| Worst Argument of the Week |
| The Internet is awash in bad takes about Charlie Kirk right now, but there is one man who decided to use the ingredients of every bad take and dissolve them into a slop that perfectly encapsulates everything wrong with mainstream, white media in this moment. That man is Ezra Klein. His piece, unconscionably titled “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way,” goes beyond mere hagiography of a guy whose literal last words were a racial insult to achieve a level of intellectual detachment from reality that I believe can only be reached by a white man in America.
Klein writes, “You can dislike much of what Kirk believed and the following statement is still true: Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way.” I want people to pay attention to Klein’s word choices here, because nearly every one of them is covered in white supremacist apologia shit. A close read: |
- “Dislike”: You see, for a cis white man like Ezra, politics and political discourse are matters of taste. Klein no doubt disliked that Kirk said gay people should be stoned to death, but to him that’s merely a matter of preference. For other people—say, for instance, the gay people who would have been stoned to death had Kirk been more effective in his political goals—Kirk was not merely a distasteful provocateur; his ideology was a threat to their very existence. Whether an entire class of people has a right to exist is not a game to some of us, as it is to Ezra.
- “The following statement is still true”: I feel that when a guy prefaces a statement with something to the effect of “what I’m about to say is true,” they’re about to lie.
- “Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way”: First of all, “exactly the right way” is not a fact that can be shown to be “true.” It’s a value judgment. And value judgments can be questioned no matter how much the white man making them stomps around and claims his judgments are facts. When we look at what values Klein supports through the avatar of Kirk, we see that Kirk was practicing the most divisive form of politics possible. Kirk’s goals were to outrage, not enrich. He practiced the politics of bullying and threatening. He called empathy a “made-up word” and said that Black women lacked the “processing power” of their white counterparts. Did Kirk have a right to say these things? Absolutely. Should he have been killed for practicing politics in the way that he did? Absolutely not. But to say that practicing politics in his way was “exactly right” is, frankly, a disgusting statement from Mr. Klein. I don’t even think there is one “exactly right” way to practice politics, but if there is, I for sure don’t think the one true way is to racially denigrate Black people and threaten the existence of the LGBTQ community. I want people who practice politics to be better than Charlie Kirk. And Ezra Klein.
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| Klein’s article goes on to condemn political violence. I agree with that, of course. But condemning political violence as an op-ed columnist is a little bit like condemning the French Revolution when you’re a member of the aristocracy. It is in our best interests to condemn the violent murder of public figures, because we all know we might be next. That doesn’t make us empathetic or graceful or more enlightened than the least common denominator on social media; it makes us self-interested.
Moreover, it is entirely possible to condemn political violence and mourn the victims of political violence without lauding the political influence of the perpetrator of the violence. Klein fails that should-be-basic test.
Charlie Kirk represented the very worst American political discourse had to offer, and I wish he were still alive so I could say that to him, to his face, over and over again. I wish he lived long enough to see everything that he worked to achieve crumble all around him.
You see what I did there, Ezra? It’s really not hard. |
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