Ezra Klein’s New York Times editorial Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way is bad.
The headline
That headline is worse than the editorial itself. It is so unconscionable that Klein has a moral obligation to either:
- publicly apologize for it and demand both that the Times both change it and publicly apologize for using it
- resign from his position as an editorial writer at the Times
I do not expect him to do either, which indicts both him and the NYT. I regret that I had only one subscription to cancel, and exercised that measure quite some time ago.
I say this headline is worse than the content of the editorial because it takes Klein’s point out of context:
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.
Klein says this in service of rejecting the assassination of Kirk as a form of political violence which we should not exercise for any reason.
Political violence is a virus. It is contagious. We have been through periods in this country when it was endemic.
As far as that goes, I vigorously agree with Klein. Persuasion is the right way to do politics.
But that points to the failings of the editorial. Klein had an obligation to name the odiousness of both the content of Kirk’s politics and the method of Kirk’s rhetoric. He did not. Very bad.
Charlie Kirk was not the person Klein describes
Many Americans have not heard of him. Klein’s editorial will be many people’s introduction to him, and will become the core of what they know; him failing to explain Kirk and his place in American politics betrays those readers.
Kirk was a nasty piece of work. So it is disingenuous when Klein says this …
American politics has sides. There is no use pretending it doesn’t. But both sides are meant to be on the same side of a larger project — we are all, or most of us, anyway, trying to maintain the viability of the American experiment.
… because no, Kirk was not trying to maintain the viability of the American experiment. He was part of the far right ecosystem deliberately attacking American fundamentals. Turning Point USA helped organize people attending the “Stop The Steal” rally which turned into the 6 January 2021 insurrection against the US government, and Kirk baldly denied the plain truth of J6:
It’s bad judgment, all of a sudden, to climb the Capitol steps and walk in the rotunda; it’s just not wise. However, ‘not wise’ does not mean you’re an insurrectionist, ok? Let me be very clear.
Just because you do something stupid, does not mean you’re Timothy McVeigh. Just because you do something that is regrettable does not mean that you are planning an armed insurrection against the United States government.
The New York Times should be embarrassed that their editors have so much to learn from Teen Vogue and their article Who Was Charlie Kirk? What to Know About the Turning Point USA Founder and His Views.
Far-right political activist Charlie Kirk was shot dead on September 10 while speaking at Utah Valley University. Kirk, the CEO and co-founder of Turning Point USA, was 31.
The shooting occurred as Kirk was speaking in front of a crowd at the Utah university, a kickoff event for Turning Point’s “American Comeback” national tour that had received nearly 1,000 petition signatures calling for it to be canceled, reports the Associated Press. According to CNN, Kirk was asked about the statistics of transgender people linked to mass shootings, an active — and misleading — talking point on the right; Kirk was answering the question when he was fatally shot.
[⋯]
A Trump ally, Kirk was popular among the far-right, known for rallying young people around conservative ideas and around the President. Kirk often travelled to college campuses, where he would debate with students on popular right-wing talking points. He is often credited with rallying young conservatives in a new wave of political activism. During these appearances, Kirk frequently spoke out against abortion and reproductive rights, espoused anti-trans ideology, spread COVID-19 misinformation, spread other controversial and, often, prejudiced opinions. Kirk was gifted at digital attention-grabbing throughout his career as a right-wing commentator; in 2024, prior to another “debate” campus tour, his appearance on the video platform Jubilee debating young liberals went viral.
Kirk has been outspoken against gun control legislation, frequently defending access to guns during debates and speaking engagements. In a Turning Point speech last year, Kirk called shooting deaths as a result of gun access the “cost to liberty,” comparing gun deaths to the risk of driving and auto accidents. He made similar comments in 2023, calling gun deaths “worth” it in exchange for Second Amendment rights shortly after a mass shooting killed three children and three adults at the Christian Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee. Around the same time that Kirk was shot, a shooting at a Colorado school was also unfolding. According to the Denver Post, two teens were injured, with one still in critical condition, and the teenage shooter dead after turning the gun on himself, as of the morning after the shooting.
