the defense market to the open market, but of course the people who move don't talk much about their former jobs. I moved out of it before Big Tech got Big, so I don't know for sure, but I bet pay is a lot less. A lot more bureaucracy too, though the big tech companies are working on solving that.

I reject pretty much every aspect of this post. I think you present your premises as a false consensus and a false binary choice as your conclusion. The actual policy discussion on the ground is not "we're only gonna do high-skill immigration. How much should we do?" but the beginnings of a "not any more, you're not" response to "we're just not going to bother enforcing immigration law against illegal migrants". Which means there's a lot of low-to-medium-skilled work being done by immigrants. There's no point in my mind to discussing the numbers of truly high-skilled immigrants a country should import when unskilled labor, fast food, taxi driving, food delivery, etc. are all done by immigrants with varying legal status, and chain migration rules allow the high-skilled migrant to bring a family who brings their family (who ...).

I see so many migrants who make the simultaneous arguments of 'the locals aren't skilled enough to do high skilled work' as well as 'the locals find low skilled work beneath them', with the general theme being 'the locals are lazy and incompetent, so give all the jobs to migrants'.

Meanwhile you've got a plethora of other states like Singapore, Malaysia, the Gulf Arabs etcetera where the solution to this is bringing foreigners from less-advanced economies to do the shit jobs but not providing any particular pathway to family migration and/or permanent settlement.

Here is my compromise for the United States:

  • Give up to 100,000 provisional green cards a year based on getting a three-year contract to work at an annual salary at least 2X the American average income (something like $250k) If more demand than that, the visas go to the highest bidder. Also, give no more than 10,000 to a single country of origin.
  • Give up to 50,000 provisional green cards to youth under the age 20 who score the highest on an old-school SAT test, test to be taken in the United States or a consulate at a cheating proof facility.
  • Give up to 100,000 provisional green cards to people of any age who score the highest on a battery of scientific, engineering, and mathematics tests.

This replaces all H1bs, student visas, OTPs, diversity visas, etc. If the worker brings their wife and children that comes out of the quota. They cannot bring their uncles and brothers and nephews.

Now I know, the general response is "because those jobs should go to the locals!" but the thing is, talented local people already have jobs. If they're hard working and capable, then they're mostly already doing their part in achieving Y (or doing something else in another industry) because companies want them.

There is a vicious cycle here where we encourage native born Americans to enter the college->fake job pipeline, then we bring in immigrants to do the real work. This suppresses the wages for the real work, which creates all the more incentive for a native born American to get some kind of fake patronage job, and so forth. Of course, then the immigrants have children and we tell them they need to go to college and get a fake job, and thus we need even more immigrants and the entire thing becomes a ponzi scheme.

at an annual salary at least 2X the American average income (something like $250k)

The American average income is $125k a year?

Total personal income (including income from dividends and asset sales) divided by the workforce is something like $150k. But then you want to take out imputed rent from the Personal Income number, and also maybe include seniors earning income as well in the divisor. The best way to do the calculation would be total aggregate income as reported to the tax authorities, divided by number of people with taxable income.

But lots of those dividends and asset sales are from retired people, so you are overestimating average income very substantially when you divide by the workforce. One approach would be to look at BLS CEX survey, which has annual average household income of $102k in 2023, with 1.3 earners, so really more like $78k per earner, which is in line with the income per earner for the 80-90th percentile. Top decile income is $168k, so we are probably not getting to $125k per earner until about the 90th percentile. (https://www.bls.gov/cex/tables.htm)

Or you can look at average personal income directly, which gives only $67k in 2024, though I agree that this one is too low because it is everyone 14 and up. (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MAPAINUSA646N

$125k seems way too high as an estimate of average income, and $250k is an extremely high salary. I would think a more appropriate threshold would be around $175k. Though I am fairly confused on why a numerical limit on visas would be needed with high salary thresholds and required time commitments, which are already ensuring that you're only bringing in pretty rare abilities.

But lots of those dividends and asset sales are from retired people, so you are overestimating average income very substantially when you divide by the workforce.

Yeah, it would be better to divide by total people with taxable income, to include the retirees.

I think the Census and BLS surveys have problems, I'm not sure if they include dividend/asset income, and I've also heard they cap the income recorded for privacy issues (because high earners are rare enough that if they were reported, it would deanonymize the data)

You want to include dividend/corporate profit income as part of the average income calculation, because the whole idea is to put a floor on how much the owners of capital can push down wages using immigration.

It seems like it would be more that sample size starts to get small at crazy high earners and that response rate is probably pretty low for extremely highly paid people. I'm also not sure what privacy issue there is when the max granularity is top 10% of households - this is roughly 30 million people or whatever.

