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

[u/Vert_der_Ferk25]

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 👀🔥"

"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?

[u/EsotericInvestigator]

Kirk's schtick was borrowed from Shapiro. He'd go to venues where people who had more ambition than sense would try to debate him, and he'd either capture someone just naively in over their head or unable to think on their feet to respond to a specious argument, then clip them as representative of what his enemies think. Besides the cherry-picking, this only works in a context where people are not in a position to really work through arguments and don't know how to interact with the one-liner pantomime, so it's ultimately a thin veneer. It is good for people who just want to believe people they dislike are idiots and cannot be bothered to think it about it too much, though. He was sort of a travelling tour of Facebook boomer memes come to life. The hook that keeps people coming back to try their hand is they could sense he's obnoxiously wrong, but knowing that someone isn't reasoning well and being able to explain that in a quick back and forth are totally different things.

[u/4444Grains → u/EsotericInvestigator]

This is really what it boils down to…he was a showman…and not even a really good one.

Someone here gave the example of “It would be like LeBron going to colleges and challenging random students to basketball games”…but in that scenario LeBron would win 100% of the time because he is legitimately great.

Charlie Kirk had a (very small, shallow) bag of tricks, he wasn’t debating in good faith and he absolutely had no intention of learning or growing. So, his whole shtick of “Change My Mind” was just bullshit.

[u/EsotericInvestigator → u/4444Grains]

Yeah, that analogy is poor because Lebron James is good at basketball. What he was doing was the quasi-secular version of traveling creationists who offer to debate people to give themselves a veneer of intellectualism. They rely on getting into quick verbal exchanges with carefully practiced specious arguments that can be deployed in a couple lines with people who don't have the ability to quickly diagnose how to respond to their BS. That takes skill, but the skill isn't in developing cogent arguments or even being good at rhetoric. It's having a gimmick and trying to be careful about which targets you use it on.