the thing that has driven me most insane about the past week of charlie kirk news is how even relatively critical people have not really challenged the framing of him as a "debater" or "speaker", which is a gross exaggeration. the guy was at best a debate-themed influencer. his whole shtick was he'd pretend to be interested in "debating" as a way to get random stoned 19 year olds on college campuses to engage with him, at which point he'd say something stupid and inflammatory along the lines of "the bible says homosexuality is a sin" or "black people have low IQs" or even just an ad hominem about how his opponent was a blue haired antifa commie or what have you in the hopes that his opponent would, realizing they had been lured into a sham debate in bad faith and there was not in fact any point to trying to 'change his mind', give up and just call him a bigot or tell him to go fuck himself and he could then take that clip and edit it into a youtube short entitled something like "DERANGED LIB gets DESTROYED by FACTS and LOGIC" with a thumbnail of them scowling with some spittle leaving their mouth which would go on to do numbers feeding the lowest common denominator conservative content mills. he was transparently uninterested in being right or "winning debates", or more to the point to him one could win a debate even by proffering the far worse arguments so long as in the process of doing so you produced a soundbite or clip where it looked like the other guy was getting Owned. this shallow anti-intellectual obsession with looking like you were Owning your opponent in the moment, even if it was because you said something so stupid and inflammatory that your opponent was at a loss for words as to how to respond to it, happened to be basically the exact approach trump himself took to presidential and political 'debates' and kirk ended up being very well suited to the trump era for that reason, a propagandist whose cheap schlock dovetailed nicely with the regime's taste for cheap schlock, and probably the only respect in which you have to hand it to him is that he was either savvy or very lucky in that respect