[⋯]
[Turning Point USA] has long maintained a “Professor Watchlist” to allegedly “expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.” In 2023, an Arizona State University professor on TPUSA’s “Watchlist” was physically attacked by someone associated with Turning Point USA. In 2017, TPUSA was the subject of an investigation by the Chronicle of Higher Education over allegations they had violated their 501(c)3 status by funneling money to student government candidates on campuses across the country.
In short, Kirk was dedicated to destroying the viability of the American experiment. No, that is not practicing politics the right way.
Teen Vogue has more, and I have more below.
Commentaries
Seth Cotlar
As someone who spent many hours listening to Kirk’s show on AM radio, I would say that he made Rush Limbaugh seem like Walter Cronkite by comparison, in terms of rhetorical tone and empirical rigor. The subtext of every show was “You don’t hate the left enough.”
That is the message Kirk devoted his life to spreading. I don’t see how it honors him to turn him into a paragon of democracy, when that is not how he saw himself.
Has anyone seen a compilation of clips or quotes that show Kirk speaking to his audience in a manner that illustrates the civic virtues he’s being eulogized for having embodied? If so, I’d be interested to see it. If not, that seems notable, no?
When we eulogize political figures who have died we usually do so with snippets of their own words that exemplify the essence of their life’s work. So let’s see them, all of the Kirk quotes in which we see him urging his followers to embrace the better angels of their nature.
He was a very talented shitposter who was adept at creating selectively edited, “own the college kid libs” content that made his boomer billionaire funders and MAGA Republicans happy. That’s what his fans admired him for. There’s no need to pretend like he was something other than what he was.
I’m choosing to remember Charlie Kirk’s contribution to American civic life in his own words.
Hillary For PrisonIf Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, or John Adams saw drag queen story hour, they would mobilize the MinutemenResidents of Springfield, OH are reporting that Haitians are eating their family pets, another gift of the Biden-Harris mass immigration replacement plan. Liberals will soon be lecuting Americans on why they need to sensitive to Haitian culture and accept this …It’s just so nauseating where this wife … who comes in with her sweet husband who probably works his tail off to make sure that she can go and, you know, have a nice life, provides for the family. And then she lies to him, saying, “Oh yeah I’m going to vote for Trump” and then she votes for Kamala Harris as her little secret in the voting booth.Derek Chauvin has been found guilty on all three charges leveled against him — Second Degree Murder, Third Degree Murder, and Second Degree Manslaughter
Biden’s “prayers” were answered.
Maxine Waters got her way.
Will it be enough to keep America from burning?
Only a dishonest media would care more about Trump allegedly paying $750 in taxes than Hunter Biden taking in $350 Million from the Russians.
The New York Times game of “gotcha” with the president makes them look petty and small.
This is a tragic and all too familiar sight right now: Athletes dropping suddenly.All men are created equal but not all cultures are created equal
The West is superior to every other culture because it is the most prosperous, tolerant, and innovative culture to ever exist
That's why America is the only country where even those who hate it refuse to leave
American culture is most accepting on Earth
The world is a better, stronger, and more peaceful place, thanks to the Western values
When a conservative gun enthusiast tried to assassinate Trump, Kirk immediately tried to fan the flames of division by blaming it on “them,” by which he meant the “them” he always blamed everything on, “the left.”
If an NHL enforcer known for taking out players on the opposing team died, we wouldn’t eulogize him for his grace and nimbleness on the ice. Kirk was a skilled propagandist who had a very loose and opportunistic relationship to what most people would call “the truth.” Why pretend otherwise?
On the GOP FB pages I follow I’ve seen dozens of comments from Kirk’s fans in which they say it’s time to “take off the gloves” and do to Democrats what they did to Kirk.
- we don’t know who the killer is.
- I thought we didn’t do vigilante violence and collective guilt in “the west.”
No one is responsible for what their followers say or do. But it’s noteworthy that so many of Kirk’s admirers are calling for political violence in response to this act of political violence. They apparently didn’t get the memo from him that such attitudes run counter to his beliefs.
