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'His legacy is cringe': how Charlie Kirk became a meme among the young – even his supporters
It is gratifying, though unsurprising, that Kirk's death did not kick off a wave of revenge killings and mass violence, as fedposters fervently predicted. Regardless of what the Guardian's experts say, it was reasonable to deploy cancel culture against the most gleeful celebrators of Kirk's death. Killing people you disagree with in a democracy is bad, and celebrating it shouldn't be accepted. But the right clearly pushed their chips in too far trying to martyrize the guy and now his legacy is incomprehensible memes that have nothing to do with his life or message. Turning Point was always aimed at zoomers, and their verdict is in. There are probably a bunch of them who don't realize Kirk was a real person. And the less said about Erika the better.
As a side note, there are a whole bunch of retarded conspiracy theories around his death, because we can't accept that a guy could just be shot by a lone nut despite multiple videos. Even JD Vance isn't immune.
I saw a post (I think on Substack) making the point that the way progressives talk about Kirk parallels Umberto Eco's observation that, in fascism, the enemy must be seen to be both strong and weak. When Trump wants to name a street after Charlie Kirk, progressives tend to roll their eyes and say that he's undeserving of the accolade because he was just some guy with a YouTube channel. But when people are saying that it was bad that Kirk was assassinated, progressives will turn around and say that it was justified, because he was a powerful and dangerous demagogue who used his platform to incite violence against [minority du jour].
Obviously, it cannot be the case that Kirk was both an insignificant YouTuber and an influential demagogue: only one of these things can be true.
But each can be true to different people. To a person who thinks Youtube is new fangled nonsense he can be a random Youtuber for example.
Is it the same exact people saying both? If not you're just running into the fact that the outgroup is not homogeneous and some of them hold different opinions from each other.
If its the same people then your point may stand.
The difference is moot to the person (or group, etc) under attack by different members of the coalition, and this argument sets a bar that makes addressing an enemy coalition impossible. It's asymmetric concern.
MitigatedChaos memorably described it as the distributed hypocrisy of von Wokenstein's Monster though acknowledges it can be performed by any ideology.
So too am I reminded of this chart. Are they literally the same people saying white flight and gentrification are bad, that cultural appropriation and being chauvinistic are bad?
Well, probably, but who wants to waste the time collecting receipts on hateful people? Let's assume for the sake of argument they are separate people in a big-tent coalition.
That they're separate people doesn't matter to me! What matters is that [coalition] has no acceptable state of being for outsiders.
Not at all, it's treating it as a monolith that makes it unadressable. If you target the specific elements with specific arguments/actions that's a solid method of putting a fracture in the coalition.
A libertarian, a MAGA Rust belt Red Triber and a Blue Tribe Catholic conservative may all vote for Trump but the specific concerns they have are different and may in fact be at odds.
The libertarian might want no tariffs and low taxes, but the MAGA Rust belter wants tariffs and taxes to redistribute back to the Rust Belt that was harmed by laissez faire economics, the Catholic wants to target abortion but cares much less about 2A rights and so on and so forth. Which means who says what and spends political capital on what is extremely important information if you oppose them.
The coalition doesn't want anything at all, it's an emergent entity out of all the various groups and sub-groups. So if some progressives think Kirk was just a nobody Youtuber so it was no big deal, that is a very different action space than for progressives who think he was a huge dangerous threat to democracy. If you want to try and persuade people that maybe shooting Youtubers is wrong, that's a different argument than arguing Kirk was not a huge threat to democracy.
You're assuming your conclusion. Because they are a coalition with different opinions therefore there is no space to exist. But what if it is is "Because they are a coalition with different opinions therefore there is opportunity to put wedges in place so to create space to exist." We call this a culture war for a reason, if you want to create space for outsiders you have to make it so. That's what created the progressive project in the first place. And they did that by piecing together a coalition and peeling some of them away from prior coalitions.
Coalitions are not unassailable cosmic entities that exist beyond space and time. They shift and change and break. As we have in fact seen in recent memory.
That they are separate people SHOULD matter to you. If they are fundamentally a monolithic entity then that is much more of a problem.
Ok fine if I want to spend my life to try and change people that hate me, it matters that they are separate people that might be able to be changed.
As a griller, I don't want to do that, I want to live my life and have my family and not be bothered too much, so the coalition, whether or not the component parts change, matters more to me. "Progressive Democrats are bad for schools and my family" stays the same even if they're bad last year because of braindead "anti-racist" racism, and next year because of braindead knockoff communism.
Also, generally speaking, I'm the exact opposite in every dimension of the kinds of person those people will listen to. I'm not some arrogant piece of shit high on my own supply that's been coddled in the rich parts of big cities and attended Harvard; I'm a lower-middle straight-passing cis white guy that attended a mid-tier state school. I have not structured my life or been blessed with the privileges that will cause progressives or liberals to listen to me; if I tried to convince them of anything, most likely they don't listen at all and at worst I've negatively polarized them into being even stupider than they were before.
I can't say I care much about Youtubers as an open season class, but I would be pretty bothered if people started taking shots at Alec Watson or Norm Nakamura.
Egregores are not unassailable, fair enough. Cosmic is questionable.
Me too. My grandfathers were a subsistence farmer and a cattle inspector respectively. I'm now teaching at a low tier school in the US. Though I did have a career in the Civil Service in between. It's fine. Progressives and liberals listen just fine to white guys. I chair several of our committees, Indeed, when I turn up to the Women's book club I get gushed over. "It's so brave, so nice to see a man taking an interest". Indeed I would say being a straight white male around liberals is extremely high status right now. We are in high demand!
Because ,spoiler alert, almost everyone is a "griller" on your side and the progressive side. Maybe not the elites, but there are not very many elites (though of course they have an outsize influence!). Most people just want to get on with their lives.
When I lived in a small Red town, I had my Blue academic colleagues over to mingle with my Red Tribe neighbors on a few occasions for BBQ's and there were no issues at all. Well an argument over whether turkey burgers could be as good as regular burgers notwithstanding. They even all agreed charcoal was superior to propane (Hank Hill would be unhappy!).
As an outsider in the US, things are simply not as divided as many people here seem to think, in my direct experience. And I am from Northern Ireland, so I know divided! My wife's family reunion was last week and I was the only white person out of 250 black Americans (and one Asian lady!) from all over the country, I had no problems at all. Their family shirt was even an American flag with a bald eagle superimposed over it and 50 out of 250 emblazoned on the back (It was their 50th family reunion and the 250th anniversary of America).
If people aren't persuaded by arguments it's not because you're a straight white man, it's because most people do not reason themselves into their positions and so can't be reasoned out of them I think, no matter who is doing the talking.
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