I don’t know if the world needs my “thoughts” about Charlie Kirk and the young man who has admitted to the murder, Tyler Robinson. But not knowing a lot has never stopped me from blogging/posting about something before, so…
Before I go any further, let me be crystal clear about two key points.
First, I am against anyone getting shot for speaking on a college campus– or just being anywhere. Cold-blooded murder is bad. I know, a bold position. Kirk didn’t deserve to be shot any more than the two high school kids in Colorado who were shot on the same day. Kirk did not deserve to die, just as the hundreds/thousands of people who are killed every year by confused young men like Robinson, and like the shooter at that high school in Colorado.
Second, I think the reason why the reaction from MAGA world and conservative media is so strong and emotional is because in those worlds, Kirk was a huge presence and friend. TPUSA was instrumental in Trump winning votes among college-aged men, and Kirk raised A LOT of money for Republican causes. He seemed to know every Republican member of Congress, but beyond that, Kirk was friends with lots of people on Fox News and in the right-wing podcasting world, of Don Jr., JD, and many others in that circle. By all accounts, Kirk was incredibly charismatic and personable. I’ve read or heard multiple accounts of people who knew him saying things like “I didn’t agree with him about anything, but I always felt like he listened to me and cared about me.” Obviously, I’m hoping this does not become a full-blown McCarthyist-like effort to “punish what (Trump and his advisers) alleged was a left-wing network that funds and incites violence,” and I don’t support Kirk’s politics in any possible way. But I understand why Kirk’s millions of social media followers are upset.
Obama gave a very good speech the other day where he spoke in part about the Kirk shooting and the dangers of political violence in this country, and the importance of not letting political disagreements turn into shootings. Here’s a quote from The Guardian’s story about this:
While he believed that Kirk’s ideas “were wrong”, Obama said that “doesn’t negate the fact that what happened was a tragedy and that I mourn for him and his family”. Denouncing political violence and mourning its victims “doesn’t mean we can’t have a debate about the ideas” that Kirk promoted, he added.
Exactly. So, with that out of the way:
I didn’t pay much attention to Kirk before he was gunned down, and obviously, we’re all still learning more about Robinson. But as I’m learning a lot more about both of these guys, I’m beginning to recognize both of the Kirk and Robinson “types” in other men I’ve met and known.
I have a better handle on the Kirk type because he reminds me a lot of guys I knew from debate. I was active in debate throughout high school, I dabbled in it a bit as a competitor in college, and I did a fair amount of coaching and judging of high school debate as a college student. Debate was for me (and for everyone I knew who was involved in it) my “sport,” and it was just as much about competing and winning as football or wrestling or gymnastics or any other sport you can think of. I went with my team to tournaments all over Iowa and the Midwest, where dozens of different schools competed for championships, trophies, and bragging rights. Just like football, there were some schools that had powerhouse debate programs, teams that would win most of the time. (FWIW, I did not go to such a school, and I was a pretty mediocre debater, too).
Debate teaches participants how to take any position and to “win” the argument, regardless of what that debater actually believes. In the style of debate I did, each team of two people would take the affirmative side of a resolution one round and the negative side the next. I’m simplifying this, but that meant that in one round, you might passionately argue that gun control was bad, and then, in the next round, passionately argue that gun control was good. It didn’t matter if you believed one position or another because it was all part of the game. In other words, competitive debate is not some kind of Platonic dialogue that leads to a philosophical truth any more or any less than the outcome of a football game conveys a “truth”. 1
Naturally, debate attracted people interested in arguing for fun and as a thought experiment, and also people interested in public speaking, research, politics, and so forth. It is no wonder that a lot of famous people in politics and the media had experience in competitive debate. Most of the debate kids I knew had (like me) left-leaning political beliefs, but I also knew staunch Reagan conservatives as well. A lot of these folks were great guys– fun to hang around with, smart, charming, great speakers– who treated their politics as part of the sport. Kirk would have fit right in with this group.
But debate– the academic kind, but also the Platonic kind as well– has rules, and it is more than only an argument. For one thing, you need evidence to support your points, and that required hours in the library researching.2 Being good at arguing was not enough.
There has been a lot of praise heaped on Kirk for his “debate skills” and willingness to engage with anyone anywhere and on any topic, notably on college campuses. But as far as I can tell, what Kirk was good at was not the kind of debate I did in school (because he doesn’t use evidence to make his points), nor was he good at a more idealistic/truth-seeking Platonic debate/dialogue (because there is no mutual exchange trying to learn some truth). Rather, Kirk was good at arguing with people. Or maybe more accurately, at people.
YouTube is awash with videos of Kirk doing his “ask me anything” bit on college campuses and in podcasts, but here’s a simple example of what I mean:
It’s entertaining, Kirk has his moments of charm and wit (well, if you overlook his sexist ideas about dating and his berating of most of the people who step up to the microphone), and he’s very quick on his feet. But this is just a trick. It is arguing, and being willing and able to argue about anything regardless of how you feel about it. Given that Kirk’s goal with the Professor Watchlist website was to intimidate and silence academic freedom, it’s hard for me to believe that Kirk was always that sincere about these performances being an “exchange of ideas.”
