Art Keene
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Art Keene
@artkeene.bsky.social
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Retired anthropologist. Managing Editor, The Amherst Indy (www.Amherstindy.org)
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I also tried to counter Klein and others’ characterization of Kirk as a model of commitment to debate and persuasion—a bizarrely revisionist account of his work.
Fair enough, I suppose, on its merits, but such a description of reasoned, honest, good-faith debate is so inaccurate a description of what Charlie Kirk engaged in on college campuses – in his series of large, staged events where he “debated” untrained liberal undergraduates with cameras rolling – that it reads as willfully naive, if not outright dishonest. Charlie Kirk’s “debates” were aggressive, unequal, trolling affairs, in which he sought to provoke his interlocutors to distress, shouted them down and belittled them, spewed hateful rhetoric about queer and trans people, women, Black people, immigrants and Muslims, and selectively edited the ensuing footage to create maximally viral content in which his fans could witness him humiliating the liberals and leftists they perceived to be their enemies. This was not “debate”; it was not reasoned, good-faith discourse; it was not the kind of fair deliberation that democracy relies on. It was a mockery of those things.
September 14, 2025 at 1:36 PM