After Charlie Kirk’s Murder, Elite Arrogance Still on Full Display
College students saw Charlie Kirk as the ultimate enemy, so awful he needed deplatforming or worse, but educational swindlers are the real enemies of youth.
From Bret Stephens in the New York Times:
It’s too bad that Kirk, raised in a Chicago suburb, didn’t attend the University of Chicago. It wouldn’t have hurt getting thrashed in a political debate by smarter peers. Or learning to appreciate the power and moral weight of views he didn’t share. Or recognizing that the true Western tradition lies more in its skepticism than in its certitude.
It’s too bad Bret Stephens never debated Charlie Kirk. He’d have had to defend the idea that students at places like the University of Chicago are not only “smarter” than ignorant red-staters (and students at schools like Cambridge), but more schooled in the “Western tradition” of “skepticism,” as opposed to “certitude.”
Does Stephens mean currently? If so, that’s rich. The cultural schism now widening under all of us in America has surely been caused at least in part by a shift in the attitudes of the very people Stephens calls “the greatest scholars.” Professors abandon skepticism for certitude in a range of hot-button issues, including a conspicuous one that may have had an impact on Kirk’s murder, transgender ideology.
And “smarter”? Stephens needs a fresh look at what passes for instruction and re-examine whether students are really being taught to think better. He should ask if it’s not instead true that institutional America is and has been systematically ripping off its young, a question Kirk threw at students everywhere, often with devastating results. It’s not surprising that scenes of kids who casually admit they “hate books” but were welcomed to pay tuition anyway haven’t made too many of the “Kirk’s greatest misdeeds” reels currently circulating:
This major plank of Kirk’s traveling-debate act is almost never mentioned in mainstream press rundowns of his views. Press accounts focus on alleged bigotry, xenophobia, and misogyny. However, Kirk’s schtick as a non-college graduate moving from town to town doing verbal battle with ostensibly enlightened clientele of higher education had a key subtext: college embarrasses its customers.
His book on the same theme gives predictable focus to the ideological-indoctrination portion of liberal arts education in particular, but most of his argument centers on things I heard for years from student loan forgiveness advocates: college doesn’t prepare students to enter the workforce, does little to secure income, and is particularly devastating to seas of humanities students duped into thinking they need to mortgage their futures for careers that, like my own, often don’t require degrees.
This part of Kirk’s act has been edited out of the public debate. Most infuriating of all has been listening to media figures at outlets like Salon denounce “Debate Me, Bro” culture as commercial hucksterism that’s “ruined civil discourse.” Not only is Kirk guilty of this, apparently, but also the likes of Joe Rogan, whose podcast is part of the regrettably rising tide of “people who don’t know what they’re talking about arguing with each other under the guise of debate.” These people have the gall to denounce The Joe Rogan Experience as an ignorance-spreading machine when the higher educational system has been gorging itself on trillions in federally-backed loans, just to crank out people with no professional skills who are also so shredded intellectually, they think they have to use terms like “birthing persons.”
Set aside the motive of Kirk’s shooter, which will likely come out in full in time. The scene of the crime was a college, and the damage such institutions did to young brains in this country is the story that’s most visible on Kirk’s videos, but which America’s opinion-making classes are most interested in keeping hidden:
Stephens pooh-poohs the video record of Kirk’s campus debates as “owning inarticulate liberal kids in mass audience settings.” However, it’s not selective editing or an elaborate Washington Generals act that led to the hours of online implosions, but an embarrassing premise. America’s “smarter” kids not only haven’t been taught how to handle press encounters, they’re increasingly not taught much that’s concrete at all. Beyond political solidarity against people like Kirk and a clunky vocabulary of oppression most will never use in their professional lives (if they even get jobs), our Best and Brightest are continually sent into the world armed with nothing but neurosis, self-absorption, and a Flatland view of human nature.
Decades ago this looked mostly like a commercial scam foisted on middle- to upper-middle-class teenagers, who after the sixties began to be lent the equivalent of home mortgages the instant they hit the age of consent, then packed off to leafy luxury kennels where liquor laws are ignored, no one flunks out, and the main “coursework” is therapy disguised as academics. I once thought students who majored in intersectional basket-weaving at third-rate schools and then carried school loans to Social Security Age were the main victims. It’s now clear a country asked to revere the leadership of intellectually unequipped graduates was also seriously victimized.
Would Charlie Kirk have had as easy a time beating up on 19-year-olds learning helicopter piloting or chemical engineering? Maybe, but it stands out that the bulk of the people who did show up to argue with Kirk were raised in the intellectual nerf-habitats of humanities faculties, where weak arguments were routinely allowed to prevail and young people were taught to take it personally when adults didn’t automatically salute nonsense shibboleths about race or gender or the latest whateverism. That’s what comes through on Turning Point’s most viral “Charlie Kirk OWNS woke dipshits” videos, which are almost always about abortion or trans rights or other culture-war minefields where students simply haven’t been taught the other sides of issues, or to just lob words like “evil” without even bothering to make cases.