Now, while I feel like I knew some Kirk types in debate and also in college politics, I feel like I know less about his (alleged/presumed) killer. But I do recognize the type in some of my late teen/early 20-something male students. Like Robinson– and also the guy who shot a couple of high school kids on the same day as Kirk’s murder in Colorado, the shooter behind the killing/injuring of Minnesota legislators, the guy who fire-bombed Josh Shapiro’s house in Pennsylvania, on and on and so forth–these are men who have been sucked into a baffling mix of shady internet discussion groups, Discord/gaming communities, the “manosphere,” crypto or other get rich schemes, conspiracy theory sites, fringe political and extremist group sites, etc.
I’ve never had a student about whom I thought, “hey, this guy could be a shooter,” and I’ve never felt like I needed to refer one of these students to the support services at EMU as someone who needed “help.” But some of the young men in my classes, sitting in the back of the room in first year composition with baseball hats pulled down over their foreheads and staring at some kind of screen, some of these young men espouse some of the sort of strange theories and confusing politics that are an emerging story about Robinson, and I think these students inhabit some of the same kinds of online spaces as Robinson. The Robinson type represents the most extreme version of the crisis among young men I’ve been reading about for the last year or so, and 99.99% of these confused young men are not dangerous. But the problem iof troubled and struggling young men in this country is real.
Kirk’s supporters in MAGA world are convinced Robinson and similar shooters are motivated by dangerous leftist ideologies. Kirk’s critics and many on the left argue that political violence in this country is mostly coming from right wing ideologues. My gut feeling is Robinson and his type aren’t motivated by left/right Democrat/Republican politics as we commonly understand them, but more by a messy stew of contradictory political views, internet memes and popular culture, gaming, and just overall “confusion,” for lack of a better way of putting it.
I have a hard time articulating the details of why I feel this way. Fortunately, I saw on the PBS News Hour an extremely helpful interview with Ryan Broderick, the primary writer of Garbage Day, which is “a Webby Award-winning newsletter about the internet and it comes out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.” He writes about all kinds of online culture, and man, he goes deep in places– a really interesting Substack site/newsletter. In this interview, Broderick explains in compelling detail what he sees as the likely meanings of the engravings Robinson made on the bullets that killed Kirk and that were recovered at the scene. Here’s an interview Broderick did with PBS News Hour on September 16 (the clip starts with the interview, which is about 10 minutes long, though this links to the entire episode).
If you are interested in the much longer and detailed version, I’d recommend the post on Garbage Day, “Charlie Kirk was killed by a meme.” Again, Broderick goes deep and with compelling documentation, explaining different internet/game/meme culture connections invoked by the evidence Robinson left behind with the shooter at a New Zealand mosque in 2019, Luigi Mangione, and other similarly confused shooters. The detail defies summary, but if you want the very short/”what’s the point” argument, I’d say Broderick sums it up well in the concluding paragraph:
We have let school shootings in America persist long enough that we have created a culture where kids grow up seeing them as a path towards fame and glory. Another consequence of how thoroughly the internet has flattened pop culture, politics, and real-life violence. All of it now is just another meme you can participate in to go viral. Made even more confusing by a new nihilistic accelerationist movement that delights in muddying the waters for older people who still adhere to a traditional political spectrum. Many young extremists now believe in a much simpler binary: Order and chaos. And if you are spending any time at all trying to derive meaning from violent acts like this then you are, by definition, their enemy.
I think this is spot on: I don’t think these shooters were radicalized by leftist professors,3 and they aren’t especially motivated by right-wing politics either. I think Broderick is right that the online culture inspiring (if not creating) shooters like Robinson defies our normal polarized sense of left and right.
In that Guardian article I mentioned earlier, Obama said “we” (as in all of us, I think) want to identify a clear enemy, and “We’re going to suggest that somehow that enemy was at fault, and we are then going to use that as a rationale for trying to silence discussion around who we are as a country and what direction we should go … And that’s a mistake as well.”
Trump and the Republicans are making this mistake right now, though going after “liberal extremists” who disagree with Trump is also a move consistent with the other steps toward authoritarian rule he has taken (and with no resistance from other Republicans). But folks on the left are just as polarized. If the victim of this recent shooting had been a prominent left-wing activist, I guarantee Democrats would be sifting through clues to try to prove the shooter’s right-wing political motivations.
But make no mistake, our conventional assumptions about right/left or red/blue politics in this country are not going to answer the question of these shooters’ motivations, and it is not going to prevent the next shooting from one of these types of troubled young men. As a society, we should be striving for a way to save these young men from being consumed by this culture and turned into killers.
Unfortunately, there is no way Trump or anyone else in DC will do this, and as a result, more politicians, school children, and just innocent people minding their own business are going to be killed. That is a sad and frightening reality of our times.
- I should note that my experiences in competitive debate are almost entirely limited to the 1980s– obviously, a long time ago. I don’t follow it anymore, but as I understand it, a lot of the strategies and approaches have changed in recent years. I think it’s still seen by participants as being more about a competition deciding winners and losers and less an actual exchange between people who hold different views, but I could be wrong about that. ↩︎
- In fact, I think the main skill I took away from debate was actually not “public speaking” at all. Rather, it was my introduction to how to do library research, how to find quotes to support you points, and how to keep track of/cite all of that evidence. ↩︎
- I wish I could indoctrinate students into left-leaning politics, but are you kidding? I can barely get them to read the syllabus. ↩︎