Good article by Arun Gupta, also did you know Charlie Kirk targeted professors at schools? The right weaponized free speech 6 years ago.
Left media takes about Charlie Kirk have ranged from predictable to appalling. The sharpest analysis I have seen has been people writing on Facebook and videos on TikTok.
In a separate post, I will reprint an analysis by my friend Joe Lowndes who says it all with his opening line, "Ezra Klein's embarrassing lionization of Charlie Kirk demonstrates how fascism feeds on the dying body of liberalism." You should follow Joe.
In other words, liberals are worse than useless. They provide a valuable function as meat for fascism to feed on and grow stronger.
I want to flesh out, so to speak, a different point, which I will expand on Substack. Charlie Kirk was a digital Klansman.
I am intimately familiar with Kirk's strategy because I spent years covering far-right extremism in Portland. Kirk used the exact same model that Andy Ngo used.
This is not a free speech issue. Even the left media has failed to grasp that Kirk, Ngo, and their ilk learned how to weaponize free speech. Six years ago — 6 years! — I described how Ngo's terrorist technique worked, which Kirk scaled up to a national level (link is in comments):
"The incident [by Ngo] was an example of a disturbing media model for the Trump era: opportunists using biased reporting, social media, and wild accusations inflame vigilante and digital mobs to target “enemies” such as the media, Democrats, and left-wing activists."
I talked to one researcher named Madison who tracked NGO who said, "Ngo signals this is a person that should be targeted, should be harassed, and should be threatened. Andy puts a target on them and that results in the person being doxxed. Andy is giving people explicit permission to unleash hatred and violence on people. He absolutely knows what he is doing.”
This is exactly what Kirk did with his Professor Watchlist. Whenever Turning Point decided to target someone, they only had to write an article about them. They knew there is a cancerous dark ecosystem on Redditt, 4Chan, Telegram, X, Facebook, and so on that would take the information and crowdsource a terror campaign against them.
In the last few days, I have seen four academics post accounts about the torrent of harassment they faced. Their email inboxes would fill up with racist invective. They would pick up their phones to people screaming slurs at them and threatening to kill them and harm their families. Their universities would be barraged with the same assault and demands they be fired.
The harassment would spill over into the real world sometimes with people stalking them, photographing them, showing up at their home -- as happened to Tariq Khan. Sometimes the university would provide them with security, which is unnerving because it makes real the scope of the threat. People lost jobs and were pushed to the brink of suicide.
Charlie Kirk was the leader of a virtual lynch mob. He never got his hands dirty and would even denounce the harassment, but plausible deniability is all part of the game. Mainstream journos are so short-sighted and cowed by the right they never forcefully exposed Kirk's or Ngo's stratagem.
The reason I say Kirk was a digital Klansman has to do with what he was really trying to do. There is some pushback over attempts to beatify him, such as with a decent new article by Jamelle Bouie. But he does not see the bigger picture. Denouncing Kirk as sexist, racist, transphobic, Islamophobic, nativist is true but misses the point because it turns his strategy into a listicle. Kirk was vicious because he was advancing an agenda to make U.S. politics and society white supremacist and Christian nationalist.
Anti-Black racism was at the heart of that. He was a general in the MAGA war on Black America. This is Trump's and Kirk's real agenda, and legacy media and left media have not realized it. Kirk demeaned, degraded, and denigrated African-American people, history, and culture whenever possible. So all his anti-Black racism was not just random musing. His strategy was to attack and reverse all the progress Black people have won through great struggle and sacrifice since the dawn of the Civil Rights era.
That's why Kirk demeaned the most successful Black women as lacking brain processing power, and that they steal a white person's slot. That a Black pilot is inherently unqualified. That Blacks were better off under slavery and Jim Crow terrorism because it kept their savage violent nature under check. That's why he was so obsessed with "Black crime" because it infected the minds of his followers that Black people are inherently subhuman so making them second-class citizens is simply reflecting their true worth.
From here, we can then understand how his "free speech" were far more than "controversial positions." He was a modern-day Julius Streicher inciting violence systematic against Black people. That's why his professor watchlist was heavily slanted to demonizing and targetting Black, brown, Muslim scholars. He was enacting a violent white supremacist plan.
It also meshes perfectly with what Trump is doing -- and again, which mainstream media and even left media have been almost completely clueless about. Yes, there are numerous groups Trump and Maga have in their sights: Immigrants, Latinos, trans people, Muslims, Palestinians. But the heart of MAGA is anti-Blackness.
That's why Trump is obsessed with cleansing history of both Black progress and the crimes of African slavery and Jim Crow that are fundamental to the making of America. It's why he attacks DEI, is trying to shut down the teaching of Black history, is hellbent on removing the first Black woman to serve on the Fed Board of Governors. And most of all is sending the military to invade Black-majority cities because of a fabricated "crime epidemic." This is not to downplay the ethnic cleansing of Latinos and brown immigrants. But apart from Los Angeles, his rage is completely directed at Black cities: D.C., Baltimore, Chicago, Memphis, New Orleans.
We are witnessing a reboot of the American Civil War. Far less overtly violent, even if shrouded in rhetorical and performative violence. Trump and MAGA are using the state to systematically mobilize the criminalize justice system media, academia, and levers of police and military force to subjugate Black people.