One final thing. It’s odd to see Ezra Klein, a total policy nerd, say Kirk did politics the right way when Kirk had almost no interest in either policy, or the empirical rigor necessary to get policy right. Kirk’s approach to politics was 99% culture war rage stoking with almost no policy content.
There’s a reason Kirk rarely engaged with his fellow adults who knew things about things. It’s because Kirk was not interested in or adept at knowing things about things … which, IMO, is not an admirable quality in a figure whose entire brand is to engage in public/political debate.
As we learn from the New York Times Daily podcast, Kirk cut his teeth as the manager of Don Jr’s social media accounts. From a young age Kirk aspired to be the Rush Limbaugh of his generation. His goal was to be the most polarizing figure possible.
So again, one might ask how an empirically-grounded journalist who wrote an entire book lamenting the polarized state of American politics, might describe one of the most intentionally polarizing fabulists of our era as someone who did “politics the right way.”
Seth Cotlar again
American politics has sides. There is no use pretending it doesn’t. But both sides are meant to be on the same side of a larger project — we are all, or most of us, anyway, trying to maintain the viability of the American experiment. We can live with losing an election because we believe in the promise of the next election; we can live with losing an argument because we believe that there will be another argument. Political violence imperils that.
Kirk and I were on different sides of most political arguments. We were on the same side on the continued possibility of American politics. It is supposed to be an argument, not a war; it is supposed to be won with words, not ended with bullets. I wanted Kirk to be safe for his sake, but I also wanted him to be safe for mine and for the sake of our larger shared project. The same is true for Shapiro, for Hoffman, for Hortman, for Thompson, for Trump, for Pelosi, for Whitmer. We are all safe, or none of us are.
I read this part of the Klein article and asked myself, “hm, I wonder what Charlie Kirk said about the 2020 election? Did he ever acknowledge that Biden won?” The answer, unsurprisingly, is no.
Charlie Kirk did not believe in recognizing the results of elections his side lost, which, in my opinion, is the definition of doing politics the wrong way.
This is just a tiny sampling of his election denial posts.
WOW. Director Tulsi Gabbard confirms that she’s uncovered multiple “burn bags” tucked away in safes and random back offices, that contain intel on the politicization of the 2020 election.
Was 2020 really the most secure election in history?
And when will that all come out.
[Video from TheStormHasArrived]
STEVE BANNON:
“You are the sovereign will of the American people. Handed down generation to generation. Through every patriot’s grave, down to the current time.
They steal the 2020 election. Did you give up? Did you go back and cry? Did you go into the fetal position and suck your thumb? Hell no. You didn’t.”
Republican Wisconsin senate candidate Eric Hovde breaks his silence:
“At 4am, Milwaukee reported ~108K absentee ballots, with Sen. Baldwin receiving nearly 90% of those ballots. Statistically this outcome seems impropable.”
Eric Hovde was up big in Wisconsin on election night. But just like in 2020, in the middle of the night, Milwaukee County posted a huge number of absentee ballots (~108K) all at once, that overwhelmingly went for Democrat Tammy Baldwin (~90%), and erased Hovde’s lead completely.
A new study by The Heartland Institute finds that mail-in ballot fraud significantly impacted the results of the 2020 election and that Trump would have “almost certainly won” without the massive, often illegal expansion of mail-in voting.
zerohedge.com/markets/mail-b…
Republicans who ignore the con of the 2020 election should leave the party.
Why haven’t the any of the 2,000 mules who committed multiple crimes surrounding widespread ballot trafficking in the 2020 Election been arrested yet?
š¤
[Blurry images of election workers]
If Twitter hadn’t interfered in the 2020 election, there never would have been any issue on January 6.
Imagine how many of these pro-Hamas thugs we could have deported if Joe Biden and the Democrats hadn’t rigged the 2020 election.
Isaac! At the Butler! responds to Klein
I feel like I am taking crazy pills. Charlie Kirk’s ultimate goal, which he said time and time again, would have been the suppression, through threat of violence and the use of state power, of the rights of those he disagreed with, including freedom of expression.