The “Is college a scam?” debates are most revealing. You see teenagers and young twenty-somethings making industry arguments against themselves, in a way they would never do if the underlying subject was Big Oil, Banks or Big Pharma. Are too many kids pushed into crippling loans? Gosh, nobody pushed us, we’re all of age. Do you need a degree to get the job you want? Absolutely, I’d never get satisfying work without this experience. Does a multi-trillion-dollar industry that’s failed its customer base and created a huge debt bubble and is massively subsidized by the taxpayer bother you? No, that’s natural.
The biggest tell, though, is what happened when Kirk brought up non-professional jobs with high salaries. Who teaches a college student to roll her eyes at the idea of working as a plumber? Who, me? That’s learned disrespect:
Moments like these are what made kids look “inarticulate” in these encounters. Kirk of course exploited this, but it shined through that his beef wasn’t with young people, but the adults behind the students, whom he called “the powers that run colleges.” He repeatedly argued that colleges take young, impressionable people terrified of a shrinking job market and desperate to validate family expectations and social aspirations, and shoehorn them into useless degree programs that feed them political agitprop in place of knowledge. If that agitprop didn’t directly lead to his shooting (it might have), it’s certainly alive in the sociopathic reaction of media figures and academics who seem genuinely to believe that some people just need removing.
Stephens conveniently excised all this from his own thesis about “our vanishing culture of argument.” Center-left America (as well as civil liberties organizations like FIRE) are rightly in a panic over signals from Trumpian conservatives about a post-assassination speech crackdown. Donald Trump shared a video from a TikTok influencer calling for the establishment of a “Charlie Kirk Act” that would hold media companies and academics “accountable for… false narratives.” Louisiana Republican Clay Higgins vowed to work with tech platforms to “mandate immediate ban for life of every post or commenter that belittled the assassination of Charlie Kirk.” Attorney General Pam Bondi freaked out listeners on both sides when she said, “There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech.” Top presidential adviser Stephen Miller said the government would “identify, disrupt, eliminate and destroy” left-wing groups responsible for elevating a climate of violent intolerance.
It’s old news that America’s political right feels rage at being talked down to by a handful of elites who for ages moved straight from the academy to jobs as architects of mass culture, occupying them as a birthright. Elections are the one major area where non-college-educated citizens get a say in determining national priorities, and it hasn’t been lost on red-state voters that whenever “deplorables” vote the wrong way, university intellectuals argue for increased digital controls to keep the rabble’s wrong decisions from bursting through even there. Donald Trump’s war on places like Columbia and Harvard clearly had roots in frustration over this exact dynamic.
After January 6th, 2021 when Twitter inexplicably shut down 70,000 accounts associated with QAnon and joined other companies in removing Trump from social media, leading academics and policy wonks cheered. Deplatforming, said Harvard’s Joan Donovan, “is working,” while Graham Brookie of the Atlantic Council said it “rapidly curbs momentum and ability to reach new audiences” of bad actors. Papers like The Washington Post couldn’t wait to applaud a supposed “drop” in disinformation these moves brought about. In 2018, Columbia Professor Tim Wu wrote the seminal “Is the First Amendment Obsolete?” paper arguing new conditions (like deployment of “atrocity propaganda” against the likes of Hillary Clinton) required a rethink of the Bill of Rights. The biggest content-suppression farms were all tied to the most prestigious institutions: Stanford, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, even the University of Chicago Stephens fawns over. It will be the mother of all disasters if Republicans take the cheese and try to appropriate this machinery for themselves. The political gains will be temporary, but the tools for a crackdown will become permanent.
Worse: what happens when you combine the idea that some people are too evil to deserve speech with mass instruction in crackpot ideas? Someone will get hurt, obviously, or lots of someones. Rather than admit to roles in radicalizing people against (pick one) vaccine skeptics, “deplorables,” “transphobes,” or other offenders, it will become necessary to keep describing the victim as the wrongdoer. Jimmy Kimmel, who spent Covid telling us “doing your own research” was the province of people who think “Moderna turns yer teeth Jewish!” and the unvaccinated should “rest in peace, wheezy,” now has a bit just flat-out lying about who Kirk’s shooter is, because we couldn’t possibly regret suggesting some people are better off dead. We are mass-producing frustration, ignorance, and meanness, and it’s getting harder to pretend we don’t know exactly which industry is behind it.