We can also look at the CPS and start to get a lot closer to the question of "What is the normal income for working people in the US?", as there is a specific category of 18+, full-time. Average total money income was $96k in 2024, which seems pretty reasonable to me as an estimate. This sounds to me like it would also include that investment income you are looking for, though I don't think I agree that this should be included for the purpose of this exercise since the idea seems like it is to ensure that a prospective immigrant worker truly is valuable to a company and not easily replaced by a domestic worker with up to double the average earning power... is your idea on including all income to capture things like stock options as compensation or something? Even a 100% average threshold if using $96k would go a long way to fixing the problem of H1Bs frequently going to mediocre-tier workers. https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-poverty/cps-pinc/pinc-02.html

I broadly agree but also this inherently leads to a cottage industry springing up where what should be an innate test of 'intelligence' gets gamed to the enth.

There's no shortage of skilled or potentially skilled workers in the US. We have 350 million people. And immigrants of the extreme tip of the intellectual distribution will generally get an exception to any immigration policy that might hinder them.

What the actual vast majority of immigrants do is either unskilled manual labor, or from a higher class immigrant, functionary white collar licensees doing corporate scutwork or providing services in places white collar white people don't want to work, or for wages and in conditions they wouldn't accept.

As any hiring manager knows nowadays, the job pool is mostly incompetents, liars, lazies, addicts, or otherwise unwanted because of a serious flaw.

'Nowadays?'

How long, per chance, do you believe this state of affairs has held before it didn't? Years? Decades? 'They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work' was the joke of an entire economic system of the 20th century, so we're probably looking at centuries.

Did the hiring managers of feudal Europe five hundred years ago think their serf pool as highly competent, honest, diligent people devoid of alcohol addiction or other serious flaws? Chinese mandarins? Byzantine administers? Illiterate tribal chiefs the world over?

The problem is that the jobs are getting a lot more complicated. In peacetime, Johnny Serf has to farm a few acres of land with a couple of different types of crops. It can get tricky but it’s not rocket science and Johny has been doing it his whole life. If Johnny is lazy or a drunk and his crop yields are ten percent lower than his neighbor that mostly doesn’t affect anyone other than Johnny. In wartime Johnny has to hold a pike on a marginal section of the line and let his liege lord do most of the real work.

His great-great-great grandson John Tradie has to drive a semi truck, and if he’s not constantly paying attention every second he could kill a dozen people with it. Or he works in an office doing rather complicated drafting and clerical work that in Great Grandpa Johnny’s day would only be done by monks, scribes and merchant guilds (he has to read for God’s sake!). If John Tradie goes to war he has to operate the radar system on a Patriot battery that costs more than his grandfather’s liege-lord’s entire fief.

Subsistence farming is actually a very complicated job which brutally punishes laziness. You are correct that a stellar IQ is not needed but apathetic, un conscientious farmers starved to death or wound up enslaved.

Do you know any good books on this? I know about "peasant studies," but the peasant studies books I've read tend to be highly sociological/politicized.

Let's say the US has X amount of specialized talent and thus they can only do Y amount of productivity with in a year.

How close are you to reaching Y? Is a person's contribution to X fixed at birth (or shortly after), or can it increase through training, education, and experience?

Your argument relies on the idea that X is both largely fixed among the existing population and that it's a relevant near-term constraint on industry, while I'm not sure either is true. Underemployment is rampant, with only 56% of college grads working at a job that needs any degree. Still no perfect candidates? Just hire someone 80% qualified and train them up the rest of the way. Can't handle the last 20% of the job having no competent people? Hire them earlier and train them up before it becomes a critical constraint. Can't plan ahead that far? Sucks to suck, git gud.

I work in public accounting. You do not need to be particularly smart to work in accounting. You need a college degree, about a ~105 IQ, and an okay work ethic to be a good employee. Every firm I’ve worked at big and small has tons of H1B employees because you can underpay them (as in like $50k for an entry level vs. $65k for an American in the same position), promote them slower, and not worry about making them a partner one day. What benefit does this bring to the country? It’s laughable to call a 23 year old doing outsourced bookkeeping for some guy’s plumbing business “high-skilled” in any meaningful sense. It’s absolutely grating hearing people claim the US economy relies on these “high-skill” workers as if the majority of them are doing groundbreaking technical research. Accounting is a perfect career path for our replacement-level college grads who just want a safe, steady job. But nobody is majoring in it anymore since the pay sucks and the hours are terrible because firms can just hire indentured servants to fill any labor shortages. If we just made the H1B system conditional on paying the employee $250k we’d get all of the benefits of the actual high-skill immigrants and not the army of Indians undercutting everyone who just wants a normal boring office job.

