If you read this blog with some regularity, it's a near certainty you are some flavor of political conservative, even if you reject the label of "far right." I'm recommending a column to you that you may not like the tone of, or the place where it was published, a pure progressive rag: Salon.
Executive Editor Andrew O'Hehir is woke as they come, but I think he's grasped something about the Charlie Kirk phenomenon others have missed. Hold your nose if you must, but read through to the end. To be fair to O'Hehir, he admits Kirk made a big difference.
His considerable talent lay in translating the knee-jerk reactionary views of Trumpism — everything the libs have done, from abortion rights to Black Lives Matter to proliferating pronouns to low-flow showerheads, is destroying America — into the distinctive cultural language of a younger generation.
Everything about his online presence, media appearances and in-person tours was designed to reach younger people who were acclimated to the language and culture of celebrity, but weren’t much interested in the remote, tedious and pointless machinery of politics.
His rhetoric was often extreme and his positions deliberately inflammatory — he claimed to be modeling a rebellion against established order, after all — but his demeanor was radically cool, relentlessly cheerful, and never openly hostile or unfriendly.
Had he lived, devout Christian Kirk might have become an evangelical minister who presided over a suburban megachurch. Or even this century's Billy Graham. Hat tip to RealClearPolicy for the link.
Via con Dios, Charlie.