Like, yes, what Kirk built, the speed at which he did it, and his ability to speak to college students etc. is impressive. But you can’t lionize that without also explaining what he actually stood for and what he was actually advocating.
I think I understand where this is coming from— we’re all scared about the violence of our political culture spinning wildly out of control— but this kind of dishonesty simply abets Kirk and his allies’ project.
I’m also fairly sure Klein didn’t write anything like this after the assassination of multiple Dem politicians in Minnesota. I’m not saying this as a gotcha, but rather the show the implicit assumption of our discourse, which is that Right Wing violence is to be expected, and thus tacitly accepted.
On some level this bugs me way more than the Times’s euphemistic way of describing Trumps’ authoritarian power grabs, because the not-very-online segment of the Times readership likely has little idea who Kirk was, and are going to come away very misinformed from the way they’re treating this.
Like … my parents have no fucking idea who Charlie Kirk is. What they’re going to get from the Times coverage is that he was a compelling speaker and gifted organizer who was martyred for free speech.
Also, sorry, too worked up and my first cup of coffee just hit… Kirk was part of the effort to overthrow the elected government of the United States on January 6th! In what sense was that “practicing politics the right way”????
Charlie Kirk may have been good at showing up at college campuses and talking to anyone who would listen etc. But the org he headed built a database of professors to target with harassment campaigns in the hopes of drumming them out of academia. Is that practicing politics the right way?
It’s also interesting that Klein mentions the reichstag fire because what’s going on feels a lot more like the canonizing response to the murder of Horst Wessel, a response that Klein is now participating in with this reprehensible piece.
Btw since this thread has now escaped the ecosystem of people I normally interact with I just want to reiterate / clarify something: i am very pro free expression. I think Skokie was correctly decided etc. if all Kirk was doing was saying hateful nonsense into microphones, Klein would have a point
But that’s not what Kirk actually did. Beyond frequent comments that could arguably amount to incitement, his actual operation (Turning Point) is a Thiel backed intimidation racket that explicitly opposes academic freedom and targets people for harassment campaigns.
He also provided material support to an effort to overthrow the government. You can’t lionize his persuasion campaigns and not mention these things. He was an outspoken defender of free expression for people he agreed with and worked to silence those with whom he disagreed.
If you’re going to write an appeal to our better angels piece after Kirk, it’a gotta be an appeal to do politics the way he pretended to do it.
Mother Jones | Charlie Kirk Doesn’t Really Seem to Mind White Nationalism
Worth reading the whole thing. Mentions of two of my anti-favorite people jumped out at me: Sailer & Yarvin:
In October, he invited veteran white supremacist Steve Sailer, whose bonafides include writing for overt white nationalist publications including VDare and the Unz Review, on his podcast. During their interview, Kirk called Sailer his favorite “noticer”—a word frequently used in internet conservative spaces as a euphemism for individuals willing to publicly draw bigoted conclusions linking race and criminality. Sailer did exactly this during their conversation, insinuating that Black people commit crimes because of innate characteristics: “Blacks tend to commit murder about 10 times as often per capita as whites… it’s not just all explained by poverty.”
“Steve, what you’re doing is so important,” Kirk gushed.
In January, Kirk hosted Curtis Yarvin, a neo-reactionary, anti-egalitarian who has described slavery as “a natural human relationship” and argued the biological roots of intelligence vary between populations. (He has tried to walk such claims back.) While Kirk seemed uncomfortable when Yarvin’s expressed his affinity for monarchy, he mostly remained effusive and praised his guest for “thought-provoking ideas” that “I love.”
Noah Berlatsky | Whitewashing Charlie Kirk Promotes Political Violence
The main problem with this is that it is a lie. Kirk was not especially interested in persuasion. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the January 6 insurrection; his organization, Turning Points USA, bussed people to the coup — including one man who stormed the capital and beat police with a fire extinguisher. Kirk continued to defend the insurrection and TPUSA’s role in it for years.
