Debunking Charlie Kirk on his tolerance and reason during Kavanaugh hearings

During the very emotional days of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation process — the Senate hearings with him, then with Dr. Christine Ford, then with him again — the nation was transfixed. Multiple national media outlets talked to diverse Americans as they watched the drama unfold.

On the day of the hearing (Sept. 27) with Ford and Kavanaugh, Charlie Kirk, founder and president of Turning Point USA, videoed himself talking to a Kavanaugh protester outside the US Capitol. He posted an accompanying tweet with that video the next day:

This video is supposed to be exemplary for Kirk of the Left’s intolerance and of Kirk’s reasonableness, as evidence in his tweet about the “unhinged” woman and his own claim about the conversation he attempted.

But the video and other evidence show his hypocrisy on those two terms.

Kirk on Tolerance

Tolerance is a favorite word for Kirk. Here are some examples of Kirk’s use of tolerance/tolerant on Twitter:

As he is wont to do a lot, Kirk is taking a “left” mantra and using it against them.

The phrase “tolerant Left” has been around in conservative, alt-right circles at least since 2010. Consider this 2010 article “10 Bigoted Remarks Made by the ‘Tolerant’ Left In Obama’s ‘Post-Racial’ America” on the blog of conservative David Horowitz and his Freedom Center, a kind of precursor to Kirk’s attacks on higher education. [Kirk has a professor watchlist, and Horowitz came out with a book in 2006 that did the same thing.]

Other conservatives have used it since then: Nancy French in 2012, Townhall.com in 2013, alt-right media site Breitbart in 2016, and far right News Busters in 2017.

Kirk on the Sinister Left

Kirk has used “sinister Left” at least 14 times on Twitter between September 14 and Sept. 29.

Here are some examples:

As far as I can tell, “sinister left” is a fairly new phrase, using sparingly in the last few months. Kirk sees the Left as sinister for its lack of care about families, decency, and truth as evidenced in this tweet:

While that moves the audience needle for Kirk to hyper-partisanship, it exposes Kirk to hypocrisy for his lack of reasonableness and tolerance.

On Kirk’s Reasonableness

First, on the reasonableness, if Kirk is so concerned with the power of the sinister Left — and let’s be clear, sinister is somewhere between sinful and evil, a kind of underhanded maliciousness — why is he engaging them in “reasoned” conversation? [Kirk calls the tactics of the sinister left “evil” in this tweet.]

Yes, he wants to expose them. We see this as he implored people to ‘watch’ in his own tweet. He also suggested in a tweet that Sen. Lindsey Graham exposed the Left in Graham’s monologue during the Kavanaugh hearings:

But to expose, to reveal, one doesn’t have to argue back, to try to convince them of something. One in fact shouldn’t. Because it won’t work. It would only work if indeed they are not sinister.

Yet we see otherwise in Kirk’s Sept. 28 video. Kirk begins the clip by asking the woman why she debases his attempt at “reasoned” dialogue by calling him names. [We don’t know if she did call him a name before that, but she labeled him “asshole” right after that.] Then Kirk gets as adamant as the woman in the video with his strong hand signals and tone. This is not reasonableness, if, in Kirk’s definition, reasonableness is the opposite of getting verbally assailed and not also assailing the other.

On Kirk’s Tolerance

This is all of course a matter of what people should tolerate. We should not tolerate sexual abusers, for one. We should not tolerate those who disregard the rule of law — as opposed to the rule of privilege or status or race. We should not tolerate…

Kirk might agree with all this. He also would add we should not tolerate sinister groups.

Fine as it goes. But what is meant by intolerance? We don’t let them roam free — imprison the abusers. We don’t let them bribe or undermine legal institutions — the privileged.

But how we do show our merited intolerance for sinister groups or people?

According to Kirk, we expose them, show them to the reasoned ones. And of course, the reasoned ones will agree that what has been exposed is unreasonable.

But how does that stop the sinister? Exposes are always for a third party, especially if the exposed party has no shame about being exposed. And one might rightly suggest that sinister people have no such shame.

