And this actually ties back to a subject that was covered earlier: this idea that Charlie Kirk was all for open debate/discussion.
Yeah, no. Sorry. I’m here to call absolute bullshit on that one. The entire premise of his debate format was exactly in the title: “prove me wrong.”
That in itself is logically fallacious. That’s shifting the burden of proof. When I first saw him doing that shit, my first reaction was exactly what it is today: “no, motherfucker. That’s not how it works. You have to prove that you’re right and then you get to ask if we can disprove you.”
”Prove me wrong” wasn’t just some label that he used either. Just watch that video and many others like it and you’ll notice the same problem:
Charlie Kirk never met that challenge. All he ever did was bloviate his stupid and ignorant opinions to college kids. There’s no need to “prove him wrong,” there.
He failed to live up to the burden of proof to demonstrate his positions as factual/accurate/true. Every. Single. Time. For example, when he says “prowling blacks go around for fun targeting white people. That’s a fact!”
How was it a fact? Had he presented credible evidence to establish such a fact? Or was he just blowing more of his horseshit out there and packaging it as “fact,” as so many right wingers just love to do? Well it’s hard to assume the former because I actually did watch a few formats of this “engage the college kids” nonsense and he never did that. It was just drive-by internet troll horseshit.
In doing these ridiculous presentations and editing out the few actual strong rebuttals he would encounter along the way, through the miracle of social media, he was able to convince millions of rubes that he was smart. He was able to convince people that he had powerful points. He was able to convince people that because college kids couldn’t prove a negative, his general political persuasion was the right one. It was intellectual fakery to the absolute max.
So no, I will not concede the point that this piece of shit was a champion of open discourse. He infected open discourse with the intellectual equivalent of AIDS, cancer and Alzheimer’s all rolled into one.