That sounds great -- but it's not an argument for throwing all the H1Bs out. Make it $250K and it returns to being a truly high-skilled program.

All in all it's a M&B -- the motte is "the H1B salary floor is too low and it's not skilled enough", the bailey is "immigration bad".

I don’t think it’s a Motte and Bailey. Maybe some people on Twitter are claiming every last immigrant needs to be deported but even that is hyperbole. People wouldn’t care if it was just cutting edge STEM researchers, renowned surgeons, etc. But instead what is happening is that entire towns are being overrun by Indians making $120k working in IT at a bank or something, plus their parents that they bring over and their citizen children. I guess an economist would say this is good, they’re net taxpayers and not criminals, but I don’t see how this materially benefits the nation like they’re working on the Manhattan project or founding Nvidia or whatever. It just feels like additional competition for the ~1 SD above the mean citizen who makes up the bulk of the mid-middle to upper-middle class of the country for some marginal positive effect on the government’s balance sheet, plus all the more qualitative negative effects of increased diversity.

Very few people are arguing you shouldn't be able to import Alfred Einstein but it's also inherent to the system that whatever cutoff line you originally use to define unique genius is going to get eroded over time as business & humanitarian cases pile up. Plus people outside the country learn to adapt their individual cases to better resemble the Diagnostic criteria.

Agreed. From an engineer's perspective: it's clearly a wage suppression scheme. This is a trick to push down the middle class.

It’s absolutely grating hearing people claim the US economy relies on these “high-skill” workers as if the majority of them are doing groundbreaking technical research.

I mean the issue is that we're not selecting very hard for actual high skill / rare skill people.

If we just made the H1B system conditional on paying the employee $250k we’d get all of the benefits of the actual high-skill immigrants and not the army of Indians undercutting everyone who just wants a normal boring office job.

Yeah this seems like a good policy decision and I expect it doesn't happen because of specific lobbying to prevent it, not because it's unpopular with voters.

I mean the issue is that we're not selecting very hard for actual high skill / rare skill people.

As a one-time applicant, H1B kind of seems to anti-select for high skill a bit. If you have legible skills in demand (like when I had lucked on a momentarily hot PhD topic), you probably have other options too, and are less likely to keep taking a stab at a vaguely demeaning 1/5 hit rate lottery with 1 year between draws, a ridiculous stack of paperwork to get that lottery ticket, and a delay of months to even find out if you got the short straw. I did one attempt at H1B, didn't win the lottery, then the firm trying to hire me wanted me to go for O-1 next which had its own set of offputting hoops to jump through; and rather than stay more months in a bureaucratic limbo working from the wrong time-zone, I ended up signing on at a local subsidiary of an US bigcorp instead.

In this European office, taxes are higher, salary maybe has a bit of a cut vs. California, and climate is worse, but OTOH there is more vacation and no 60h work week hustle, cost of living is modest, I'm way in top 1% of the country's income stats, and would likely feel less well off at SV. If I was dead set on maximum earnings, my first pick now would be to try and finesse a transfer to Zurich where in turn I'd make more after taxes than US. Some friends in my techy bubble did manage to migrate to the States, at least one via O-1 and one via some roundabout route of being a postdoc researcher first. They've expressed envy that my office's mostly Europeans instead of mostly Asians that are 90% of the workforce over there.

OTOH if H1B is your one great shot at exiting a drab developing country, you're probably way more likely to keep plugging at the lottery year after year and finally make it through.

As any hiring manager knows nowadays, the job pool is mostly incompetents, liars, lazies, addicts, or otherwise unwanted because of a serious flaw.

As both a hiring manager and a grass-toucher, I really do not believe this. Yes, our recruiters, both internal and external, bring in a lot of garbage, but I don't think that's because there are no qualified applicants. It's because in the last ten years, then has been a sharp increase in the offensive capabilities of "bad actors" in the employment market (Indian tech consultancies gaming the visa system, Linkedin spammers) with an especially sharp increase in the last few years due to the adoption of LLMs. It's more difficult for me to judge the quality of an applicant before meeting them by checking their Linkedin, CV, cover letter, or email correspondence. Everyone has learned that all text-based communication can be polished by an LLM, and so typos, poor writing skills, and obvious bullshitting are all easier to avoid (although em-dashes and chatgpt-speak are still giveaways sometimes). I have a lot more screening interviews now that are a waste of time since it's more difficult to vet ahead of a video call.

However, this is probably a temporary state of affairs. Hiring managers and recruiters optimizing for quality will improve their defensive capabilities by inventing new, harder-to-fake vetting procedures. We just aren't there yet, the defense is still catching up.

