Are we talking about the same guy, NYT, MSNBC, and Gavin Newsom?

The post OK, But You Do Know You’re Eulogizing Charlie Kirk, Right? appeared first on Aftermath.

Thursday morning, Ezra Klein at the New York Times published a column titled “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way.” Klein’s general thesis is that Kirk was willing to talk to anyone, regardless of their beliefs, as evidenced by what he was doing while he was shot, which was debating people on college campuses. Klein is not alone in this take; the overwhelming sentiment from America’s largest media institutions in the immediate aftermath of his death has been to paint Kirk as a mainstream political commentator, someone whose  politics liberals and leftists may not agree with but someone who was open to dialogue and who espoused the virtues of free speech. 

“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,” Klein wrote. “He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion. When the left thought its hold on the hearts and minds of college students was nearly absolute, Kirk showed up again and again to break it.”

“I envied what he built. A taste for disagreement is a virtue in a democracy. Liberalism could use more of his moxie and fearlessness,” Klein continued.

Kirk is being posthumously celebrated by much of the mainstream press as a noble sparring partner for center-left politicians and pundits. Meanwhile, the very real, very negative, and sometimes violent impacts of his rhetoric and his political projects are being glossed over or ignored entirely. In the New York Times, Kirk was an “energetic” voice who was “critical of gay and transgender rights,” but few of the national pundits have encouraged people to actually go read what Kirk tweeted or listen to what he said on his podcast to millions and millions of people. “Whatever you think of Kirk (I had many disagreements with him, and he with me), when he died he was doing exactly what we ask people to do on campus: Show up. Debate. Talk. Engage peacefully, even when emotions run high,” David French wrote in the Times. “In fact, that’s how he made his name, in debate after debate on campus after campus.”

This does not mean Kirk deserved to die or that political violence is ever justified. What happened to Kirk is horrifying, and we fear deeply for whatever will happen next. But it is undeniable that Kirk was not just a part of the extremely tense, very dangerous national dialogue, he was an accelerationist force whose work to dehumanize LGBTQ+ people and threaten the free speech of professors, teachers, and school board members around the country has directly put the livelihoods and physical safety of many people in danger. We do no one any favors by ignoring this, even in the immediate aftermath of an assassination like this.

Kirk claimed that his Turning Point USA sent “80+ buses full of patriots” to the January 6 insurrection. Turning Point USA has also run a “Professor Watchlist,”and a “School Board Watchlist” for nearly a decade. 

“America’s radical education system has taken a devastating toll on our children,” Kirk said in an intro video posted on these projects’ websites. “From sexualized material in textbooks to teaching CRT and implementing the 1619 Project doctrine, the radical leftist agenda will not stop … The School Board Watch List exposes school districts that host drag queen story hour, teach courses on transgenderism, and implement unsafe gender neutral bathroom policies. The Professor Watch List uncovers the most radical left-wing professors from universities that are known to suppress conservative voices and advance the progressive agenda.”

These websites have been directly tied to harassment and threats against professors and school board members all over the country. Professor Watchlist lists hundreds of professors around the country, many of them Black or trans, and their perceived radical agendas, which include things like supporting gun control, “socialism,” “Antifa,” “abortion,” and acknowledging that trans people exist and racism exists. Trans professors are misgendered on the website, and numerous people who have been listed on it have publicly spoken about receiving death threats and being harassed after being listed on the site.

One professor on the watchlist who 404 Media is granting anonymity for his safety said once he was added to the list, he started receiving anonymous letters in his campus mailbox. “‘You're everything wrong with colleges,’ ‘watch your step, we're watching you’ kind of stuff,” he said, “One anonymous DM on Twitter had a picture of my house and driveway, which was chilling.” His president and provost also received emails attempting to discredit him with “all the allegedly communist and subversive stuff I was up to,” he said. “It was all certainly concerning, but compared to colleagues who are people of color and/or women, I feel like the volume was smaller for me. But it was certainly not a great feeling to experience that stuff. That watchlist fucked up careers and ruined lives.” 

The American Association of University Professors said in an open letter in 2017 that Professor Watchlist “lists names of professors with their institutional affiliations and photographs, thereby making it easy for would-be stalkers and cyberbullies to target them. Individual faculty members who have been included on such lists or singled out elsewhere have been subject to threats of physical violence, including sexual assault, through hundreds of e-mails, calls, and social media postings. Such threatening messages are likely to stifle the free expression of the targeted faculty member; further, the publicity that such cases attract can cause others to self-censor so as to avoid being subjected to similar treatment.” Campus free speech rights group FIRE found that censorship and punishment of professors skyrocketed between 2020 and 2023, in part because of efforts from Professor Watchlist.

Many more professors who Turning Point USA added to their watchlist have spoken out in the past about how being targeted upended their lives, brought years of harassment down on them and their colleagues, and resulted in death threats against them and their loved ones. 

