Charlie Kirk, Ezra Klein, and the Cost of Civility-Theater Liberalism

[Celerity]

“Talking across divides” is laudable—until it becomes a license to launder antidemocratic and dehumanizing ideas.



https://newrepublic.com/article/200961/charlie-kirk-ezra-klein-civility-theater-liberalism

https://archive.ph/lCgRR

The scene is familiar: a campus auditorium bristling with hired security and raised cell phones, a lectern bathed in hard light and flanked by university crests and sponsor logos, a line of students at the mic—some earnest interlocutors, others rehearsing a confutation for their social media feeds—while the marquee speaker works the room with a practiced smirk and a repertoire of gotchas engineered to go viral by morning. This outrage-packaged-for-attention market that incentivizes mockery and monetizes contempt is the roadshow that made Charlie Kirk famous—an old playbook Dinesh D’Souza and David Horowitz ran before him, now optimized for an algorithmic age: a ritualized antagonism, audience participation as culture-war cosplay, the triumphant edit pushed out to millions before the house lights are up. Strip away the self-flattery of a university crowd congratulating itself on its open-mindedness, and the illusion that a staged confrontation with a celebrity provocateur constitutes pedagogy, and what remains is a reel factory masquerading as a public forum.

The purpose of such displays has never been enlightenment. The conservative of the moment hitting the campus speaking circuit has been a fixture for decades—Ann Coulter in the early, protean cable era; Milo Yiannopoulos in the Breitbart-to-Berkeley moment; and now Daily Wire figures like Michael Knowles and Matt Walsh. What distinguished Kirk from the herd wasn’t originality but scale. Turning Point USA built a national feeder network of clubs and events, staged Q&A’s for sound bites rather than dialogue, and yoked the tour to watchlists, merch, email capture, and donor cultivation. The aim wasn’t education but pipeline: bodies in seats today, list building and voter recruitment tomorrow. That is why holding it up as a civic model feels so misplaced. The wish for liberal analogues (durable youth institutions, organizing muscle, community presence) is defensible. As Ezra Klein put it in a New York Times column he posted the day after Kirk’s shooting, widely derided for the assertion that Kirk was “practicing politics in exactly the right way”: “I envied what he built. A taste for disagreement is a virtue in a democracy. Liberalism could use more of his moxie and fearlessness.” But the lines should stop us short. Wanting organizing capacity is one thing; canonizing a machine that converts attention into activism while eroding understanding is another. Klein has been around long enough to know the difference.

Across the liberal commentariat, including in the Times’ own letters, readers balked at calling Kirk’s style “the right way.” And as many scrupulously documented—Jamelle Bouie at The New York Times (Klein’s colleague), Ta-Nehisi Coates in Vanity Fair, Chris Stein at The Guardian—even granting Kirk his better moments of empathy and grace, too much of his on-air work amounted to stigmatization rather than civics. On air, he said of airline diversity efforts: “If I see a Black pilot, I’m gonna be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified,’” a line that invites listeners to treat Black accomplishment as suspect and to recode diversity initiatives as both a public-safety hazard and an assault on the presumption of white merit. He urged that, “We need to have a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor … immediately,” turning the machinery of punishment toward trans clinicians and the families they serve. He trafficked for years in “great replacement” rhetoric—an anti-immigration conspiracy theory with antisemitic roots that accuses shadowy elites, often Jews, of importing migrants to “replace” white voters and culture in order to secure permanent political power—and used racialized phrases such as “prowling Blacks,” while casting Islam as incompatible with the West. He also presided over Turning Point USA’s Professor Watchlist, criticized for prompting harassment of named faculty. To the left-of-center commentators curating his record, the conclusion was not charitable. But it was, in their view, warranted; a montage pressed into an epitaph—uncharitable by design, meant to cement the public memory of the man.

On the right, the montage ran differently: Where the left compiled lowlights, supporters stitched highlights—“owns,” yes, but also vignettes meant to attest to public-spiritedness. Kirk walked confidently into hostile campuses, weathered combative Q&As calmly, and, in a widely circulated clip, explained that “when people stop talking, that’s when you get violence,” casting argument as a dam against escalation. They circulated candid family footage to hold him up as a doting father and loving husband as well as a tireless debater. Sanctification gathered speed. President Trump announced he would posthumously award Kirk the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and Republicans pushed a House resolution honoring his life and condemning political violence. In this telling, the rough edges were scrubbed or reframed as necessary provocation, and the most inflammatory lines were denied outright. Vice President JD Vance, guest-hosting Kirk’s show, demanded acknowledgment that Kirk did not say Black women “do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously”—technically correct as a matter of quotation mechanics—even as Kirk’s tendentious account of affirmative action still casts prominent Black women as occupying “stolen” slots.

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