mistaking performance for discourse, spectacle for persuasion.

Lemmy in a nutshell. A clever dunk will always “win” you a debate even though nobody changed their mind.

I admittedly don’t know much about him, but it was pretty clear to me from the few clips and misc news articles I’d seen that Charlie Kirk wasn’t interested in discourse and his whole schtick was that it was a debate/discourse facade with the intention of pushing his ideology to college kids and cutting up the debate clips to spread online. He was never interested in intellectual conversation, just indoctrination.

Those huge paychecks he received as donations to his organization were not so he could go have fun debating liberal college kids, they were funding pushing conservative ideologies on them. The fact that so many people still don’t see this for what it was is baffling.

Perhaps most insidiously, these aren’t actually debates at all. They’re performances designed to generate specific emotional reactions for viral distribution. Participants aren’t trying to persuade anyone or genuinely engage with opposing viewpoints. They’re trying to create moments that will get clipped, shared, and monetized across social media.

Here’s the tl:dr version.

Kirk wasn’t showing up to campuses to “talk with anyone who would talk to him.” He was showing up armed with a string of logical fallacies, nonsense talking points, and gotcha questions specifically designed to enrage inexperienced college students so he could generate viral social media clips of himself “owning the libs.”

Klein is eulogizing not a practitioner of good-faith political discourse, but one of the most successful architects of “debate me bro” culture—a particularly toxic form of intellectual harassment that has become endemic to our political discourse. And by praising Kirk as practicing “politics the right way,” Klein is inadvertently endorsing a grift that actively undermines the kind of thoughtful engagement our democracy desperately needs.

The “debate me bro” playbook is simple and effective: demand that serious people engage with your conspiracy theories or extremist talking points. If they decline, cry “censorship!” and claim they’re “afraid of the truth.” If they accept, turn the interaction into a performance designed to generate viral clips and false legitimacy. It’s a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose proposition that has nothing to do with genuine intellectual discourse.

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

— Sartre on the “debate” of hateful bigots

Watch the “Thank you for smoking” movie for an explanation of how this grift works.

Has Stephen Crowder left his underground bunker recently? I bet he hasn’t asked anyone to prove him wrong in the last week

Especially works well on the uneducated. And is just another arm of a propaganda hydra.