domain:alexberenson.substack.com
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
just now
Maybe as a case of big fish small pond? I guearantee you most people never heard of it, and to the extent they did the chart speaks for itself.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3m ago
The lefties who are cheering for his death would not have seen him as a moderate,
This is the issue. Who is a moderate in the eyes of these people? If Kirk doesn't qualify, it means to most conservtive you can be, is a liberal.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3m ago
Bluesky is not representative of liberals as a whole, and especially not top Dem leaders (with perhaps the exception of Ilhan Omar).
Quantumfreakonomics
4m ago
I was just reading a bunch of threads of people screenshotting Kirk shooting social media posts and sending them to the subject's employers. Legitimately fascinating to hear of the back-end effects so soon.
Objectively, I think the left's reaction to the Charlie Kirk shooting is less extreme than the left's reaction to the Trump assasination attempt or the Brian Thompson shooting, but the backlash to the reaction to the shooting seems a lot more intense this time. I wondered why, then reading your post it hit me; "Trump is president now." Right-wing cancel culture is now backed up by the implicit threat of government sanction. Employers don't inherently care about their employees' personal lives. For better or for worse, they are being made to care.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
5m ago
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.
Catsnakes_
6m ago
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.
Throwaway05
6m ago
I'd assert that categorically right leaning oppression is superior to left leaning oppression - the right in the last one hundred years when malformed wants you to obey or die, with the notable exception of some regimes going after minority targets. The left when malformed wants you to believe or die, with frequent spastic targeting of nearly everyone. Cultural immune system aside, Russia, China, and Cambodia were all worse than WWII Germany.
This remains true for the religious right and woke power politics, the latter is far worse and more antithetical to healthy society. While it is true that some of this is probably true because of new social technologies generated by things like social media, it was safer in the religious days with the possible exception of a few minorities.
And I think that last bit is the point - in a democracy you can oppress a minority (and ya know, usually shouldn't?) but if that minority grows powerful, influential, and numerous...it stops. And that's what happened the religious right. Society changed, they became smaller and more moderate and more open and intensely effective advocacy changed things.
In contrast these days you have a much, much, MUCH larger group of society that is being oppressed...or at least feels that way.
It isn't necessarily an accurate thing, but it is INTENSELY more destabilizing.
One example is what has happened to young white men - totally vilified, not given any support, and also the group most likely to commit violence.
daguerrean
7m ago
The argument I’m seeing from the left that he was actually a Groyper and all the antifascist slogans were ironic has an amusing resemblance to Holocaust denial. By this I mean the old “It didn’t happen but if it did happen it would’ve been a good thing.” As in, “He wasn’t killed by a leftist but we leftists think killing him is a good thing.” Which is what makes it seem so absurd, if your ideology leads you to support his assassination, is it really so surprising someone sharing your ideology did it?
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
7m ago
It's one of the most popular political songs of all time. I like Casa de Papel, but come on.
WandererintheWilderness
7m ago
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!
faceh
8m ago
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.
Spookykou
9m ago
Are you honestly not familiar with how clipping is used to take what people say out of context to villainize them?
NullHypothesis
9m ago
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.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
9m ago
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.
KMC
10m ago
It only took them sixty years and four chief justices to reach the correct answer.
pigeonburger
12m ago
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.
Catsnakes_
13m ago
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?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
13m ago
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.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
13m ago
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.
Spookykou
14m ago
This really reads as a tongue in cheek gotcha, he can't stop smirking as he makes the argument. I don't think he takes the scripture literally, he immediately explains his personal interpretation of the 'love your neighbor' bit, and I think he is also explaining his interpretation of the myriad 'stone the gays' bits in the bible in the same moment.
I would imagine that his position, which he half states in the clip, is that homosexuality is a sin and as a good and loving Christian he has an obligation to help gay people understand that truth rather then just affirming their identity.
This is just based on the clip. I have seen very little Charlie Kirk content so he might in other places make claims that undermine this reading.
zoink
14m ago
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.
This whole attempt to lionize Kirk after his death has been extremely black pulling, as a leftist.
I don't think any lionization is aimed at blackpilled leftists. Ezra Klein says free speech is good, but he doesn't lionize him. This is about the best response that can be mustered among a sea of "he didn't deserve to die, but..."
I don't know much about Kirk. As far as political influencers go, a commitment to the exercise of speech and "Debate*" is worth a nod even in an asterisked, scare quoted own-the-lib form. Doubly so in an environment where an exercise of speech, the bedrock of our polite society, will get you killed. I wish Kirk's politics were more like mine in his life and advocacy, but that goes for everyone.
Would it be helpful if you pretended Joe Rogan was killed instead? That sounds snarky, but I am curious who might be a controversial, but deserving figure you dislike to receive more than mostly derision with an addendum of he didn't deserve, but... after their murder.
Catsnakes_
15m ago
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.
KMC
16m ago
It feels like we rapidly are descending into an authoritarian anti-free speech environment
This is called a slippery slope, and we're already halfway down and too far gone to slow or stop. The time to slow or stop was 10 years ago, or 5. Now we are too late.
Past tense, please.
I want to shake this person and ask what good this kind of statement actually does for our cause. Do you want more vigilante killings?
The answer is obviously yes, and it's been obvious for years. That's the natural conclusion of punch a nazi, resistance, Trump is a fascist rhetoric. I think that yes, leftists genuinely want people like Kirk, Trump, Tucker Carlson, and Stephen Miller dead, assassinated, shot, exploded, defenestrated, and generally removed from the living. I think your colleague wants it.
Hell, I think my own father wants it, because his reaction to Trump's assassination was first disappointment, and was never outrage.
Do you want to win elections?
I think they want to stop having elections that hinge on what they consider settled matters, as if one side simply considering it settled is enough to move on. One way to accomplish that is to murder those who keep raising settled issues until nobody has the guts to raise them again.
While this works in practice I don't think it's a question of logical identity. Every major religious movement that believes in a single God also tends to ascribe some overlapping characteristics and roles to that figure, but that's more of an observation about the sorts of gods people want to believe in, or indeed, if you're spiritually-minded, about what the real elephant is probably like. If there were a religion who believed in a single deity that's radically unlike the Abrahamic God in all particulars - didn't create the world or humanity, isn't benevolent, isn't the source of morality, is not absolutely in charge of the cosmos, isn't anything close to omnipotent - I don't think it would make sense to talk about them as worshiping "the same God" as Christians and Muslims and even Zoroastrians.
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