RECLAIMING THE GOOD OF THE INTELLECT?

Charlie Kirk was shot during one of his "Prove Me Wrong" events, which provides Inside Higher Ed's Ryan Quinn with a reality check.  "The provocateur supercharged the right’s depiction of campuses as intolerant, leftist spaces. Then he was killed on one while exercising free speech and debating students."

We'll get to the substance of that "provocateur" epithet in time.  The event is unprecedented enough to concentrate minds in higher education.

Wednesday saw a moment without precedent in recent history: A college speaker shot to death on a campus during an event. That fact alone would’ve escalated growing concerns about the future of free speech and civil discourse at colleges and universities.

But this speaker was Charlie Kirk, a prominent ally of a U.S. president who was already crusading against higher ed. Kirk, a national political figure in his own right, was one of the foremost conservative critics of intolerance for right-wing views in higher ed and the founder and leader of Turning Point USA, a nationwide organization of conservative campus groups that aided the president’s re-election. Kirk even spoke at Trump’s January inauguration.

He was known for goading students on campuses to “prove me wrong,” posting the resulting clips online, appearing in conservative media to denounce higher ed, spreading his views further on his own podcast and using his organization’s online presence and on-the-ground staff to target left-leaning faculty.

Those growing concerns?  New, only to the house organ for all wokeness, all the time, inside higher education.

His death at Utah Valley University could put more pressure on higher ed at a time when colleges and universities have already been excoriated and targeted by the right. Faculty and those who criticize higher ed as being insufficiently open to civil debate between different viewpoints are worried that free expression will further erode.

City Journal's Heather MacDonald suggests the erosion has long been under way. "It was grimly fitting that Charlie Kirk was slain on a college campus—source of the 'hate speech equals violence' ethic that demonizes opponents and demands that they be silenced."  Campus Reform's Emily Sturge joins the pile-on.

For years, higher education has cultivated a toxic culture that excuses and rationalizes violence against conservatives to the point that the rhetoric seemingly glorifies such action. Professors who cheer bloodshed are not fringe; they’re influential authority figures teaching the next generation of leaders that violence is acceptable.

A week ago, I called for stock-taking.

Wouldn't university administrators, from the chancellor to the deputy assistant deanlet for climbing walls, agree with the proposition that a university is a place to debate and discuss ideas, not to shoot people for holding them?  You'd think a campus visitor shot down on the quad is something that could directly affect any university.

First, though, the defenders of business as usual circle the wagons.  "Prove me wrong" tours?  Nothing emergent about them, it's the vast right wing conspiracy at work.

There has been a shift in campus conservative activism, from “conservative campus organizations and actors [that] favor a more erudite style of political discussion” to ones “which are often very well funded” and “thrive on confrontation.” The Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which focused on “seminars on moral and political philosophy” has found itself being outmaneuvered by more confrontational groups such as Young America’s Foundation, the Leadership Institute (associated with the recently disgraced James O’Keefe) and Turning Point USA.

However, as the book’s publication date suggests, this shift began to take hold years before the Great Awokening. And Binder and Wood provided persuasive evidence that the shift had far less to do with what was happening on college campuses than changes in the broader conservative movement. There was money – and lots of it – for organizations that were willing to take the culture war to America’s universities, creating an entire political economy.

Ah, yes, that reactionary persuasion economy.

Academic leftists who have trouble with the idea that some people might take issue with them of their own accord are nothing new. Years ago, some students decided to stop griping about the dominant leftist culture at the University of Wisconsin and established the Badger Herald. (Some of the founders of the Dartmouth Review, which claims to be the pioneer conservative voice on a lefty campus may have been in diapers in 1969.) From time to time the university-funded Daily Cardinal (cardinals are red, so were the editors' diapers) would claim that without funding from National Review or some such place there would be no Badger Herald. We might have a better debate if advocates -- from whatever position -- would engage the ideas rather than attempt to identify the hidden powers behind the disseminators of the ideas.

I'll take Professor Farrell's insinuation that the Herald of the early 1970s offered a "more erudite style" as a complement.  Today's Herald probably lacks a conservative editorialist.  There's a further reversal of roles in the past fifty years: it was "outside agitators" stirring up leftist protest in Madison, whilst today the outside agitators are chucking red ball caps to the audience.

The reason why so many campus controversies seem to follow the same script is … that they are following the same script. A conservative group invites a figure onto campus who seems guaranteed to provoke outrage, leading to protests, and likely headlines about campus illiberalism. This is not a reaction against purported wokism so much as a means of weaponizing it for the other side’s political purposes.

Professor Farrell's editorial goes on to note that students of a leftish disposition might "feel at home on college campuses in ways that conservatives do not."  Whether that makes for a more fertile field for provocateurs does not have to follow.  Consider Outside the Beltway's Steven Taylor, who makes the case that Charlie Kirk was a provocateur.