Let's say the US has X amount of specialized talent and thus they can only do Y amount of productivity with in a year.

I dunno, man. This just does not pass the smell test for me. In a country of nearly 350 million people, there aren't enough bright, talented people to fill jobs? I get that companies want to hire a top 1% intelligence/conscientiousness person for their very important software role, but will it doom American industry and creativity if we force them to use the top 5% of the American talent pool instead of the top 1% of the global talent pool? We may move forward slightly slower, but we will also avoid the negative effects of creating a new class of alien elites who see America as merely an economic zone. If we tied work visas to renunciation of other citizenships and the ability to pass civics test or something, I might change my mind a little.

... man, it would be nice if the US could just have some areas that are primarily there as economic zones, and some areas that were reserved for protectionism and preservation of American culture. SF / NY / Boston / Seattle could host the global megacorporations that want to bring in the world's best no matter the cost, while much of the rest of the country could be reserved for cultural preservation.

the job pool is mostly incompetents, liars, lazies, addicts, or otherwise unwanted because of a serious flaw

Now maybe that's what we as a society want, jobs programs for the lazy drug addicted idiots being put in roles above their worth,

Main problem I see with this characterization is that laziness is both a relative concept and a habit.

Relative: Everyone is lazy compared to migrant who works 60h+ like an indentured servant because he/she has to. However, increases in GDP are supposed serve human flourishing, not the other way. I suppose that is the "trade-off" you are talking of.

Habit: Humans are habit-forming creatures. Live some time as unemployed and yes, most people will learn lazy unemployed habits that are hard to break out of. For this reason, it is quite important to keep unemployment rate low.

Another aspect is that habit-forming does not stop at unemployment. Majority of people are quite industrious when they find themselves in a positive feedback cycle and it is clear to see results of your work. It is how most computer games are structured, people play them for pleasure. Many corporate jobs, however, are structured so that easiest habit to form is, "do what you are told and don't make too much trouble for anyone, including yourself". I am kinda lazy employee these days, myself. Key was when I realized that my attempts to go above and beyond results in more work, no change in salary, any fruits were reflected in my managers' bonuses than mine, any failures were still mine to bear, and any path to making it otherwise was illegible. Of course my manager would rather have a "less lazy" migrant worker who has to go above and beyond anyway than reorganize anything.

However, increases in GDP are supposed serve human flourishing, not the other way.

Says who, exactly? After all, GDP is relatively easy to measure, and gives you a numerical answer, while we can't even agree what constitutes "human flourishing", let alone measure it. So why wouldn't people choose to take the former as their measure of societal quality — 'line goes up equals world more gooder' — and then argue that, just as the job of corporate executives is to maximize "shareholder value", the job of a modern technocratic government is to maximize the GDP of the geographic territory it administrates… even if that means replacing legacy populations with cheaper imports?

Another thing: it is weird that pro-migration lobby has advocated for the need of skilled migration in nearly all developed countries (the US, Canada, the UK, near all European countries) despite the vast differences in population, resources, economic outlook, unemployment rates, and other policies. The US has 350m people and has a large, varied economy and resources, unemployment rate 4%, it could be self-sufficient, and they say, America needs 'skilled' migrants. Sweden is smaller economy, unemployment rate 9%, economy specialized to few key industries and services, they live and die by trading for other resources, but they also say (until perhaps recently), they need more 'skilled' migrants. Repeat for any country and any economic situation.

This is because of how political groups in one country feed on political groups in another.

That's why Japan has much less of this sort of thing. It's really hard to have influence when the country is thousands of miles away and speaks mostly Japanese.

What do you mean 'high skill immigrant workers'?

There's a world of difference between 'mid javascript jockey', 'mid accountant', 'mid miscellaneous office worker' and 'fabulously talented UV lithography genius' or 'hypersonic plasma fluid dynamics expert'.

I suspect you don't mean the latter but the former, since you're talking about 'the job pool' rather than 'high powered R&D positions'.

If mass immigration were so great, we'd see the rich countries with the highest immigration rates having huge productivity growth, right? Canada and Australia have been much more aggressive in mass migration than the US. They're fairly free market anglo-derived liberal democracies, the closest analogues to the US. Australia has a points system supposedly targeting skills shortages and 'high skill migrants'. Both Australia and Canada have had a terrible time in terms of prosperity and economic growth, despite (because of) all this immigration. Canadian GDP per capita has been stagnant for about a decade. In truth it's not high-skill immigrant workers that are coming in, many of them just do food delivery. There are a small fraction of actually-high-skill workers and a huge number of people gaming the system to work or gain access to a richer country than their birthplace, which is understandable but not necessarily in the national interest.

