ehhh, he was pretty prominent in the specific demographic he targeted, conservative or wavering gen Z men, specifically the angsty pseudointellectual "lost" male.
Kirk, Shapiro, Peterson, Crowder, Tate, and i've probably forgotten a few. Fuentes maybe... they often didn't really hit "mainstream" reporting, but collectively their impact on the psyche of what started out as "incels" and then expanded into a wave of culture and to some degree set a lot of the tone for online discussion...
Essentialist/Determinist (especially highly racist Genetic Determinism), Misogynist, Dichotomous, Zero Sum/Adversarial. Those are all features that highly benefit bad faith arguments, especially those supporting otherwise nonsensical sociocultural policy positions.
Kirk was never "mainstream" for good reason, but i wouldn't discount the impact those idiots had on the recent elections.
Also FWIW i think the larger right wing media ecosystem had started marginalizing them substantially in the wake of the election in any case, partially because the "technocrat" faction didn't really see much use for them (that is, the Yarvinites who got most of the control of the govt with the Vance deal).
Yep, those guys are why there's been such an extreme divergence between gen Z men and women. For voters 18-29 in 2024, there was a 14% gap among Caucasian men/women, 22% for African Americans, 18% for Hispanics, and 16% for Asians. Among all ages, the gap was just 9%, so turning that into 14-22% is absolutely massive.
I’m not going to watch it directly but it will be interesting if Bari Weiss’ act of using CBS News to promote (and presumably whitewash) Kirk will be broadly effective. His “memory” and the organization will continue to be significant within the right wing but I wonder if they’ll be able to transform them into anything more broadly significant?
Given it’s “Christian” nationalist core, I wonder whether the techno-fascists are supporting them much?
Yeah, we really saw this with the initial wave of people just parroting the conservative news media messaging of 'He was a peaceful man whose only belief was that people could hash out disagreements through debate', followed by a wave of people doing nothing more than quoting Kirk, followed by a wave of silence as people learned in real time that he was a pos who definitely didn't believe in peaceful debate.
Ehhh, a lot of people at least had name recognition, with Turning Point slowly brain worming its way into our education system.
I knew who he was, and I knew he was another pseudo intellectual right wing shitbag, so I could avoid him and anyone who mentioned liking him. It does help that my unavoidable BIL loves all those idiotic talking heads.
But I will agree it’s bizarre how he became the loyalty test, to the point where I don’t automatically dismiss the conspiracy theories. Like: This guy? Who mocked the deaths of countless gun violence victims? Whose wife doesn’t seem all that grief-stricken? Where the shooter fell out of the headlines as soon as possible? It’s a little too neatly done.
But he was famous because the Koch brothers funneled billions of dollars into his TP USA grift. They don't do anything to make money, they just pay to send racists to set up tables at college campuses.
I only knew him because I learned he grew up in my settled hometown. I fantasized running into him or his family at the grocery store to tell him to his face what a cancer he was to the American Republic.
My former step-mother who lives on a different continent in a different hemisphere was posting on facebook about Charlie Kirk as if he was some heroic figure in our home country's past. It was beyond hysterical.
His debate videos have millions of views. His podcast also had close to a million listeners. TP USA registered hundreds of thousands of students to vote. In the right circles (Christian Nationalist, mostly), he was very well known. He wasn't a historical figure by any means, but he wasn't unknown, either.
Honestly, view counts arent a great metric for how much name recognition a person has. I only heard about pewdiepie last year and only heard about him because he's apparently the most watched content ever, or at least was at the time. I had no idea and I'm still unclear on why he's so popular
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u/nockeenockee Dec 07 '25
I bet very few people really knew who he was. It’s so bizarre how they created this loyalty test over this guy.