Kirk was not a debater simply “showing up…and talking to anyone who would talk to him.” He was a performance artist making money off of these events. The word that has been in my brain since the day of the shooting has been provocateur. Kirk was not debating or engaging in a reasoned interchange of ideas. He was hoping to provoke college students into making social media content.

As such, [Ezra] Klein is flatly wrong to call him “one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion” because I do not believe his main goal was to persuade anybody. At best, like any ideologue, he was so certain of his own positions that he thought ridiculing others was actually “debate,” because he was just declaring truth as he saw it.

That's consistent with Professor Farrell's thesis of a political economy of right populism for fun, profit, and clicks and likes.  Professor Taylor subsequently observes,

Kirk and people like him are not looking to learn. They may claim to wish to teach, but even then, it is more about received knowledge than debate and reasoned acceptance of new knowledge. They are looking to pummel the listener into compliance. And the way Kirk (or Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity or Ben Shapiro) was a controlled environment using specific rhetorical tools to produce the outcome he wanted

His essay draws a comparison between the "Prove Me Wrong" tour and the sort of touring evangelist (we get them in DeKalb as well) who shows up on a hot day to scold the scantily clad collegians as sinful.  That doesn't make for the kind of video Turning Point was putting up, in which all Mr Kirk had to do is make like a three-year-old and keep asking "why?"  Too many youngsters knew the epithets, you know, fascist, transphobe, all the other secular sins, but could not explain the intellectual foundations to their claim.  Didn't even require a "cite the passage in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual that identifies the symptoms of Islamophobia" or "What are the testable implications of critical race theory?"

That brings us, dear reader, to the rediscovery of the good of the intellect.  James Joyner, also with Outside the Beltway, suggests, "Kirk was not actually interested in debating ideas. He was in the business of scoring points, not persuasion and genuine give-and-take."  Which works when you're dealing with a young skull full of mush who fails to understand his side of the argument, but might not be how we engage in sifting and winnowing to find the truth.

The “debate me bro” playbook is simple and effective: demand that serious people engage with your conspiracy theories or extremist talking points. If they decline, cry “censorship!” and claim they’re “afraid of the truth.” If they accept, turn the interaction into a performance designed to generate viral clips and false legitimacy. It’s a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose proposition that has nothing to do with genuine intellectual discourse.

The fundamental issue with “debate me bro” culture isn’t just that it’s obnoxious, it’s that it creates a false equivalence between good-faith expertise and bad-faith trolling. When you agree to debate someone pushing long-debunked conspiracy theories or openly hateful ideologies, you’re implicitly suggesting that their position deserves equal consideration alongside established facts and expert analysis.

This is exactly backwards from how the actual “marketplace of ideas” is supposed to work. Ideas don’t deserve platforms simply because someone is willing to argue for them loudly. They earn legitimacy through evidence, peer review, and sustained engagement with reality. Many of the ideas promoted in these viral “debates” have already been thoroughly debunked and rejected by that marketplace—but the “debate me bro” format resurrects them as if they’re still worth serious consideration.

Perhaps most insidiously, these aren’t actually debates at all. They’re performances designed to generate specific emotional reactions for viral distribution. Participants aren’t trying to persuade anyone or genuinely engage with opposing viewpoints. They’re trying to create moments that will get clipped, shared, and monetized across social media.

Kirk perfected this grift. As a recent detailed analysis of one of Kirk’s debates demonstrates, when a student showed up prepared with nuanced, well-researched arguments, Kirk immediately tried pivoting to culture war talking points and deflection tactics. When debaters tried to use Kirk’s own standards against him, he shifted subjects entirely. The goal was never understanding or persuasion—it was generating content for social media distribution.

And, of course, this broader “debate me bro” culture has become so commonplace and expected online that it has now been fully industrialized into content farming.

All of which might be true, and yet, as long as students are rendered incapable of counter-argument by the Student Affairs curriculum and the incantation of identity politics commonplaces, the schtick works.

There’s nothing in how Charlie Kirk “debated” that aimed to get at nuances or understanding. They were entirely designed to seek to humiliate his opponent. They’re full of red herrings, lies, and attempts to deflect from any actual logic, as the video link above showed.

The point is not about getting to any level of understanding. It’s to try to quip and dunk in the manner most likely to go viral when shared on social media in 20-second snippets.

The format actively discourages the kind of thoughtful, nuanced discussion that might actually change minds—the kind actually designed for persuasion. Instead, it rewards the most inflammatory takes, the most emotionally manipulative tactics, and the most viral-ready soundbites. Anyone going into these situations with good faith gets steamrolled by participants who understand they’re playing a different game entirely.

Professor Joyner watched that video in order that you don't have to.  "I got bored after a few minutes, but it does a good job breaking down Kirk’s practiced use of red herrings, straw man fallacies, false correlations, and Gish gallops to avoid engaging with the substantive questions ostensibly being debated. It’s performance art, not debate."

How much of the Student Affairs curriculum, or any of the "studies" disciplines, comes off no better?