The US gets most of the best anyway, since why would anyone really talented think 'I want to move to Australia and start a company there.' Tiny market size, limited capital, great distance from the rest of the world, barren manufacturing sector, high energy prices...

If you're gonna have immigration, better 'high skill migrants' than refugees from shithole countries. But better still to just skim the very best, the actually high skill migrants. If a company wants to bring someone in, charge them 200K as a flat fee to ensure they're really getting their money's worth, that they absolutely need this person. If a university wants to bring someone in, make sure they'd be in the top 5% of domestic students, were they a domestic. The US could cut immigration 98% and do just fine.

See also: https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/brain-drain-as-geopolitical-strategy

jobs programs for the lazy drug addicted idiots being put in roles above their worth

Do we then need jobs programs for the civilizationally impaired, those peoples who couldn't make a rich, safe country themselves? This line of reasoning cuts both ways. If Americans are so lazy, inept and stupid, shouldn't these talented and deserving foreigners stay at home rather than come to babysit these lowlife Americans who don't know how to do anything? Americans invented Javascript, one imagines they can find some mid Javascript developers at home.

Also in the case of Australia the local trades are so unionized and wildly overpaid that there's not even really much of a pathway for sheer weight of bodies to help solve the housing issue through forcing construction wages down to regional norms.

The whole 'high skilled' thing feels like a relic of manufacturing economies with true artisans when now in the days of services being ascendant aside from a few obvious niches like surgeons and lawyers there's a great fungibility of labor in milquetoast laptop sinecures.

What do you mean 'high skill immigrant workers'?

At first read I think they clearly meant "'fabulously talented UV lithography genius' or 'hypersonic plasma fluid dynamics expert'."

Reading it again, I think they probably mean both the above and "'decent javascript jockey', 'decent accountant', 'decent miscellaneous office worker'"

If mass immigration were so great, we'd see the rich countries with the highest immigration rates having huge productivity growth, right?

I'd say the history of North American population and productivity growth shows fairly clearly intelligent immigration is fairly effective at this.

I will also say, as a Canadian, what we've been doing in the last 5-10 years has been anything but intelligent immigration. We've essentially flipped from having a logical points based system to wholesale importing of low quality human capital (to put it delicately).

I agree with your prescriptions for how to run a good immigration system. What's sad is the west already figured this out, I don't know why we decided to fuck it all up. Actually I do, line must go up, labour must be cucked.

Yeah, they game the entrance system. Canada too supposedly has a 'skills based' immigration system but like Australia it's a joke. Universities are supposed to admit people who pass a rigorous test but they're phenomenally greedy and the entrance requirement is de facto 'has money and a pulse', nevermind plagiarism or anything else. And then there are fake journal articles they write to seem smart...

Every test becomes something to game and it's hard to convince people to test rigorously if their financial interests are advanced by bringing in high fee paying foreign students. On balance I think it'd be better for universities to receive no more money from foreign students than domestics, possibly less. Right now there are perverse incentives. The university business model should be to educate the domestic talent base first rather than bring in as many foreign students as physically possible, only if there's surplus capacity should foreign students be admitted, or if there's some other special reason like exceptional talent.

This appears to be a consistent failure mechanism with all "high skill immigration." Because there are clear metrics, they are clearly game-able by motivated by people who are from a worse country and have no buy in to the social contract of the country they are moving to.

Let's say the US has X amount of specialized talent and thus they can only do Y amount of productivity with in a year. If companies in (or investing in) our country are so productive and there's enough market demand that they want to do creation over Y, then limiting access to talent over X puts a cap on growth.

This is a false premise on a number of levels. Productivity is the value generated per worker. Production is the total amount of goods and services created. Production is a function of a number of different inputs - labor, capital, land, etc. If a company needs to increase production in an environment with a constrained labor market, it can do that by increasing productivity. In other words, investing capital into technology, automation, and other labor-saving improvements. Production can also be increased by offshoring low-value components of the supply chain to other countries, like mineral extraction, textile manufacturing, etc. Of course as we have seen this needs to be done judiciously to avoid building our own competition in unfriendly countries.

Now I know, the general response is "because those jobs should go to the locals!" but the thing is, talented local people already have jobs. If they're hard working and capable, then they're mostly already doing their part in achieving Y (or doing something else in another industry) because companies want them.

If your new venture is creating more value than whatever these people are already doing, do the capitalist thing and poach them. That's the free market at work - businesses with higher margins can afford to attract labor from companies or industries that are generating less value. That's part of how productivity increases, generating more value per worker by having workers move to higher value positions.

As any hiring manager knows nowadays, the job pool is mostly incompetents, liars, lazies, addicts, or otherwise unwanted because of a serious flaw. It's the same way that dating apps like Tinder are mostly used by the unpleasant and unwanted, the good ones are already picked through.

