I don't watch right-wing media personalities much because I find it too painful. For that matter, I don't watch left-wing media personalities much either for the same reason. But the pain in each case arises from very different sources. The right-wing pain comes from being weary of the lies and the distortions and the brazen hypocrisy. The left-wing pain comes from watching them flail about, utterly impotent, unable to rise and meet the moment, indeed, apparently not even realizing the nature of the moment that needs to be risen to.
Before Charlie Kirk was killed I had never watched him. I had no reason to believe that he was any different from any of the other right-wing influencers out there, but I was wrong. Charlie was different. If, like me, you have never watched him, take a moment to watch this.
I've cued up the video at a particular key moment and you only have to watch about 30 seconds of it to get the key point. There are two things worth noting. First, Charlie is actually listening to his interlocutor, a young girl who is badly unequipped to go up against him. He acknowledges her position, even steel-mans it, and then destroys her with a very simple question: "If a mom finds out she is having a girl, but she wants a boy, should she be able to abort that three-week-old?" In more clinical terms: should abortion for the purpose of sex-selection be allowed?
Without hesitation the girl answers "yes", apparently without even realizing the rhetorical trap she has just walked into. Charlie doesn't even have to say anything, though eventually he does finish her off with a single word: why?
There is an answer to Charlie's question, though it's clear that the poor girl doesn't actually know what it is. She ends up, probably without even realizing what she is doing, arguing for eugenics, which Charlie of course points out to her.
I think this moment is significant for two reasons. First, Charlie is engaging in exactly the kind of reasoned, civil debate that the left often claims to yearn for. They lament Donald Trump's childish, divisive rhetoric, but fail to realize that they should be careful what they wish for. Because in the rare cases where prominent right-wingers do engage in civil debate, as Charlie is doing here, they tend to destroy their opponents. And they do it for one simple reason: they prepare. They study. They actually know the arguments and the counter-arguments. But the left, for the most part, doesn't. When they think of the right wing they do not think Charlie Kirk, they are still thinking Archie Bunker.
There is a correct answer to Charlie's question, but "because the fetus can't survive outside the mother's womb" isn't it. The correct answer in this context is not just the factually and philosophically correct answer, but it also has to be rhetorically correct, phrased in a way that would win the crowd back over in the moment. Coming up with such an answer, and doing it in the moment, and delivering it in a persuasive way, is not easy. You can't just wing it.
The right has an entire infrastructure dedicated to training people to perform in situations like this. Charlie was the poster child for the result, and you can observe many of the subtleties of his performance in the thirty-second excerpt. He doesn't ask abstractly, "Should abortion for the purposes of sex-selection be permissible?" No, he asks specifically about "a mom", which he does very deliberately in order to weave, in the span of just a few dozen words, a dramatic narrative with two characters, a mother and her unborn child, with the former clearly cast in the role of the villain willing to sacrifice an innocent in order to satisfy her own selfish desire to have a son.
The girl debating Charlie clearly doesn't understand this at all. She thinks she is answering a straightforward question about policy. She is playing tic-tac-toe while Charlie is playing chess, and she doesn't even realize it. And most liberals watching this debate don't realize it either. Because if they did, then this girl would have known that the proper response Charlie's question is not "yes". That answer is factually and philosophically correct, but rhetorically it is a disaster because it fails to explain why it is factually and philosophically correct, which is far from self-evident (as Charlie then goes on to explain to great effect).
I found another Charlie Kirk clip that I think is worth watching. This one is about 90 seconds long, and the first half is actually a clip of Kamala Harris. It was recorded (as will be obvious when you watch it) before the 2024 election.
This clip is significant for two reasons. First, he is not afraid of giving Kamala Harris significant air time to deliver a message that begins: "I am a product of teachers and an educational system that believed in providing the children with the full expanse of information that allowed ... and encouraged them to then reach their own conclusions and exercise critical thought..."
I'm going to stop transcribing there -- watch the video if you want to hear the rest. The details don't really matter. What matters is that Charlie allows Harris to have her say, with an excerpt that is not a gaffe, not taken out of context, but something that she fully intended to go on the record, a message that her audience resonated with, as shown by the thunderous applause when she finishes. And then, having allowed her to have her say, he doesn't even have to respond! To him, and to his audience, it is self evident that Harris has in fact just shot herself in the foot, though she is clearly, as with the girl in the previous video, utterly oblivious to this. There is something about what Harris has just said that Charlie recognizes as a fatal weakness, that is going to cost Harris the election.
And he was right.
Even today, with the undeniable evidence that Charlie was right screaming from the headlines every single day, I'd be surprised if one liberal in ten can identify what it was that Harris said that Charlie recognized. In fact, I'd be surprised if Harris doesn't have some pretty significant support for running again in 2028, despite the fact that nothing has changed and she will almost certainly lose again.
For now, I am going to leave it as an exercise to figure out both the correct response to Charlie's abortion question and what he saw in Harris's speech. The answers per se are not really the point I want to make. The point I want to make is that the entire left-wing political apparatus in the U.S. doesn't even seem to recognize these as questions that need answering.
There is, of course, another moment from that second video that deserves a lot more attention than it has received, and that is the titular quote: "Joe Biden ... should honestly be put in prison and/or given the death penalty for his [unspecified] crimes against America." I have not gone through a lot of Charlie Kirk footage, but I'd be surprised if that call for political violence was an isolated incident, or if he ever recanted it.
Violence is always a tragedy, and political violence doubly so. But I think it's important never to forget that Charlie cast the first stone.
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Postscript: the title of this article is an allusion to this previous post from five years ago, which ended up getting me into much more trouble than I ever imagined. I am alluding to that post because I recognize that this one might be similarly provocative. I agonized for a long time whether or not to publish this. The fallout from the previous post pains me to this day. But I guess I've decided that if the price of being able to look at myself in the mirror is that no one listens to me any more, well, so be it.
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