Friday, September 12, 2025

CHARLIE KIRK AND THE PRESUMPTION OF RIGHT-WING DECENCY

How familiar do you think Ezra Klein was with the specifics of Charlie Kirk's career when he wrote his New York Times obituary "Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way"? My guess is that he didn't know much about Kirk. Journalists and pundits try to write with an air of authoritativeness even when they're holding forth on subjects outside their area of expertise. We see that every time a subject expert vigorously fact-checks a poorly informed reporter or commentator.

Why would Klein know much about Kirk? Klein, like most writers in the mainstream media, has never shown much interest in the specifics of what popular right-wing demagogues are saying. (The mainstream media has largely ignored the content of right-wing invective since the heyday of talk radio.) Klein was unlikely to run into Kirk at the Atlantic Festival or the 92nd Street Y. Kirk existed largely outside Klein's orbit.

I'm not offering this as an excuse for Klein's decision to summarize Kirk's career this way:
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.
I'm saying just the opposite: Klein knew that Kirk made many people angry. Before writing about Kirk, Klein should have done some research in order to understand the reasons for that anger. But it appears that he didn't.

When I decide to write about a right-winger I'm not completely familiar with who's just said or done something inflammatory, I often look for documentation of other offensive words or deeds. It doesn't have to be a deep dive -- Wikipedia, Media Matters, Right Wing Watch, or even just a Google search of the name followed by the word "controversy." It's not hard.

I suspect that Klein didn't do this kind of research on Kirk, for two reasons:
1. Like most writers in the mainstream media, he presumes that anyone who's this close to the Republican mainstream must be, deep down, a reasonable and decent person.

2. Like most writers in the mainstream media, he presumes that liberal anger is likely to be a hysterical effort to suppress legitimate ideas.
We know that Klein extends the presumption of decency to mainstream Republicans because of what he said about congressional and judicial Republicans in the opening essay of a recent podcast:
Early in Donald Trump’s second term, as the president was asserting a level of nearly autocratic power — which his predecessors certainly did not think they possessed — I published an essay called “Don’t Believe Him.”

In that essay, I argued that Trump was asserting all this power because he was actually weak. He was moving so fast because everywhere else in the government, he was likely to be stopped — in Congress and in the courts....

For a while, that bet looked sort of right. Trump was getting stopped in the courts. They were ruling against him overwhelmingly, over and over again. These were the early months of the administration — we were still then waiting for the Supreme Court to weigh in.

But in the last few months, the Supreme Court has weighed in. And it has weighed in overwhelmingly for Donald Trump and the powers he seeks.
Klein simply presumed that congressional Republicans and the six Republicans on the Supreme Court would act decently. To his horror, that didn't happen. (The headline of Klein's next column, "Stop Acting Like This Is Normal," can be read as Klein chiding himself for his earlier naïveté.)

I think Klein assumed that Kirk was a fine fellow whose positions were right-wing but invariably within the pale -- abortion is bad, traditional marriage is good, the border should be secured. And because angry liberals and leftists are assumed to be both hyperbolic and censorious, Klein assumed that we were horrfied by Kirk because he vigorously defended these positions. I think it never occurred to Klein that he might want to give angry liberals the benefit of the doubt and try to understand why Kirk made us so angry.

If he'd made the effort, he would have discovered that Kirk wasn't a decent person at all. He was a person who said this:

Ezra Klein: Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way Charlie Kirk: Jail every doctor who has treated transgender children. (Source: www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk...)

[image or embed]

— Evan Urquhart (@evanurquhart.bsky.social) September 11, 2025 at 1:27 PM

And this:


Klein would have learned that Kirk said, “We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s,” that he called Kamala Harris "the jive speaking spokesperson of equity," and that he said this:
Well, KBJ - Ketanji Brown Jackson - is what your country looks like on critical race theory. KBJ is your country on CRT. KBJ - Ketanji Brown Jackson - is an embodiment of the tyranny that we currently live under. She's an ideological, unintelligent, yet confident fanatic....

She feels entitled to this position. Why wouldn't she? It's not like she got this position based on her qualifications.
Klein would have discovered Kirk pronouncements like these:
Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.
– The Charlie Kirk Show, 19 May 2023

If I’m dealing with somebody in customer service who’s a moronic Black woman, I wonder is she there because of her excellence, or is she there because of affirmative action?
– The Charlie Kirk Show, 3 January 2024....

The American Democrat party hates this country. They wanna see it collapse. They love it when America becomes less white.
– The Charlie Kirk Show, 20 March 2024

The great replacement strategy, which is well under way every single day in our southern border, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different.
– The Charlie Kirk Show, 1 March 2024....

America has freedom of religion, of course, but we should be frank: large dedicated Islamic areas are a threat to America.
– The Charlie Kirk Show, 30 April 2025

We’ve been warning about the rise of Islam on the show, to great amount of backlash. We don’t care, that’s what we do here. And we said that Islam is not compatible with western civilization.
– The Charlie Kirk Show, 24 June 2025

Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.
– Charlie Kirk social media post, 8 September 2025
Klein would have learned that Kirk "founded the Professor Watchlist, committed to singling out academics he believed discriminated against conservative views, scholarship, and students, leading to threats against some of the instructors named," as well as the School Board Watchlist, "a platform designed to track school districts and governors whom [his] organization accuses of advancing what it calls 'radical left agendas' in American education."

And he would have learned that Kirk called for Mehdi Hasan, a U.S. citizen, to be deported because Hasan expressed opinions about COVID and vaccines on MSNBC that Kirk didn't like.
Wow. Who is that neurotic lunatic? Who is that guy? Send him back to the country he came from. Holy cow. Get him off TV. Revoke his visa....

When you think they really can't reach another level of just outright Pfizer prostitution. That guy's a prostitute with a British accent. He’s a foreigner with a British accent who's a prostitute for the pharmaceutical companies.
And he would have learned that Kirk relentlessly spread lies about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio:


But Kirk was a Republican insider, so Klein gave him the presumption of decency, as most people in the mainstream media do. Kirk's critics were angry liberals and lefties, so Klein presumed they were censorious hysterics, which is how the mainstream media always sees us.
Posted by Steve M. at 9:32 AM

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