The vast majority of employees are "on the market". Just offer them more money. It's that simple. People hop jobs all the time, especially in hot industries like tech. Even if they aren't officially looking, it's easy to put the word out that you're hiring and have your staff refer people into your hiring pipeline. What's more common is that companies have unrealistic expectations - they want 90th percentile employees at 50th percentile pay and mediocre benefits.

Now maybe that's what we as a society want, jobs programs for the lazy drug addicted idiots being put in roles above their worth, and we're willing to sacrifice efficiency in key industries for it.

This is a bullshit false dichotomy. How about just incentivizing the 72% of STEM grads who don't work in a STEM job to actually work in STEM, if we have such a skills shortage?

This is a bullshit false dichotomy. How about just incentivizing the 72% of STEM grads who don't work in a STEM job to actually work in STEM, if we have such a skills shortage?

This number includes social science majors (for whom there are no jobs in their chosen field) and people who work in management (who would not necessarily be better off as ICs).

It also includes STEM grads in healthcare jobs - if you count those as "STEM jobs" the number drops to 62%. And teaching doesn't count as a "STEM job" either - not sure how many maths and science teachers there are or how that affects the numbers.

This number includes social science major

Where are you getting that from? This would be a rather unconventional use of "STEM". Not saying you're wrong, but finding out would require a lot more clicking into his link, than I can do right now.

Ctrl f "social" bro

It's got science in the name.

So does "pseudoscience".

"Very droll, minister."

Hopefully the Census is capturing the legions of pseudoscience majors in this statistic as well.

It does, you pointed it out yourself.

It is a fair criticism, for whatever reason the census bureau decided to include social science and psychology in STEM. They do have a very nice visualization though, by clicking on the major it shows the percentage of employees who end up working in STEM jobs, and highlights their placement in different job groups. For computer science and math, it's 51.1%. Engineering is 51.5%. For physical science majors, it's only 27.6%. Those are pretty grim numbers that aren't explained just by management being excluded from the stats.

This, of course, mirrors what any engineering or chemistry grad would tell you if you just...walked around and interviewed a bunch of seniors at local state university. Ask them if they have job offers and what they are in and at what number. Lots do not. Even your 'B' students that have done an internship often will only have 1 pretty mediocre offer. And if you don't get an industry offer within 6 months of graduation your likelihood of ever getting one drops off pretty significantly.

On top of that, there is also the large cohort of "retired" engineers. We use this term sparingly because almost none of them have retired voluntarily. They were all let go for being too old and given a BS reason, and no one else would hire them because they are too old (and also given BS reasons). Sure, they just have 3 decades of industry experience being wasted while they run an online CNC custom parts website, but he's 50 freaking years old and wants 6 figures to work 40 hours a week with standard sick and vacation! Insanity!

I knew traditional (non-software) engineering was screwed up, but I thought they were less youth-worshipping than tech, not more.

A company I used to do jobs for had a pretty good team that churned out steady work and a decent number of patents a year. Nothing that makes a practice, but a good client. They had a 56 year old guy on the team that was clearly slowing down, but still was sharp, just not 8am-8pm shift sort of on his game. But he was the best at helping me draft their patents. Any questions, go to Richard. Richard picks up the phone every time and always can clarify a point with a helpful few sentences, and then go on to point out some more things he thinks were not explained properly in the specs they sent over (almost always correct). So this guy was still a good engineer, and outstanding communicator. One day they submit a spec and his names on it but he doesn't pick up. Ask another guy, "oh Richard had to leave." That sucks I say. Something about being in the bottom 30% of deliverables 2 years in a row.

Let's say the US has X amount of specialized talent and thus they can only do Y amount of productivity with in a year. If companies in (or investing in) our country are so productive and there's enough market demand that they want to do creation over Y, then limiting access to talent over X puts a cap on growth.

Now I know, the general response is "because those jobs should go to the locals!" but the thing is, talented local people already have jobs. If they're hard working and capable, then they're mostly already doing their part in achieving Y (or doing something else in another industry) because companies want them.

I think that this part of your argument is mistaken. My experience working in tech isn't that the H1B program is used to bring in high skilled immigrants to expand labor beyond what the native population can support. It's that the H1B program is used to bring in employees at below-market pay, rather than paying the native citizens market rates for their work. Not only that, but then the employer has an indentured servant to whom they can do whatever they want, because if he leaves the company he has to go back home (and while the pay may be below US market rates, it's above the rates in his home country). This isn't exactly a situation where employers are giving people a win-win fair deal. The ideal is certainly as you describe, but I don't think that the reality lives up to that (thanks to good old human greed).