Kirk’s assault on democracy did not start on January 6. TPUSA has been touted (by Klein and others) as some sort of righteous free speech advocacy group promoting debate on campus. But that (again) is a lie. In fact, TPUSA’s main purpose is summed up by its “Professor Watchlist” a website which lists teachers and professors who TPUSA believes “discriminate against conservative students, promote anti-American values and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.”
In short, the Watchlist is intended as, and functions as, a mechanism to stifle academic freedom by targeting those on the left—especially women and BIPOC professors — for stochastic terrorism and harassment. Professors on the list say that they regularly receive hate mail and death threats — and that the threats accelerated after January 6, the insurrection that TPUSA supported. The link to the recent firing of a children’s literature professor reported by a conservative student for talking about “gender” is quite clear. TPUSA was a leader of a conservative moral panic designed to terrorize liberal professors and drive them from the academy—a moral panic which has metastasized into Trump’s unprecedented, openly ideological campaign to defund universities.
Kirk has also just openly called for political violence himself; he praised as Biblical and “perfect” the idea of stoning LGBT people to death, and argued that gun deaths were “worth it” to preserve Second Amendment rights. Klein says it’s not fair to argue that Kirk deserved to die by gun violence because he was opposed to gun control, and that is true. What Klein refuses to grapple with, however, is that, Kirk claimed that the Second Amendment needed to be preserved through violent death. That’s an argument which explicitly says that we should see children killed in school shootings as an inevitable necessary sacrifice to politics. It’s a justification of political violence
Kirk quotes via Brad Johnson
I think it’s worth it. It’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal.
Chicago, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Portland, San Francisco. We got a big military. We should be willing to use it.
Kamala Harris wants to see the elimination of the United States of America.
Kamala Harris seeks to kidnap your child via the trans agenda.
Jews are experiencing the hate that we white people have been experiencing the last decade, and we've been warning against
We need to have a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor. We need it immediately.
You might go out to dinner, go see a movie and come back to a bunch of illegals sitting in your living room, and it will then become their home.
The American Democrat [sic] Party hates this country. They wanna see it collapse. They love it when America becomes less white. They love it when America gets overwhelmed.
The great replacement strategy, which is well underway every single day in our southern border, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different.
They hate those of you that own land and have guns and believe in a better country, and they have a plan to try and get rid of you.
You believe in God, country, family, faith, and freedom, and they won’t stop until you and your children and your children's children are eliminated.
By the way, I would totally tune in to see some pedo get their head chopped off.
The problem is that the MAGA patriots on January 6th, when they went into, for example, the Senate — where the Senate votes, or they went into some of the hearing rooms, they should have stripped naked and filmed themselves having gay sex. That would have solved all the problems.
Native-born Americans, you better buy weapons, everybody. Have a lot of guns at your disposal. I would never leave your home without a weapon.
I can say declaratively this guy [Martin Luther King, Jr.] is not worthy of a national holiday. He is not worthy of godlike status. In fact, I think it’s really harmful.
The left would love to see a race war.
Climate change is the wrapper around Marxism. You have Marxism at its core and you have climate change on the exterior. Climate change activism, environmentalism, pseudo-paganism — we call it a Trojan horse, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, it all sounds so clichĆ© but it’s totally true.
I know this sounds controversial, but peaceful and constitutional defiance of the federal government will actually strengthen the nation.
If they can make you put a mask on, they’ll take your guns. They can make you take a vaccine, they control your children.
Black people tend to be more athletically inclined to be good at basketball. It’s just the way it is.
Twelve thousand Haitians are now your fellow citizens. Did they earn it? Did they come here the right way? Did they apply? Did they wait in line? No.
We’re going to talk about how the other side has openly admitted that this is about bringing in voters that they want and that they like and honestly, diminishing and decreasing white demographics in America.
A properly defined government is a government supposed to fear the people, not the people fear the government. And one of the ways this is possible is to be able to have hundreds of millions of people own firearms."
