This Fucking Guy: Ezra Klein
Ezra Klein, The NY Times' token progressive once again licks his finger and reads the winds wrong.
I expected a lot of bad takes once I heard that Charlie Kirk was shot at a campus event. The right wing and MAGA crowd were gonna go nuts on anyone to the left of Genghis Khan, that's a given (and it happened on all sorts of social media).
And I expected Democratic leaders and electeds to mainly say trite things about how they abhor violence and that this has no place in America.[1]
Both of these did not disappoint. Hell, even I had some anodyne words to say:
Geoff Anderson
Mostly that I felt sorry for his young family, and how nothing good would come of this.
But the next morning, I opened my NY Times feed to this homeless abortion of a title:
Alas, the resident NY Times' "token" progressive was going to beclown himself.[2] I briefly glanced at it on Thursday morning and quickly clicked away. It was chock full of platitudes, and a grudging acknowledgement that Kirk built his following and audience well.
Bollocks.
Klein starts with the litany of political violence, and how corrosive it is. Yeah, nothing edgy there. But what caused me to click away was this 'graph:
You can dislike much of what Kirk believed and the following statement is still true: Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion. When the left thought its hold on the hearts and minds of college students was nearly absolute, Kirk showed up again and again to break it. Slowly, then all at once, he did. College-age voters shifted sharply right in the 2024 election. (emphasis mine)
No, that was and is not true. Kirk was practicing politics as a bully, not quite gish-galloping, but his modus operandi was to get left leaning students in front of a crowd, to belittle them, and to stomp all over their statements, declaring victory. He used trite throwaway lines (like the one he loved to tout about how the 2nd amendment was worth the price of a few people dying by firearm violence), and parroting right wing narrative.
Klein then goes on:
I did not know Kirk, and I am not the right person to eulogize him. But I envied what he built. A taste for disagreement is a virtue in a democracy. Liberalism could use more of his moxie and fearlessness. In the inaugural episode of his podcast, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California hosted Kirk, admitting that his son was a huge fan. What a testament to Kirk’s project.
No, Newsom having Kirk on was not a testament to Kirk's project, it was a bad choice by Newsom who spent the time normalizing and saying Kirk had good ideas.
No, Kirk did not. It was this ill-fated desire by the Democratic consultant class to duplicate the right wing/MAGA influencer ecosystem without actually understanding how it works.
He then goes on to mumbling something about the sides in politics, and maintaining some semblance of viability. That is poppycock. Yes, there are sides. One side (the Democrats) play like it is a rule bound system with rational actions and responses. The other side rejects the rules, and goes straight for the political jugular. Alas, they seem to win too often.
This is like all the people who object when I comment somewhere that "This is who we are" whether it is in the election/elevation of Trump, or the coarseness of the conversation, or, whatever. I get a ton of pushback. But the reality is that this is who we are.
I will end with this final pull:
Kirk and I were on different sides of most political arguments. We were on the same side on the continued possibility of American politics. It is supposed to be an argument, not a war; it is supposed to be won with words, not ended with bullets. I wanted Kirk to be safe for his sake, but I also wanted him to be safe for mine and for the sake of our larger shared project. The same is true for Shapiro, for Hoffman, for Hortman, for Thompson, for Trump, for Pelosi, for Whitmer. We are all safe, or none of us are.
No, you were NOT on different sides. His side wants you, me, and all the Democrats and even centrist Republicans dead. He gleefully mocked the LGBTQIA+ community, BLM, and any organization trying to help the broader electorate.
And Ezra Klein whitewashing that makes him my Human Garbage of the Week.
1 - seemingly forgetting that political violence is deep in our DNA, and even our founding as a nation was tied to violence
2 - I have never been a fan or even a disinterested reader of Ezra Klein, even in his pre-NYT days. He always seemed to be calibrating his rhetoric to whatever way the wind was blowing. Read his latest bullshit on "Abundance" for the full-on triangulation