It's that the H1B program is used to bring in employees at below-market pay, rather than paying the native citizens market rates for their work.

I guess I'm not enough of an expert on economics and immigration law to feel confident this is a good option, but why not auction the H1-B visas, rather than a lottery? The government chooses the highest N salaried applications and collects an extra percentage payroll tax on such visa holders. I have heard complaints that this would probably drop them all in high-cost-of-living areas, but it seems easy enough to adjust for that.

Maybe I'm missing a reason why that wouldn't work that isn't "existing H1B body shops have too much political power."

I have heard complaints that this would probably drop them all in high-cost-of-living areas,

Which is a problem why exactly? Most of the people who object to immigration are living outside of those extremely HCOL areas anyway, seems like it would do a good job of ensuring that the areas that wanted lots of immigrants had lots of immigrants and the places that don't like immigrants don't get them.

IIRC the reverse: "my factory in flyover country that needs real experts won't be able to compete with the coastal tech companies hiring entry-level JavaScript developers."

Yeah, "there are 4 experts on this equipment in the world and none of them are US citizens and we need one of them for 4 weeks" is a problem which is not well addressed by my proposal (or by our current system).

Yeah, "there are 4 experts on this equipment in the world and none of them are US citizens and we need one of them for 4 weeks" is a problem which is not well addressed by my proposal (or by our current system).

In the current system they could theoretically come in on an O-1. In practice, the expertise may be too narrow to be legible to the US government.

A lottery would be better than the current system for sure, but it doesnt address the problem that once the top 10% of the bids are actually filled, there will still be a bunch of people offering "job openings" in the 60-80k range that they claim they cant fill with Americans and then the bottom bidders still can fill those. Unless there really is enough actual high end demand for H1bs for all of them to make like 500k. But given the current market that seems extremely unlikely.

thanks to good old human greed

It's not just greed, is the inability to compromise. Just like with abortion, where neither party is willing to offer a sensible compromise because it angers their extreme wing, is a platform to shit on the other party from, and poses a defection risk from the other party (like with gun control), the ruling parties of the US both acknowledge the shortcomings of H-1B, but can't create a bipartisan bill that reforms it into something that matches its original design (providing short-term high-skilled labor) or its current purpose (naturalization visa for white-collar workers).

Honestly, Trump Mk.1 was the Dems' best chance to run a reform like this through the Congress. Instead, they spent four years making Trump, who struggled with GOP support, their sworn enemy. Now Trump Mk.2 is all about owning the libs and rules by decree.

We've had sort of a natural experiment on this, in the form of the Great Depression followed by WW2. There was a ton of long-term unemployed people from the depression, and many of them became...not very good people, after years of riding the rails and being homeless/broke. Very high crime rates, and just a general fragmentation of society. Not the sort of person a sane person would want to hire, even if the economy wasn't in the toilet because of the depression.

But then the war happened. Governments started spending money like crazy, causing a surge in demand. Obviously the government needed lots of bodies to fill the army and war industries, but then regular jobs also started needing to get filled, so employers were willing to take a chance on people they'd never normally consider. Including both hobos and housewives who had never worked a regular paid job before.

And for the most part... it worked. Despite all the destruction of the war, countries grew their economies during the war as those long-time unemployed people came back to work. It turns out that people aren't just widgets- if you give them a chance, the right environment, and some training, they can learn and grow to take on a wide variety of tasks.

But in a world where there's high unemployment, and every position comes with large mandatory headcount costs, plus potential lawsuits if anything goes wrong, noone wants to take a chance on a questionable hire.

I suspect, although I’m not sure how one would go about proving or quantifying it, that this mechanism has been broken down by what I suppose you could call the vices of modernity. The type of “long-term unemployed” people who in the early 20th century would be riding the rails, as you say, today either end up on the streets and become addicted to hard drugs, or shut themselves up at home and become grotesquely obese. These conditions are supported by welfare programs (and in the former case supplemented by petty crime) such that they never have any incentive to even attempt to find work, their conditions worsen, and eventually they become functionally irreparable parasites on the society. Many of these people, in decades past, would’ve picked up low-skilled jobs as drifters, doing a lot of the work that today is done by dubiously-legal low-skilled immigrants. The path to becoming a true “lost cause” in this sense, someone who is not merely disincentivized from working but so far gone as to be genuinely incapable of it, is far shorter now than it has ever been, and I think this has more of an effect on the economy than is usually discussed.

Maybe. But they had plenty of vices back then too. Bootleg licquor, drugs like opium and barbiturates at pharmacies, and stds like syphalis. And, yes, since stay at home shut-ins and fat people. Somehow they found a use for all those people.