Ketanji Brown Jackson — is what your country looks like on critical race theory. KBJ is your country on CRT. KBJ — Ketanji Brown Jackson — is an embodiment of the tyranny that we currently live under. She’s an ideological, unintelligent, yet confident fanatic.
Let’s talk about this war on white people. That’s a thought crime … the one type of racism you’re not allowed to talk about, of course, is the war against people who look like you and I.
Kamala Harris has now become the jive-speaking spokesperson of equity.
Ideological purity tests are an interesting approach, but let’s break up the federal government first and then we’ll go from there.
There is a deliberate and venomous anti-white campaign in our country and it drives me crazy and we shouldn’t put up with it.
Western culture is better and it’s a thoughtcrime to say it out loud. Blacks were sold into slavery by other Blacks. Thomas Sowell wrote that in great detail. When Blacks were given opportunities to return home, they did not want to return home. Blacks didn’t want to leave.
I don’t believe Black History Month is worth the kind of full month that it is, at all.
I’m not a fan of democracy.
Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.
Men know the game is rigged against them — especially young white men.
Women are wired to be more emotional and liberal policies appeal to their emotions. The women project’s a whole different thing. Men are rational, hopefully so, in their politics.
Joe Biden is a bumbling dementia-filled Alzheimer’s corrupt tyrant who should honestly be put in prison and/or given the death penalty for his crimes against America.
Now, the 14th Amendment is unbelievably important, obviously, but it’s way too broadly written.
This is left-wing ideologues that allowed the island to burn. That there is blood on the hands of the water worshippers. Christianity broke us free of pagan slavery … Could it be that Maui did not have to burn if they didn’t believe such wacky, goofy, pagan stuff?
If you have a male brain versus a female brain in chess you have a competitive advantage … Chess is very similar, by the way, to why women do not get into coding. Some do, but most do not. Why women don’t get into science, technology, engineering, and math.
Women are notorious for still remembering the details of arguments that they had from years ago.
We should not send women into the frontlines of a conflict nor should we send men into the frontlines of educating our preschoolers. Let's understand our differences and the denial of them creates moral chaos, panic, and confusion.
If you’re a Christian, they consider you a terrorist. If you’re a gun owner, they consider you a terrorist.
The entire Third World is moving into America, and the Democrats want that
I used to love New York City. It’s an unrecognizable city, but that’s what the left does. They’re parasites. The left are cockroaches. They just take things over. They don't build anything. They take stuff over and they destroy it.
Hakeem Jeffries and the Democrats, they are cleaning up. They’re raising record amounts of money … We’re dealing with maggots, vermin and swine here. This is not — these are not good people, they’re not even a little bit good. They are coming after our throats.
Jews have been some of the largest funders of cultural Marxist ideas and supporters of those ideas over the last 30 or 40 years … Until you cleanse that ideology from the hierarchy in the academic elite of the west, there will not be a safe future.
You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken seriously. You had to steal a white person's slot … It’s very obvious to us you were not smart enough to get it on your own.
We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s.
I can’t stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made up New Age term that does a lot of damage.
They’re trying to make the country less white. They’re trying to make the country more like the third world, the dumping ground of the planet is the United States southern border.
It’s important to note that Haiti is legitimately infested with demonic voodoo.
The Mamdani effect is going to metastasize in the Democrat [sic] Party … A very dark and sinister vision — one that is anti-Western, anti-American, anti-civilization.
“We will flood your country with unvetted foreigners, mutilate kids, worship criminals, and demonize half the population for simply breathing and existing.” … I want to see a Democrat [sic] Party at peace, not a Democrat [sic] Party at war with the country.
The only men who are gravitating toward the Democrat [sic] Party are men who want to become women.
We have to tell our babies to stop crying. … I believe we’re broken by sin upon birth.
White privilege is a myth and a lie. It should be completely destroyed. It is a racist idea. Why don’t they ever talk about Asian-American privilege?
Just because you have a group of people who look the same doesn’t mean they think the same, and we have great intellectual diversity in our organization.
We are up against a group of individuals that are going to use the rest of their lives and all their resources to try to take our freedoms and liberties away. These are liberals.
