r/askanything • u/Vert_der_Ferk25 • Sep 02 '26

Political Question Why am I supposed to be impressed with who Charlie Kirk was?

He was a paid professional debater. He went to a college campus, set up a tent and cameras, and engaged with amateurs who had no experience doing what he did. And the right loved him for it. His media team would then cut clips of him scoring points against amateurs, and they would push them out on all their social media feeds.

Isn't this like LeBron James going to a campus and setting up cameras while he played pickup games against kids who, at best, were on the college team but more likely dabbled in basketball, but were no match for the expert? And then what would people think if LeBron's media people cut clips of him dunking on these young amateurs and pushed them out as "highlights"?

"LeBron's TOP 10 Most SAVAGE College TAKEDOWNS đŸ‘€đŸ”„"

"COCKY College Kid gets OWNED By Lebron James! Follow for more👉"

"LeBron James SHUTS DOWN 3 Arrogant College Students Best DUNKS Compilation"

"1 NBA Hall of Famer vs 25 Amateur College Students (Feat. LeBron James) | Surrounded"

Isn't Kirk's legacy just sad?

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103

u/CoyoteTheGreat Sep 02 '26

I've never figured out if conservative ideologues sincerely think that non-conservatives should be impressed by them or not to be honest. Its always halfway between being a complete grift and these people being lost in their own sauce.

I think they -want- people like Charlie Kirk to be viewed with the same kind of bipartisan reverence that figures like Martin Luther King Jr. are, and that wanting something and believing it to be true in some conservative circles are probably the same thing.

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u/FineAndDandadan Sep 02 '26

The goal is to get people emotional and making mistakes, so that they can clip them for propaganda. It works great for recruiting college kids and younger, but as you get older, you realize how pathetic it is. This goes doubly so for when these losers pussy out from debates with people actually known for debating.

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u/Wonderful-Sun-6256 Sep 02 '26

Clip farming to primarily make money. 

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u/soscbjoalmsdbdbq Sep 04 '26

He also prepared for these debates just to argue with a 19 year old walking by on the street. The kids def would have done better themselves with prep time


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u/howbowcha Sep 04 '26

At the same time though, I'm pretty sure all the events were announced ahead of time, so it's not like the students were required to go in unprepared.

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u/Fragrant_Tear_572 Sep 02 '26

You are half right. It kind of serves two purposes at once.

One point is that young/college students can often be the most vocal at times politically even though they likely know the least. Seeing the students not really know what they are talking about most of the time is a good way to hopefully get them to at least take some time thinking about why they think the way they do, and how they reached certain political beliefs. Maybe if they spent time learning about whatever the topic is, they would think differently.

The other side is definitely for clips and gotcha moments. But these exist because of point one. A lot of the clips you see online are because students can be the most vocal and get an ego from all the people who agree around them. The issue is they think they know a lot when they most often don't, so they embarrass themselves. So it's the people who tend to know the least who try to get up on the mic and make a point to kirk or whoever, not realizing they don't have much information themselves.

Students exposing themselves by making 100 tik toks about Israel/Palestine but not knowing what the oslo accords are is not propaganda

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u/guitar_vigilante Sep 02 '26

I don't think this is true. You can be well informed without being an expert and without having rehearsed and memorized talking points. What happens with these videos is that generally well informed people go up against someone like Kirk who rehearsed and memorized a script to deal with the most common talking points of the other side, and to redirect arguments into his preferred script.

A great example of this is the beginning of Kirk's interaction with a young woman named Tilly at his debate at Cambridge University. Tilly opens the conversation by asking Kirk what women's role in society should look like and what are the material benefits of that. Instead of answering Kirk immediately shifts the conversation to his pre-planned talking points. He actually never answers the initial question in his ten minutes with her.

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u/Fragrant_Tear_572 Sep 02 '26

I've seen plenty of people walk up to the mic at kirk or ben shapiro events and the vast majority are not well informed unfortunately, and on top of that they are very vocal. The students should be able to combat whatever Kirk said but in reality they are also following a script. If the students can't adapt that just means they don't know anything beyond their own script. The difference is that Kirk was aware of what he knows and doesn't know and tried to steer the conversation to where he was most comfortable, while the students think they know everything. Even if the student hears a fact they aren't familiar with, they should be able to engage further, but they rarely are able to.

Long story short, of the people who walk up to the mic at these events to ask adversarial questions, the majority are quite uninformed. That's part of the reason why they are easy to clip, because most normal people wouldn't engage in a heavy adversarial back and forth on a topic they don't know much about.

