Charlie Kirk’s Epic Trolling of Colleges

The stark difference between civil debates and conservative provocations

Photo by Gage Skidmore, on Flickr

At the behest of President Trump’s cynical exploitation of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the corporate media have praised Kirk’s work as a paragon of civil discourse.

After all, didn’t Kirk’s “Prove me wrong” tour of America’s college campuses demonstrate his commitment to open debate? Didn’t Kirk repeatedly enter the lion’s dens of liberal colleges and confront young liberal students, standing up peacefully for conservative values?

Since Trump’s policies are never grounded in knowledge or a good-faith desire to help the country, either because he seeks to obfuscate unpleasant truths or he’s uninformed about the subject at hand, we know that the sanctification of Kirk is a travesty. But it’s also not hard to understand what was really going on with Kirk’s “Prove me wrong” circus.

The essence of it was trolling.

Conservatives like Kirk understand that their worldview is faith-based. Liberals corner the market on reason because they’re technocrats who model their view of progress on science. If science progresses, society can too by employing similar techniques, including a philosophical defense of humanist policies and a consideration of data from the…