Bob

I respect @ezraklein a lot, but this is dead wrong and frankly a baffling thing to say. Charlie Kirk was the *epitome* of our modern brand of poisonous politics. Ezra tries to make the point that he went around to college campuses to debate people. And that's true, for a very tortured version of the word 'debate'. But Charlie Kirk was not trying to build bridges. He was not trying to reach a common understanding with his opponents in the way that Ezra himself does. He was not operating in good faith, and his goal was not respectful two-way conversations where both sides can grow and change. Kirk's goal at his college 'debates' was not to find experts on tricky issues of culture and policy and then have a Socratic dialogues and learn from them. His goal was to find a purple haired nineteen year-old sociology major with more feelings than sense, and then dunk on them. He wanted to farm clips he could use on social media to make his opponents look ridiculous, and he was good at it. When I think about how social media has changed politics for the worse, Charlie Kirk and his style of engagement is one of the main protagonists. We live in a heavily polarized era where the parties hate each other more than they have in decades and political violence is on the rise. And while it might be distasteful to say it directly after he was murdered, Kirk was one of the people driving that hatred and that polarization. He taught his audiences to hate and fear their opponents. He egged on the public's worst and basest instincts. He flirted heavily and repeatedly with the idea of political violence. It should obviously be said that none of that justifies killing him. Anyone who advocates for political violence is no friend or ally of mine. But for a man who wrote a book called "Why We're Polarized" to look at Charlie Kirk and say that he practiced politics the right way is delusional.