If we do not have the capacity to defend our freedoms, which the Second Amendment allows us to do, then our rights and freedoms can be just written away in an instant.
The rise of anti-Americanism on college campuses is so dramatic. I believe the greatest threat to Western civilization is what's happening on our college campuses today. I really do.
Professors that never could have succeeded on the outside … Bitterly unhappy people that want to try to indoctrinate and deprogram America’s youth away from our fundamental values, because they’re just so malevolent towards the world that they could never succeed in themselves.
Are liberals really unhappy people or is it just me? It seems like a liberal would rather see rich people become poor than poor people become rich. A liberal would rather tell you how to live your life than actually improve the life of their own.
We as conservatives, as free thinkers, and as members of the National Rifle Association, we're never gonna tell you how to live your life.
The left would like nothing more than the most effective, the most powerful grassroots organization in America — the NRA — to be decapitated, because they know as long as the NRA is powerful, they cannot obtain unilateral political power.
The six million members of the National Rifle Association are the greatest threat to the American left that exists today and the greatest protector of American freedom now and for the rest of 21st century.
Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.
If you actually believe that climate change is an existential threat, which is complete gibberish, nonsense and balderdash—and all of you guys should be unafraid to push back against all that garbage, because it’s designed for one thing: power and control and let me just tell you something that is a general rule, if your biggest worry in life is existential, you live a great life. If your biggest worry is the sky falling and not sanitation, nutrition, getting murdered on the way home, or being beaten, you live a very nice life.
This climate change nonsense can only happen in a rich, generally peaceful society. You think that the people in the slums of India, the 300 million that don't have access every single day to functioning toilets, you think that they're worried about the sky falling?
There’s not this huge call for gun control, even from the citizens of Chicago. We have a lack of father problem in the Black community … and that has contributed to this endless cycle of gang violence and gun violence … the bottom line is a broken culture problem.
You look at what Mayor Giuliani did in New York in the early 2000s, that’s how he cleaned up the streets. He did not divide people based on racial ethnic lines, he built strong partnerships and he cleaned up the streets.
We should have a honest and clear reductionist view of gun violence, but we should not have a utopian one. You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won't have a single gun death. That is nonsense. It’s drivel.
Never give up our guns! If we do, only criminals will have guns.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.
The only purpose of a federal gun registry would be eventual confiscation.
“Gun control” is not about safety, it is about power.
Every time there’s a tragedy, the left talks about banning guns. But you cannot prevent evil by restricting the rights of the innocent.
The statistic out there is that 35,000 people die of gun deaths in America … Two-thirds of that number are death by suicide with a gun. We have a horrible mental health crisis. It’s deceiving to say it’s a gun death. It’s a suicide with a gun.
One in five gun deaths are gang violence, men between the ages of 18 to 30. That's a byproduct of institutional poverty. You’d argue that’s more of a problem of failing schools, failing government programs, lack of economic opportunity, than have much to do really with guns.
New York City councilman Yusuf Salaam, who once took part in the gruesome gang rape of a jogger in Central Park, is now furious that an NYPD officer dared to pull him over for having illegally tinted windows. Salaam wasn’t even arrested or given a ticket, but after getting away with gang rape he apparently thinks he deserves to be completely above the law.
MLK, in my opinion, and based on every objective analysis, he actually gave us more race focus and less emphasis on character and conduct.
[MLK] would be actually to be closer to a race Marxist, almost akin to DEI-type philosopher, if you go deep into his writings, especially later in his life.
Who was MLK? A myth has been created and it has grown totally out of control. While he was alive most people disliked him, yet today he is the most honored, worshipped, even deified person of the 20th century.
Maybe once you break the mythical sainthood of someone like MLK, black voters will realize it’s being used against them to suppress the individual, and even more will realize they are on our side.
Telling the truth about MLK should not be trampling sacred ground. He was just a man. And a very flawed one at that. Worship God, not a mythological anti-racist creation of the 1960s.