Yeah, I’m not trying to go too far with this take. Very true that we’ve always had alcoholics, opium dens, and weirdo hermits. But I really do think the barrier to entry for that sort of extreme dysfunction is significantly lower now than a century ago, and that has to have some effect.

It also is one with, from my perspective, mostly imagined tradeoffs. The problem with incompetents, liars, lazies, addicts or otherwise exists in the low wage market (and fir the first 3, very prominently in the H1b market), but the tradeoff for employers looking abroad vs. at home at the high end is mostly about age discrimination and wage expectations. Take, for example, this recent viral tweet: https://x.com/JoshuaSteinman/status/1964097707636625671

Essentially, this guy is complaining about the fact that he needs a couple of retired/semi-retired 50-65 year old guys to come out of retirement to found a transformers company and is complaining that their salary demand is... slightly under $500k? Of course, if you are at all familiar with the mid-high end engineering work environment this is not at all new to you. The thought of hiring a 55 year old is offensive to most people in hiring. The thought that they are just as important as a founder with seed money, probably moreso. So even though this startup cost is actually a drop in the bucket, it seems unteneble to this fellow (who is representative).

So what will he do? Likely he will give up on the idea, but if he doesn't he's likely to try the H1b route. And if you are familiar with that you will know there will be many applicants with resumes that say they have experience designing and fabricating large transformers under various industry standards. They will not. If the company ever launches it will flounder and never get out a product until this guy caves and pays an old guy, OR one of his like 25 year old incidental white guy hires from Colorado School of Mines befriends one of those old white guys and fixes everything.

Meanwhile in China somebody can take a crack at building a business that actually has some sort of tangible impact on the physical world (and not the ''AI-powered Grindr for Dogs'' somebody in that comment section mentioned) instead of the current SAASpit that defines modern Western tech.

Essentially, this guy is complaining about the fact that he needs a couple of retired/semi-retired 50-65 year old guys to come out of retirement to found a transformers company and is complaining that their salary demand is... slightly under $500k? Of course, if you are at all familiar with the mid-high end engineering work environment this is not at all new to you. The thought of hiring a 55 year old is offensive to most people in hiring. The thought that they are just as important as a founder with seed money, probably moreso. So even though this startup cost is actually a drop in the bucket, it seems unteneble to this fellow (who is representative).

That's hilarious. "I believe I have a market of $50B, but to get started I need to hire one knowledgable retired guy who won't get out of bed for less than $0.0005B. What should I do, what should I do?"

Sometimes there are actual shortages (e.g. there's 4 qualified people in the world and 10 companies looking to hire them), where upping your price just results in a bidding war. But in this case it looks like it isn't; they just have to convince one of a number of middle-aged guys to get off his fishing boat for a while.

He goes on to say:

Huge red flag for investors (I don’t yet make the rules), basically they take it as a synthetic judgement around alignment: The person is going to own 15-35% of the company. Are they going to be willing to work hard, work fast, and succeed?

LOL, no, they're not there to "work hard, work fast". If you know what you're doing, you're not hiring them for that. They're not the Wozniak or Jobs and certainly not the Randy Wigginton or Bruce Tognazzini, they're the Mike Markulla there to provide "adult supervision" for your younger guys who are doing the "work hard, work fast" thing.

My thoughts exactly. But this case is simply illustrative. I work with engineers in my law practice. My brother is an engineer. I swear, these firms treat age 50 as if it is death, and 45 as pushing the reaper. If someone in mid/mid-sr management on the engineering side gets laid off and they are over 50, they might as well just start their own model train shop right away. There simply is no appetite to hire them, even at 1/2 rungs below where they were let go from. This is why people in the industry have such skepticism about the whole model of immigrant labor. Companies inevitably ignore dozens or hundreds of qualified domestic candidates, often accompanied with a very specifically worded job posting. That then gets forwarded to the H1b agency that takes a half dozen even less qualified foreigners and writes them perfect resumes for the position (regardless of the truthiness of those words), and now you have 3 engineers for the price of 1! Or do you? For some reason the project is always "going well" or "coming along". But deliverables always seem lacking, often the claim is they are contingent on someone else's work (who is often some recent StateU grad, and "his work" is the whole project).

Yeah this is the issue that whenever somebody sets out to simplify the immigration question with a 'fair and unbiased criteria' inevitably a massive cottage industry converges to game the fuck out of those rules whilst also finding any possible legal angles for discrimination and humanitarian exemptions.

The best example was once the TCS contractors I was working with claimed they couldn’t proceed because I hadn’t defined what I meant by “the button should log the user out of the application” in regards to “logging off” meant DESPITE THE LOGOFF FUNCTIONALITY ALREADY EXISTING.


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