I am somewhat shocked by the readiness with which completely mainstream liberals reacted to the political murder of the conservative campaigner, Charlie Kirk, with open celebration. I’ve already written one short piece noting how it was acceptable, before his blood was probably dry, to follow-up the political assassination with post-humous character assassination. The general theme is “nasty piece of work, he had it coming”. Long gone are the days when after such a horrific event people would have had the decorum to hold off, for a couple of weeks at least.
There is another piece in today’s Guardian, headlined; “The students who debated with Charlie Kirk: ‘His goal was to verbally defeat us’”. I couldn’t help looking at it. How awful. He debated you and sought to “verbally defeat you”. Forgive me; isn’t that the point of a debate? But, no, it seems not. There is even a Professor, (today’s Professor, may of course be yesterday’s gutless liberal student) who explains: “In a good faith debate, the final goal is to reach consensus. If that doesn’t happen, then a lot of academics would consider it to be an exercise in futility.”. What? No it isn’t! The goal of a debate is, precisely, to win. That is, to verbally defeat your opponent. There are contexts when “the final goal is to reach a consensus”, but political debate is not one of them. Debates often lead to votes and one side wins. And the other side loses. This new concept of debate, is falsely presented, as if it really were a definition of what “debate” is, when, in reality, historically, it is a new concept. The concept is characteristic of the modern liberal cult; in such a game only one view can persist. So, debates in the traditional sense, of two points of view, both of which are considered to have validity, but only one will win, is simply too complex. It is “unnerving” for the modern liberal mind. This is a key part of the modern liberal cult. Long gone is “I disagree with you, but I respect your right to hold a different opinion and I respect that it is plausible and has meaning for you, even if it is not my opinion”.
Unfortunately, I don’t have time for a detailed analysis of this text, but there are a few stand-out moments. Another key element of the modern liberal-cult discourse is the idea of “fact-checking”. This is related to the new discourse marker, “falsely claimed”. Consider this:
In another, he [Kirk] falsely called the term foetus “just a word for a human being”. He goaded college students, who eagerly stepped up to query or challenge him, with leading questions that were intended to elicit strong emotions – “what is a woman?” and “what is racism?” were two of his go-tos.
Apparently this was a “false” claim because: ‘Foetus in Latin actually means “a bringing forth; producing; fertile”’ This looks like a very nice example of liberal-cult deficient thinking. The key feature is the inability to live with a complex intellectual terrain, for example; subjectivity, interpretations, how phrases can mean different things for different people or even the same person at different times, and so on. That is, they can’t deal with the shifting world of reality, in which, phrases point to meaning, they don’t formally encode meaning. I don’t have the context in which Charlie Kirk made his comment, but I would hazard that if he said something like “a foetus is just a word for human being” he was making an argument, which aligned with his world vision; expressing his view that an unborn baby is a human being, and the word “foetus” is used to cover this, (with or without prejudice). There is a later claim in this article that Kirk was specifically claiming that foetus etymologically means “small human being”. But, even if that was the context; the main point is the one about why Kirk was saying that, and the meaning he was trying to convey. Whether or not Kirk’s values and vision are “correct” does not depend on whether or not his etymological source says what yours says, or even if his is wrong. Kirk may also have had in mind the word as it is used in common usage. But, in the world where there is only one truth and the standard of truth is of the level of factual true/false then by presenting her etymological source Alaina Demopoulos seems to believe she has “defeated” Kirk. (Gosh, she wouldn’t be trying to “verbally defeat” him, would she?) What this “argument” shows is the paucity of thinking of the modern liberal cultist. She has simply not engaged with Kirk’s different vision. that is too hard, and challenging, and confrontational. She has tried to defeat him with a “fact”. The Professor we have already quoted with his novel concept of debate appears to believe that debates without a panel of “fact-checkers” in attendance are “unnerving”:
Webb, the Hofstra professor, called the unmoderated format of Surrounded [a YouTube channel for debates] where claims are not factchecked, “unnerving”.
“You can’t negate that it’s very interesting to watch,” Webb said, “but those students are not armed with proper data and evidence, and a lot of times they’re speaking to things that sometimes are blatantly untrue.”
Scientific meetings are one matter. Debates are another. Surely a “Professor of rhetoric” should grasp that? Webb wants to eliminate the difficult and challenging world of interpretation, argument, and competing visions, and replace it with a simplified and easy world where there are no arguments, just “facts”. That should remind readers of certain literary worlds. In fact the world of the modern liberal cultists is infinitely worse than the authoritarian and techno-fascist worlds of Huxley and Orwell. It is much worse because it is not, primarily, about external controls. (Video surveillance, drugs). It is a world of internal controls. In this world everyone is reduced to a diminished and docile human being, pursuing certain approved hedonistic outlets, while avoiding any of the complexities of life that come with reason and autonomy. It is just reason and autonomy which lead to the complex world of “competing plausible world views”. At one point liberalism was the flame which championed just how these “competing plausible world views” could co-exist in one society. And healthy debate was a part of that. That is what is being eliminated by modern liberal cultists.
The article interviewed a “young leftist” who is active on Tik-Tok about her reaction to Kirk’s murder:
After speaking with the Guardian, Troutt posted her own TikTok. “All acts of gun violence are horrible and must be condemned. That is my baseline,” she said in the clip. She added: “Mind your karma, watch what you put online.”
I am not sure what to make of that. What is the reference to “mind your karma” supposed to mean? Is she advising her Tik-Tock followers not to post lots of open celebrations of Kirk’s murder? Is she expecting them to?
Apparently this young Tik-Tocker became ‘famous’ because she sparred with Charlie Kirk:
Ultimately it was not rhetorical prowess but an insult that made Troutt a social media folk hero in #resistance circles: after Kirk attempted a gotcha moment by saying that “foetus” means “little human being” in Latin, Troutt called his self-satisfied smile “creepy”. ..
“Smiling is creepy?” Kirk clapped back, to which Troutt responded: “No, your smile specifically.”
Which babyish response might explain why these people are so horrified by the prospect of an actual debate of ideas.
For information; the Latin root for foetus seems to carry meanings of “pregnancy, childbirth, offspring” *. This appears much closer to Charlie Kirk’s reported claim of “small human being” than what Alaina Demopoulos claims that it means, “a bringing forth; producing; fertile”. But; I am willing to accept she has a credible source which says that. Which is, in fact(!), a nice example of how fruitless it is to try to reduce everything to “checkable facts”. In a way, though, she wins. Because the original debate, which I imagine was about abortion, and which is all about values and visions of humanity, maybe even God or ‘God’, and which may not, because it refers to value first principles, actually be settleable at all, but can still be discussed, has been reduced to this sterile discussion about “what foetus mean”. The difficult, and challenging discussion has been cancelled. Everything has been made safe, simple, and definitely not “unnerving”. The world of the modern liberal cultists. A world where threats can and should be destroyed.
* Google, which in turn, uses Oxford Languages.