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“I went on Charlie Kirk’s debate show back in 2022,” political scientist Rachel Bietcofer wrote on social media after Kirk’s horrifying assassination last week. “He plays a character, the real man was exceedingly polite and completely engaged with the young people in Turning Point. That character spread hate and poison, but there is a human behind it.”
There’s a lot to question about Bitecofer’s statement—for instance, if you spend your public life advocating for “hate and poison,” does it really matter if you’re polite to some people in private? But what I was most struck by was the way that Bitecofer highlights the fact that debating Kirk, and appearing on a stage with him, shaped her view of him and of his movement. She feels she has insight into him because she talked to him in person, and she feels that he is (in secret, in private) a good person because he was nice to her when they met.
People who debate generally argue that they do so in order to convince people on the right to come over to the good. “You can’t blame somebody for not embracing your message if they’ve literally never heard it,” Pete Buttigieg has said, explaining why he regularly does Fox news hits. Liberal democracy is a marketplace of ideas. Liberal and left vendors of ideas need to take their wares to that market to show they are superior.
The problem is that we aren’t in fact all rational brains in jars objectively choosing the best of all possible ideologies at the best price. Ideology is shaped by affinity, by social networks, by identity. And that means that if you spend your time debating the right, you can end up with affinities, social networks, and identities that lead you to solidarity with those you’re debating, rather than with those whose causes you are ostensibly advancing.
The class that talks
Bitecofer’s defense of Kirk’s character is an example of what I’ve referred to in the past as “chattering class solidarity”. Pundits see themselves in and identify with other pundits. And pundits, obviously, have large platforms. The result is that when pundits talk about free speech, they tend to frame it as the right and privilege of pundits to speak everywhere, at all times, about anything.
So, for example, when conservative NY Times Bari Weiss made an ugly and ill-informed remark and was widely criticized on twitter, the Atlantic launched what was essentially an entire vertical of op-eds defending her and decrying the incivility of people who dared to mock pundits for saying stupid shit.
In contrast, the Atlantic’s coverage of government attacks on Palestinian protestors has been much more ambivalent; while some writers have defended campus speech, others—like Caitlin Flanagan—compared the protests to “Kristallnacht” and called for student expulsions, or engaged in mealy-mouthed vacillation.
The contrast here seems bizarre and unaccountable. People criticizing Bari Weiss for a silly tweet seems like a much less pressing free speech issue than federal, state, and city governments calling in cops and disciplining students for protesting what at this point the vast majority of genocide scholars say is a genocide. Why would the Atlantic and other major outlets get unanimously outraged about the first but struggle to consistently condemn the second?
Chattering class solidarity makes the dynamic much clearer. Pundits at the Atlantic see themselves in Bari Weiss; they are defending her from the non-pundit rabble. In contrast, pundits do not generally see themselves in pro-Palestinian student protestors; those protestors are also part of the non-pundit rabble. Free speech, through this lens, means free speech for important thought leaders with impressive bylines. Theirs is the big speech, the good speech, the speech that matters. Other speech is unimportant and on sufferance.
Debate can coopt pundits
This is useful context for considering the resent oddly pro-Kirk article at the supposedly leftist magazine Jacobin. Written by Ben Burgis and Meagan Day, the piece discusses Burgis’ debate with Kirk in 2021.
Four years ago, one of us (Ben) did a debate with Kirk on “Democratic Socialism vs. Conservative Populism.” His politics have trended in an even worse direction over the years since, flirting with much uglier forms of nationalism and xenophobia, but even in 2021, the substance of Kirk’s side of the conversation was indefensible. While claiming the mantle of “populism,” he defended a series of positions that would have been at home on the Wall Street Journal editorial page. He was steadfastly opposed to even baby steps toward a more equal society like universal health care and building a stronger labor movement.
At the same time, he didn’t descend into personal attacks. He stuck to the substance of the arguments, largely steering clear of cheap gotchas and giving Ben the space to hammer home the contradiction between Kirk’s populist rhetoric and the ugly inegalitarian substance of his politics. In a country where substantial numbers of our fellow citizens unfortunately agree with Kirk’s perspective, discussions like that are absolutely necessary. The shooting yesterday points the way toward a much uglier path, and one that won’t and can’t end anywhere we should want to go.