And in this new war, Charlie Kirk was a general, now a fallen one, who should not only not be mourned but pissed on as the cesspool Klansman that he was.
In a separate post, I will reprint an analysis by my friend Joe Lowndes who says it all with his opening line, "Ezra Klein's embarrassing lionization of Charlie Kirk demonstrates how fascism feeds on the dying body of liberalism." You should follow Joe.
In other words, liberals are worse than useless. They provide a valuable function as meat for fascism to feed on and grow stronger.
I want to flesh out, so to speak, a different point, which I will expand on Substack. Charlie Kirk was a digital Klansman.
I am intimately familiar with Kirk's strategy because I spent years covering far-right extremism in Portland. Kirk used the exact same model that Andy Ngo used.
This is not a free speech issue. Even the left media has failed to grasp that Kirk, Ngo, and their ilk learned how to weaponize free speech. Six years ago — 6 years! — I described how Ngo's terrorist technique worked, which Kirk scaled up to a national level (link is in comments):
"The incident [by Ngo] was an example of a disturbing media model for the Trump era: opportunists using biased reporting, social media, and wild accusations inflame vigilante and digital mobs to target “enemies” such as the media, Democrats, and left-wing activists."
I talked to one researcher named Madison who tracked NGO who said, "Ngo signals this is a person that should be targeted, should be harassed, and should be threatened. Andy puts a target on them and that results in the person being doxxed. Andy is giving people explicit permission to unleash hatred and violence on people. He absolutely knows what he is doing.”
This is exactly what Kirk did with his Professor Watchlist. Whenever Turning Point decided to target someone, they only had to write an article about them. They knew there is a cancerous dark ecosystem on Redditt, 4Chan, Telegram, X, Facebook, and so on that would take the information and crowdsource a terror campaign against them.
In the last few days, I have seen four academics post accounts about the torrent of harassment they faced. Their email inboxes would fill up with racist invective. They would pick up their phones to people screaming slurs at them and threatening to kill them and harm their families. Their universities would be barraged with the same assault and demands they be fired.
The harassment would spill over into the real world sometimes with people stalking them, photographing them, showing up at their home -- as happened to Tariq Khan. Sometimes the university would provide them with security, which is unnerving because it makes real the scope of the threat. People lost jobs and were pushed to the brink of suicide.
Charlie Kirk was the leader of a virtual lynch mob. He never got his hands dirty and would even denounce the harassment, but plausible deniability is all part of the game. Mainstream journos are so short-sighted and cowed by the right they never forcefully exposed Kirk's or Ngo's stratagem.
The reason I say Kirk was a digital Klansman has to do with what he was really trying to do. There is some pushback over attempts to beatify him, such as with a decent new article by Jamelle Bouie. But he does not see the bigger picture. Denouncing Kirk as sexist, racist, transphobic, Islamophobic, nativist is true but misses the point because it turns his strategy into a listicle. Kirk was vicious because he was advancing an agenda to make U.S. politics and society white supremacist and Christian nationalist.
Anti-Black racism was at the heart of that. He was a general in the MAGA war on Black America. This is Trump's and Kirk's real agenda, and legacy media and left media have not realized it. Kirk demeaned, degraded, and denigrated African-American people, history, and culture whenever possible. So all his anti-Black racism was not just random musing. His strategy was to attack and reverse all the progress Black people have won through great struggle and sacrifice since the dawn of the Civil Rights era.
That's why Kirk demeaned the most successful Black women as lacking brain processing power, and that they steal a white person's slot. That a Black pilot is inherently unqualified. That Blacks were better off under slavery and Jim Crow terrorism because it kept their savage violent nature under check. That's why he was so obsessed with "Black crime" because it infected the minds of his followers that Black people are inherently subhuman so making them second-class citizens is simply reflecting their true worth.
From here, we can then understand how his "free speech" were far more than "controversial positions." He was a modern-day Julius Streicher inciting violence systematic against Black people. That's why his professor watchlist was heavily slanted to demonizing and targetting Black, brown, Muslim scholars. He was enacting a violent white supremacist plan.
It also meshes perfectly with what Trump is doing -- and again, which mainstream media and even left media have been almost completely clueless about. Yes, there are numerous groups Trump and Maga have in their sights: Immigrants, Latinos, trans people, Muslims, Palestinians. But the heart of MAGA is anti-Blackness.
That's why Trump is obsessed with cleansing history of both Black progress and the crimes of African slavery and Jim Crow that are fundamental to the making of America. It's why he attacks DEI, is trying to shut down the teaching of Black history, is hellbent on removing the first Black woman to serve on the Fed Board of Governors. And most of all is sending the military to invade Black-majority cities because of a fabricated "crime epidemic." This is not to downplay the ethnic cleansing of Latinos and brown immigrants. But apart from Los Angeles, his rage is completely directed at Black cities: D.C., Baltimore, Chicago, Memphis, New Orleans.
We are witnessing a reboot of the American Civil War. Far less overtly violent, even if shrouded in rhetorical and performative violence. Trump and MAGA are using the state to systematically mobilize the criminalize justice system media, academia, and levers of police and military force to subjugate Black people.
And in this new war, Charlie Kirk was a general, now a fallen one, who should not only not be mourned but pissed on as the cesspool Klansman that he was.
36-40, F