At Arizona State University, a professor on the watchlist was assaulted by two people from Turning Point USA in 2023. 

“Earlier this year, I wrote to Turning Point USA to request that it remove ASU professors from its Professor Watchlist. I did not receive a response,” university president Michael Crow wrote in a statement. “Instead, the incident we’ve all now witnessed on the video shows Turning Point’s refusal to stop dangerous practices that result in both physical and mental harm to ASU faculty members, which they then apparently exploit for fundraising, social media clicks and financial gain.” Crow said the Professor Watchlist resulted in “antisemitic, anti-LGBTQ+ and misogynistic attacks on ASU faculty with whom Turning Point USA and its followers disagree,” and called the organization’s tactics “anti-democratic, anti-free speech and completely contrary” to the spirit of scholarship.  

Kirk’s death is a horrifying moment in our current American nightmare. Kirk’s actions and rhetoric do not justify what happened to him because they cannot be justified. But Kirk was not merely someone who showed up to college campuses and listened. It should not be controversial to plainly state some of the impact of his work.

Within days of joining Meta, Shengjia Zhao, co-creator of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, had threatened to quit and return to his former employer, in a blow to Mark Zuckerberg’s multibillion-dollar push to build “personal superintelligence.”

Zhao went as far as to sign employment paperwork to go back to OpenAI. Shortly afterwards, according to four people familiar with the matter, he was given the title of Meta’s new “chief AI scientist.”

The incident underscores Zuckerberg’s turbulent effort to direct the most dramatic reorganisation of Meta’s senior leadership in the group’s 20-year history.

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One key point about entrepreneurship (which I covered in my lengthy piece yesterday) is worth amplifying because society is often being lied to about what actually constitutes building a business.

Put simply: a person who moves money around is not the same as someone who actually makes something. It is not impossible that a money-mover is adding value — I have seen it happen! — but rearranging capital is not, in and of itself, the same thing as actually inventing, or being innovative, or building something from scratch.

I point this out because I’ve spent my career enabling creative people. Whether it’s artists and writers, or coders and makers, my heart is with the people who make things with a soul. Sometimes they make stuff just because that’s what makes their heart stir. Sometimes it’s so they can sell enough of their work to be able to pay the bills. And yep, sometimes it’s so they can start a big business! All of those things seem like valid reasons for creative people to exercise that urge to build something new, and to profit from their effort in doing so.

Frankly, I don’t give a shit what happens to the guys who move the money around to enable the makers. Get the dollars into the accounts and then get the hell out of the way. Try not to crash the economy while you do it.

But what makes me absolutely furious is that the greediest, most do-nothing cohort of the money-movers have spent decades creating the myth that now they are the builders. They think they are the creative ones, the inventors, the ones who see the future. They’ve taken to writing grand pronouncements about how society ought to run, and how they can see the future — based solely on what they might write checks for.

How the VCs boiled the frog

Over the last two decades, the loudest and most prominent venture capital investors have gone from saying they simply provide resources to founders who come up with great ideas, to major VC firms now having extremist political manifestos on their websites, which they promote through coordinated media operations. These campaigns are designed to recruit compliant subordinates as “founders” in order to out the agenda of the money-movers. This is nothing like the prior ideal of enabling creative people who just have a genius idea that they want to get out into the world.

Part of this effort has also been building the distortion that the only way a new business happens is through venture capital funding. Venture funding is, compared to other sources, an extreme form of betting on new businesses that was only ever supposed to be one narrow kind of high-risk, high-reward funding, complemented by many, many other sources. And any of these other much more reasonable options might be more likely ways of building a sustainable business. But the tycoons who made their money in VC have warped the public dialogue so much that the idea of getting something like a bank loan to start a company sounds as anachronistic as a horse and buggy. New companies and even the word “startup” itself have become virtually synonymous with venture capital and the extremist agenda of the most vocal cohort of that community.

Worse, this reframing of capital-as-creativity has captured politicians and regulators at every level. Why does Jeff Bezos need three billion dollars in handouts to build a headquarters in NYC, based on a fake promise to hire Amazon workers that he was always going to hire in the city anyway? Because compliant chumps like then-governor Andrew Cuomo mistakenly think moving money around to billionaires is what constitutes building a business. Do you know how many mom-and-pop small businesses in NYC you could have saved if you put three billion dollars in subsidies into helping those who are squeezed out of their spaces by greedy landlords, instead of the HQ2 boondoggle?

What is really a business, then?

So: beware of people conflating pushing pennies around with actually doing the hard work of building a business. Beware of those who pretend that venture capital and the VCs who run that industry are the voices of entrepreneurship — or that they’re even on the side of entrepreneurs.

And beware of anyone who thinks innovation is about one lone genius or big piles of money. It’s about communities, creativity, and the joyful optimism of coming together to do hard work.