MLK was awful. He’s not a good person. He said one good thing he actually didn’t believe.
Husbands should do everything he can to not force his wife into the workforce.
How many of you, every single day, it’s your purpose for being is finding a husband? Every hand should go up. But I thought you said you wanted an amazing family. You have to prioritize and aim at what you want the most.
If you’re not married by the age of 30, you only have a 50% chance of getting married. And if you don’t have kids by the age of 30, you have a 50% chance of not having kids … Having children are are a gift from the Lord. And unfortunately, our culture deemphasizes it.
I don’t think the church talks enough about purity, right? I think it’s incredibly important and we should tell young men and young ladies to save themselves for marriage.
Young men have serious problems. We’re working on fixing that. And it’s easy to laugh, but you need young men. Young men are in a far sicker position right now than young ladies are. They’re committing suicide more. They’re checking out of society.
It’s easy to make fun of young men, but a society needs strong men and we need husbands and we need fathers. And everyone in this room should be part of that project of making men strong again. Everyone.
Young ladies need to be willing to submit to a godly man when you meet one. And if you’re not willing to do that, then you got to pray about that because a lot of young men in the dating pool say, “I don’t want to be bossed around all the time.”
The hypertoxic feminism is very off-putting to young men.
They’re called toxically masculine. They're called, you know, “Who needs men,” “the patriarchy,” and so then they just largely disengage or they do even a worse thing, which is they get involved like, “I’m just going to sleep with a bunch of women, but not going to marry them.”
Men will do anything to solve the problem of scarcity. And if men can get you quite easily, that is not an attractive quality to be able to have a man go on a journey with you … And there is one thing that men want more than anything else and it’s not Bitcoin. You know what it is.
As women have not been saving themselves for marriage and men too in the last 30 or 40 years, we’ve seen marriage rates collapse. There is a one-to-one correlation on those two things.
If everyone here basically said, “Nope, we’re going to combine our our power and be pure and trust in Jesus and in God for our future husband,” you would be shocked at how much the dating pool improves.
You must understand that a man might forget to shower for three days because he’s too worried that we’re going to go to a nuclear war with Iran. Men are obsessed with the macro and they often forget the micro.
Corporations want to hire you so badly because you are incredibly good at microtasks. That is why young women have been so well paid in the corporate environment because when it comes to getting details done, women are much better than men.
Obviously your marriage actually comes before your kids … Your relationship with your kids is important. But it’s not covenantal. Your marriage is a covenant. Your relationship with your kids is an outgrowth of a covenant. They’re under your stewardship.
Of course you should be able to use whips against foreigners that are coming into your country. Why is that controversial?
Don’t follow your heart. It’s a bad idea. Do not do that. You laugh, but the Bible is very clear. The heart is wicked. Do not follow your heart.
The most important thing as a parent is that you must instill self-control, not self-esteem for your kid. Whatever it takes, you must have them understand the power of restraint, which is a fruit of the spirit. Remember, self-control is a fruit of the spirit.
You are not your kid’s friend. You are their parent. It is an up-and-down relationship. It is not a horizontal one.
I see in public these parenting displays, that it’s so sad, where it’s just placation. The parent is being held hostage by the child. It is an ongoing blackmail operation. Where it’s like, give me candy or else I riot. It's no different than BLM.
He doesn’t need a whole feeling session. We don’t need that as men. We don’t need emotionality. No. You need conviction and order and a challenge. And we need high stakes.
You must understand God wired us a lot differently … Men look at we we have a problem where we think we are the firefighter to put out a fire. We see problem, we want to fix it … Sometimes the solution is just talking about the problem which for us is an incomprehensible thing.
Our brains work differently. For women, conversation, especially conversation about nothing, is therapeutic. It’s very cathartic. For men, it’s exhausting. And for us, we like to unplug and we like to watch or see somebody else do something hard. That’s what sports is.
Do not talk down to men, do masculine masculinity bashing of men. Not only do we need men, the civilization is God created men and women. And it’s very tempting to get into the whole kind of girl-dominant society. You do not want to live in that world.