Well, in the US, the reasoned ones will vote against the sinister.

But in our democratic state, the sinister still can vote, call their representatives, protest, march, etc.

How does then the non-sinister getting political power stop the sinister? [Kirk has argued mistakenly that the Democrats are attacking Kavanaugh to “retain power.” What power does he think they have?]

The only way to stop the sinister in this case — where both sides are able to counter the other on somewhat equal footing — is to call them reasonable.

Hear me out on that.

Only then one can limit their power through limiting one’s own. In fact, to own the label reasonable, one has to disregard certain tactics, to ‘let go’ of desires to use or practice attacks based on discredited ideas or “unhinged” rants that might persuade initially, but not over the long-term.

And so one must neuter that power in the other by limiting it in one’s self.

Or to be more clear, the way to stop ‘sinister’ people in a democracy is to compromise with them, to tolerate them in this sense: “be capable of continued subjection to without adverse reaction.” It’s that last part that Kirk fails at.

If indeed you can’t convince them of your deepest ideas or ideals, as we often see in a divided nation, you must work on areas of agreement. Because then if they can be comprised with, if they can work with your “other side,” then they can’t be called otherwise.

It is clear that Kirk shows his intolerance of the Left by refusing to see them as anything other then sinister.

This means of course Kirk’s use of sinister was never believed by him to begin with. He wouldn’t try to reason with sinister people if he thought they were sinister.

Kirk’s Intolerant Tolerance/Tolerant Intolerance

So Kirk when claims that he is trying to “reason with” people he sees as sinister, we can question his own logic on tolerance.

The principle of tolerance as key to Kirk’s mantra about the Left showed up in this Sept. 28 tweet:

Kirk is responding to feminist writer and lawyer Jill Filipovic here. She explained in a response to her initial tweet (after many responses) that the “Republican husband” in her tweet doesn’t “deserve a female partner if [the husband] (supports) men who mistreat women — personally or politically.”

Flippant yes by Filipovic initially, but made more precise by a follow-up.

Kirk has failed to do with his “sinister Left.” To Kirk, every protester, every elected representative, every Democrat, every person not in alignment with Kirk is sinister.

That is a lot of intolerance and defies reason. He is suggesting only his ‘side’ is reasonable, that only the Democrats are “terrified” of other ideas.

Yet he betrays that conclusion.

For example, Kirk tweeted on Sept. 30 that the sinister Left was following a playbook of a famous Left figure:

Yet, the targeting, personalizing, and polarizing here is being done by Kirk, as seen in his video.

He waded into a group of “sinister” people, knowing how they would react to his words, videoed particular examples of people doing just that, and used that video to polarize more. [By the way here are some facts from Vox about Alinsky and how he became a “preferred villain” of the right.]

Another example of this action from Kirk can be seen in his “reasoned” claims that the “sinister Left” Sen. Diane Feinstein leaked Dr. Ford’s identity and/or letter to the senator. Kirk tweeted Sept. 27:

In fact there was and remains no evidence Feinstein had leaked or leaked herself the name or letter.

The reporter who broke the story of Dr. Ford’s letter to the senator (a story that did not name the letter’s author) also said it was not the senator (or presumably any member of her staff). The site for which that reporter works, The Intercept, also noted “that Feinstein’s Democratic colleagues requested to see the letter in September, after she had told them she received one, but her office refused.” [That letter was eventually put by the White House in the FBI file available to all senators on the Judiciary Committee, though with the name redacted.]

In the end this might read as a simple case of hypocrisy on tolerance. But because Kirk has to “up the ante” to be the provocative sycophant he is, he has to move beyond pointing out what others before him have done (i.e. he is not first to use “tolerant left” in derogatory fashion). He has to be more divisive, more partisan than his predecessors.

This is very Trump-like. Hence the use of sinister. But that move destroys one of Kirk’s claims about himself: reasonableness.

It is clear Kirk doesn’t tolerate the Left, doesn’t show reasonableness at times, and of course lacks evidence in some cases for his reasonableness. Yet he claims otherwise.