Burgis and Day point are clear that the policies Kirk advocates are evil. But they carefully praise the form of his public discourse. Kirk, they say, did not “descend into personal attacks.” He debated in good faith which meant that Burgis was able to reach Kirk’s audience and potentially transform them into leftists with the power of his eloquence and logic.
The problem here is that, while Kirk may have been polite and pleasant to Burgis and Bitecofer and others who he shared a stage with, he was not polite and did not avoid personal attacks in most other contexts. As I (and others!) have pointed out, Kirk helped organize the January 6 insurrection, created lists to target professors for harassment and threats, and argued that LGBT people should be stoned. He regularly and viciously used racist, sexist, ugly personal attacks against Black people in particular. As a very brief sample collected by the Guardian:
If you’re a WNBA, pot-smoking, Black lesbian, do you get treated better than a United States marine?
– The Charlie Kirk Show, 8 December 2022
Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.
– The Charlie Kirk Show, 19 May 2023
If I’m dealing with somebody in customer service who’s a moronic Black woman, I wonder is she there because of her excellence, or is she there because of affirmative action?
– The Charlie Kirk Show, 3 January 2024
Burgis and Day argue that the assassination of Kirk was wrong and that it will lead to more repression. They are correct there. But they also apologize for Kirk and minimize his radicalism, his bigotry, his use of smears, and his support for political violence.
And why do they do that? According to the authors themselves, they are impressed with Kirk’s civility specifically because Burgis debated him, and because they believe those debates are valuable.
It’s certainly possible that Burgis changed the minds of some people in Kirk’s audience. But we know, on Burgis’ testimony, that Kirk changed Burgis’ mind at least to the extent that he convinced Burgis (and Day and Bitecofer) that he was a good faith interlocutor whose voice was valuable despite (or because of?) the fact that he held heinous views. The slander, dehumanization, calls to violence, and insurrection which Kirk engaged in off the stage is erased by the uplifting spectacle of the chattering class united in free speech and debate.
Affinity often supersedes argument
At the NYT, Jamelle Bouie writes that “Death tends to soften our tendency to judge. And sudden, violent death — especially one as gruesome and shocking as [Kirk’s] — can push us toward hagiography, especially in the immediate wake of the killing.”
It’s surely true that some commenters have softened their analysis of Kirk because of his ugly and violent death. Based on Bitecofer, Burgis, and Day, though, I think it’s also reasonable to see part of support for Kirk among pundits and debaters as linked to Kirk’s identity as a pundit and debater. Kirk promoted himself in part by saying incredibly inflammatory and bigoted things, in part by organizing harassment against those he disagreed with, and in part by talking to liberal or left pundits.
The last was an exercise in mutual self-promotion. Debaters are in part trying to convince people, perhaps, but they’re also staging a show which can translate into viral clips, attention, and income.
Everyone needs to make a living, and I’m not saying that debating Kirk was always wrong or misguided or corrupt. What I am saying, though, is that when you are in a mutually beneficial cross-promotional relationship with someone, it may be difficult to fully appreciate that, when they are not helping you out, they are doing things like organizing insurrections, harassing professors, calling for the stoning of LGBT people, and demonizing Black people with vile racist slurs.
People can be influenced by arguments in debates. But just as often people are influenced less by what is said, and more by who is there. Sharing a stage with someone doesn’t necessarily make you friends. But it can make you think that your interlocutor is legitimate, worthwhile, open-minded, simply because they are there and are talking to you. The far right in general, and Kirk in particular have been canny in taking advantage of this dynamic, recognizing that they can legitimize themselves by appearing in certain liberal venues with certain liberal people, and thereby normalize and mainstream a lot of bigoted and violent rhetoric which might be seen as beyond the pale if it was coming from someone outside the club.
Again, this doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t go on right wing venues or talk to right wing people. It does mean, though, that pundits who claim to be liberals or on the left would do well to think about how their jobs and their professional networks can be vectors for a kind of soft ideological capture. The chattering class always needs to think about who they’re chattering for. Is the goal to defend and advance the cause of punditing? Or is the goal freedom and justice for everyone? Either way, Charlie Kirk’s assassination was evil and wrong. But when they try to assess Kirks’ legacy, we have some evidence that chattering class solidarity can lead pundits astray.