General Discussion

Nevilledog

(54,557 posts) Sun Sep 28, 2025, 02:06 PM Sunday

What the Public Memory of Charlie Kirk Revealed

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/28/magazine/charlie-kirk-rhetoric.html

No paywall link
https://archive.li/Wmg8z

The day Charlie Kirk was killed, Dominic Durant’s 11-year-old daughter came home from her middle school in Tulsa, Okla., and told her father that her friends had been very upset about his death, and that they felt she should be upset, too. “I’m sad,” she said, tears in her eyes.

Durant struggled with how to respond. He, too, had been appalled by the act of violence. But his young daughter did not know much about Kirk, and he worried she would look him up on YouTube and come across the many ugly assertions the right-wing activist had made about Black Americans like them. For instance, Kirk had claimed that four prominent and successful Black women, who all went to Ivy League universities — Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the former first lady Michelle Obama, the TV host Joy-Ann Reid and former Representative Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas — did not “have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously” and had to “go steal a white person’s slot.” He’d argued that “Black America is poorer, more murderous, more dangerous” than when Black people were living under Jim Crow.

Durant did not want his daughter thinking that because her friends were grieving him that the things Kirk had claimed were acceptable or right.

It was a difficult and heart-rending conversation, grappling with how his daughter’s classmates could admire a man who’d said such hurtful things. “I said it’s natural to be sad and I don’t want to change your opinion about being sad,” Durant recounted to me. “But I am explaining to you that the gentleman who just got shot was under the impression that you, as a young Black woman, don’t have the brain processing power. So I am explaining it to you to let you know what he said was wrong and not true.”

*snip*

4 replies

= new reply since forum marked as read

Highlight:

What the Public Memory of Charlie Kirk Revealed (Original Post) Nevilledog Sunday OP

Very good read. I empathize* with the father. underpants Sunday #1

If Jesus cam back today ICE would put him in Alligator Alcatraz YorkRd Sunday #2

Kirk's death broke the final ties with my MAGA kinfolk pfitz59 Sunday #3

The whole article is an excellent read, soldierant Sunday #4

underpants

(193,284 posts)

1. Very good read. I empathize* with the father.

Reply to Nevilledog (Original post)

Sun Sep 28, 2025, 04:00 PM

Sunday

He has an 11 year old daughter so he’s trying to balance safety for her (in a social sense) while considering the rhetoric and now idolatry that is a threat. Sounds like a great dad.

* So white boy bemoans a lack of empathy as he repeats counterintuitive propaganda. The anti-empathy thing is ironically popular on the right which was echoed by Kirk. The professors class on misinformation should’ve been an eye opener to this kid. The IT’S ALL LIES! Cult crap he grew up with was all lies.

Two extra paragraphs. The first one for the writing. 👍

In some parts of polite society, it now holds that if many of Kirk’s views were repugnant, his willingness to calmly argue about them and his insistence that people hash out their disagreements through discourse at a time of such division made him a free-speech advocate, and an exemplar of how we should engage politically across difference. But for those who were directly targeted by Kirk’s rhetoric, this thinking seems to place the civility of Kirk’s style of argument over the incivility of what he argued. Through gossamer tributes, Kirk’s cruel condemnation of transgender people and his racist throwback views about Black Americans were no longer anathema but instead are being treated as just another political view to be respectfully debated — like a position on tax rates or health care policy.

“There has been an extreme shift,” Kelley told me. “This treatment is authorizing the idea that white supremacy and racism is not just a conservative idea, but a legitimate one.”

YorkRd

(424 posts)

2. If Jesus cam back today ICE would put him in Alligator Alcatraz

Reply to Nevilledog (Original post)

Sun Sep 28, 2025, 04:51 PM

Sunday

If Jesus came back today Ice would put him in Alligator Alcatraz and Charlie Kirk would find something in the Bible to justify it. That’s the real reason he was so beloved by MAGA

pfitz59

(11,910 posts)

3. Kirk's death broke the final ties with my MAGA kinfolk

Reply to Nevilledog (Original post)

Sun Sep 28, 2025, 05:09 PM

Sunday

I told them the truth about St Charlie and they flipped out. So done with them.

soldierant

(8,977 posts)

4. The whole article is an excellent read,

Reply to Nevilledog (Original post)

Sun Sep 28, 2025, 05:12 PM

Sunday

and one that is surprising from today's New York Times.

I wish I didn't have to doubt that those who have the greatest need to be exposed to it have the reading skills to do so, or the desire to dive into the Times "Magazine."

Reply to this discussion