It's also clear that most of these people haven't really reasoned themselves into any of their positions, it's mostly just vibe politics and misplaced confidence from everyone around them having similar views

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u/guitar_vigilante Sep 02 '26

See I'm just not buying that argument, especially when Kirk would just make things up and then when people didn't have an answer for the made up fact it's going to be seen as losing the argument.

For example Kirk would often try to make a point about secularism and suicide rates. The students debating him would often try to say that this could be caused by lower wages and increasing prices due to capitalism. Invariably Kirk would then point to all these impoverished and highly religious countries in Africa having low suicide rates, effectively ending the argument.

The thing was I went and checked this, and a good chunk of the countries with the highest suicide rates in the world are some of the poorest countries in Africa. Kirk's evidence was literally the opposite of what he said. And unless that student was much quicker thinking and said "hey that doesn't sound right let's double check those numbers," there is no way to combat it.

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u/Fragrant_Tear_572 Sep 02 '26

Not going to go into specific examples but generally the point is that even if Kirk said something that was wrong, the students most of the time are not able to engage with it. Not by design, but just because they don't know if it's true or not. If someone asked me who's the goat of basketball and I tell them it's LeBron because he has won 10 rings over his career, and the student doesn't know that's false...what do they know? Why argue about the goat of basketball if you don't know how many rings LeBron has? And even if they think they know it's false, can they still contend with the idea? How do they know it's false?

Like if some girl walks up and asks Kirk why women get paid less than men, they better be prepared to contend with the avg hours women work, the career paths they choose, etc. However, most are not even able to engage with any of it. If you want to call that propaganda go ahead but students are doing it to themselves lol nobody is forcing them to embarrass themselves

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u/guitar_vigilante Sep 02 '26

You cannot expect students (or anyone) walking by a tent to be as rehearsed and informed as the person in the tent. That's why when Kirk has gone to schools where the event is more formal and the student speakers on the other side were aware enough to prepare, he usually didn't stand a chance.

If Kirk went on the street and did his thing with random adults who disagreed with him they probably would perform worse than the random students.

And the scope of the argument is a lot wider than a specific argument about the GOAT of basketball.

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u/Fragrant_Tear_572 Sep 02 '26

If you are going to ask an adversarial question, you better have knowledge instead of vibes. Most students rely on vibes and have enough of an ego where they think that's enough. Therefore they consistently embarrass themselves

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u/OskaMeijer Sep 04 '26

If you watch any of his videos where another source posts the full contexts even the debates he posted where he "wins" are often ones where he very clearly lost if the whole thing was shown.

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u/TowardStarsOutlaw Sep 02 '26

For sure they wanted their own version of MLK, because you know they certainly do not view him with the reverence that decent human beings do. Appropriately enough though, in the end, they only wound up with a meme

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u/Ecstatic-Ask2326 Sep 02 '26

Its partially because the goal is actually to make political martyrs out of these out and about grifters to equate them to the actual activists achieving things conservatives are ideologically opposed to.

It works both to attempt to establish conservative culture control (which conservatives struggle with) and waters down the opposition's political ideologues with the inequitable comparison.

Then when people who aren't as educated or are misinformed see the comparisons, it reinforces the idea that the ACTUAL political activists were grifters like Kirk.

Its the frustrating part of trying to break this misinformation echo chamber, because ostensibly left leaning people are forced to argue from the inaccurate framing that the right wingers present.

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u/Adventurous_Team_408 Sep 02 '26

I hear a lot of echos in the halls of academia.

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u/Dramatic-Fly761 Sep 02 '26

Academia has to support their stances under scrutiny, not so much in the conservative “debate master” sphere

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u/Adventurous_Team_408 Sep 02 '26

After reading your post it seems as if you have scrutinized them.

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u/dancinbanana Sep 04 '26

You touched on something that we saw in early-mid 2025. Namely, that many conservatives still weren’t happy despite winning so soundly in 2024. They were still complaining and whining and what not, but it wasn’t because they lost like previous years. It was because the public at large weren’t happy either

Ultimately, it’s not just about passing policies for many conservatives, they also want people to like them for passing those policies. So when people did not react well to stuff like ICE crackdowns, DOGE, and tariff nonsense, conservatives stopped being happy and started lashing out.

They not only want to punish you, they want you to smile and say “more please”. CK is another example of this, they wanted him to be an MLK figure because they want conservatives / conservatism at large to be liked by the public

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u/Useful-Ant-6756 Sep 07 '26

They mistake high engagement inside their own echo chamber for actual broad-scale respect. To anyone outside that bubble, these guys are just loud talking heads who talk fast to make clips.

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u/One-Regret2978 Sep 07 '26

Spot on. They really want that mainstream historical legacy, but all they actually build are fleeting viral moments built entirely on bad faith.

