Il est Charlie

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Ezra Klein Chooses a Side

THE KILLING OF Charlie Kirk, Ezra Klein said on his New York Times podcast published this morning, "has shaken me pretty deeply." He amplified the point: 

In the days after his assassination, when I’d close my eyes, I kept imagining a bullet going through a neck.

The specificity and physicality were notable, because Klein's first reaction to Kirk's killing had been entirely abstract. By the morning after, he had posted a piece for the Times praising Kirk: 

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. 

But Klein's piece about the wonderful example Kirk set by talking about politics had avoided quoting a single word of anything Kirk actually said—an omission so absurd, it even brought Ta-Nehisi Coates out of his self-imposed exile from daily discourse to concisely document the many ways, personally and institutionally, that Kirk "reveled in open bigotry," and to inquire into what it meant that so many people were so eager to forgive that. 

What mattered about Kirk from the perspective of an opinion-seller like Klein, though, was simply that Kirk was a successful seller of opinions. 

That business has nothing to do with persuasion. To say that Charlie Kirk cared about engaging with people and changing their minds is like saying the Harlem Globetrotters care about the challenge of playing competitive basketball. He was a performer, using his audience the way a comedian uses hecklers, in what the writer John Rogers diagnosed as "debate-shaped crowd work farmed for content."