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u/No_Owl6827 Sep 04 '26

Oh my lord people are Reddit are miserable 😂

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u/Kayhimemes Sep 04 '26

MLK beat and cheated on his wife. Can’t say the same for Kirk.

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u/Visual_Winter7942 Sep 04 '26

Agreed. That said, it's stunning how clueless and reactionary typical college students are about most contemporary political issues. And when someone reveals said cluelessness, they respond with angry ad hominem attacks.

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u/stubbazubba Sep 04 '26

These are the people that hated MLK Jr in life and were disgusted at his posthumous elevation to American sainthood, who felt it was forced down their throats and not going along with it would've been too politically incorrect.

So when a well-connected right-winger, grifter, and internet personality was murdered, they tried to play what they saw as the MLK Jr playbook: actually forcing everyone to celebrate his life or stay silent, make him a martyr for whatever vague cause they can assert, and force generations to reverence their partisan culture warrior against their will.

The difference, of course, being that MLK Jr 1) was actually well-known throughout the country, 2) stood for things most Americans felt were right/worth fighting for, 3) had been the target of harassment, threats, and violence for many years, 4) actually built effective social movements from the ground up, and 5) actually cared about his causes and devoted his life to sincerely pursuing them. Kirk, OTOH, was one of dozens of largely interchangeable hucksters in the conservative YouTube performative intellectual genre, whose entire platform was externally funded by the Kochs, who cashed in every opportunity he got, and who most of the country was blissfully unaware of until his murder. How he is remembered when the full force of the federal government is no longer enforcing it will reflect that profound difference.

0

u/ecsilver Sep 04 '26

How about what is really happening. Don’t assume the worst like they just want to embarrass people but genuinely have a dialogue. Charlie did this many times. He was genuinely trying to outreach through speech. And he was murdered for it. That is evil. To see the comments all over this thread make me horrified that a significant portion of the population sees political violence as acceptable. It is never acceptable. We have to be able to talk to, not at each other to get out of this polarizing environment. Charlie was doing exactly that.

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u/WhenDuvzCry Sep 04 '26

He attacked specific groups and purposely wanted to get a rise out of people. If you can’t see that that’s on you because it was very obvious

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u/ecsilver Sep 04 '26

Have you ever watched him. Seriously? He was respectful and kind. He was murdered for it. Do you think that is ok? And even if I granted your absurd claim, would that justify murder in your opinion? The fact you can’t condemn his murder makes me wary of you

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u/PensionFlashy5132 Sep 04 '26

Charlie Kirk was a crypto-fascist hate monger who ran an organization whose members have repeatedly been tied to white nationalist movements.

You having blinders on wont change that this is how history will remember him.

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u/ecsilver Sep 04 '26

You are so wrong. Seriously watch his videos. Not cut up hit pieces. Do it. I dare you. Bc you will hate what you are saying if you do

1

u/PensionFlashy5132 Sep 04 '26

No, i've heard enough bigotry from Charles for one lifetime.

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u/ecsilver Sep 04 '26

You haven’t heard any bigotry. You literally have never listened to him and your bubble told you to hate him. Think about that. Think really deeply and hard. You aren’t making up your mind on facts and data. You are following your herd. And the worst thing for you is you show no remorse for your ignorance and your approach is going to lead you to a lifetime of ignorance. But you’ll console yourself with “the herd”

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u/PensionFlashy5132 Sep 04 '26

Im a politics wonk, i knew who Charlie Kirk was in 2014, ive heard him speak numerous numerous times.

Im just capable of hearing dog whistles and you are not.

RIP Charlie another senseless victim of gang violence.

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u/surfteach1 Sep 04 '26

No, he didn't

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u/Ashe_the_Witch Sep 04 '26

He absolutely did, denying that just shows that you’re taking a page right out of his book and arguing in bad faith. Be better.

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u/FernTheHuman389 Sep 04 '26

I mean, definitely not the same caliber as Dr King. Definitely far more smug and pretentious. Idk, I was never fully invested in Kirks content, all the shorts got old kinda quick personally. He wasnt the same kind of prestige or anything, for sure. I saw Charlie as attempting to create discourse between the extremely divided bottom tho, which isnt inherently different from what King was going for at the end before the FBI labeled him a commie. Idk. Neither of them fixed the divide tho, so

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u/TheOneFreeEngineer Sep 04 '26

What type of discourse though? It didn’t seem to be discourse to bring people together but rather to drive people apart and laugh at and belittle entire groups of Americans and drive down support for any non white right evangelical group in American. Deriding LGBT people, mainline Christian denominations, Black churches, black people in general, literally laughing and making jokes about political violence against Democrats, and celebrating the bombings of innocent people overseas if they are Muslim.

That’s a discourse sure but it’s actively for negative purposes

0

u/FernTheHuman389 Sep 04 '26

Complete honesty, i never saw anything as racist as what gets spread, he did challenge the civil rights act for installing a permanent and unnecessary bureaucracy into the workforce. Which at face value can be spread as racist. I never saw him attack churches tho? Or just random bigoted comments against black people? I definitely never saw jokes about political violence? Or the celebrating of Muslims being bombed?

Idk, I wasnt really fully immersed in his content, tbh. But yeah, the divided sides disagree on a lot. He was super zionist. But what used to be political disagreements at this point is seen as a contention of morality itself. Exposure to disagreement shows (or was supposed to show, at least) that real regular people hold beliefs counter to what youve seen and been exposed to.

1

u/TheOneFreeEngineer Sep 04 '26

It’s unnecessary to have an employee protections against racism? That’s wild to say

You didn’t actually follow him or what his content or tweets if you missed the jokes about political violence, laughing at the mass civilian deaths in Gaza, and laughing about the attack on Paul Pelosi.

Everyone is exposed to political disagreements already. He was never special for making money off of political disagreements.

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u/FernTheHuman389 Sep 04 '26

I mean... are we? Im in my echo chamber, I feel like a lot of people are in their echo chamber. We all demonize the other guy. Idk if we are exposed to debate, really

And yeah, personally the take on DEI and the like seemed to make sense. Protections against racism i would say are necessary, but quotas around having X minorities just diminishes the overall talent pool.

Also yeah, he was super zionist. I think he largely just blamed hamas for the civilian death, I really dont believe that he was laughing about innocents being bombed tho. That seems like an obvious demonization.

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u/TheOneFreeEngineer Sep 04 '26

His take on DEI was it was correct to assume that black people in a job position were inherently unqualified. Just because you agreed with it doesn’t make it not racist.

Minority quota have been illegal since the 1970s, they aren’t part of DEI. He was outright lying about racial quotas existing in DEI programs.

Nothing I said had anything to do with him being Zionist unless you think cheering on the deaths of muslim civilians is inherently Zionist, which it isn’t.

He outright lied about reality to create political disagreements to make money and a name for himself

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u/FernTheHuman389 Sep 04 '26

Hard quotas are illegal, yep. Soft quotas still radically depress the talent pool. If someone gets a job due to quotas, its probably safe to assume they arent the most qualified candidate.

Again, I find it hard to believe that he was just cheering for more and more children to be blown up. That seems like an obvious demonization. But not being anti-israel, I could see that stance getting flattened

1

u/TheOneFreeEngineer Sep 04 '26

What is a “soft Quota”? Quota by definition are hard numbers. The idea of soft quotas themselves is kinda nonsensical.

Again quota have been illegal for 50 years. People aren’t hired based on quota. Assuming they are hired because of a quota without evidence is in and of itself racist.

You seem to be replacing my claims with statements I never made. I said civilian deaths, you changed it to child deaths. He was on stage talking about the civilian deaths and destruction in Gaza and openly laughed at it calling them “stupid Muslims”

You keep bringing back to Zionism like it somehow makes laughing at civilian deaths acceptable.

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u/FernTheHuman389 Sep 04 '26

Sorry. I have trouble believing that he was cheering for more and more innocent people to be blown up, children or adults. And yeah, I bring up the zionism because he was never against Israel trying to fight for the greater jerusalem lmao, so he never denounced them for bombing. Pretty sure he blamed hamas for all the civilian casualties. I did just look into the whole "stupid muslims" thing, being prefaced by "maybe you shouldnt kill jews" and joking that they dont have any more tall buildings to throw gays off of. Idk, if all Muslims are killing jews then thats who he was probably talking about. If only a subset of Muslims are killing jews, thats probably who he was talking about

As far as quotas, there is no more rigid numerical requirements. Instead, diversity is heavily financially incentivized from the top down which leads to soft quotas. Not anything concrete, but systematic pushes to synthesize equality, largely for funding benefits. Plans like "Aiming for a 50-50 gender balance", or "doubling the representation of black and Hispanic executives over the next 5 years". This all just undermines a meritocracy

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u/mentyaf Sep 02 '26

MLK jr? The guy who cheated on his wife repeatedly? Sexual assault allegations? Kirk would have never.

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u/Hologram8 Sep 04 '26

Which is ironic, since Charile called for an end to Martin Luther King Jr. Day , because he felt King Jr. was a bad person and and an enemy of America (Communist) and was undeserving to be celebrated with a National Holiday.

Also it funny the same person Conservatives push as this "Man of Peace" also suggested President Biden be arrested and executed.