Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò at the Boston Review:
Following the shooting of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, Vox cofounder and podcast commentator Ezra Klein wrote in the New York Times that Kirk was “practicing politics the right way” because he was willing to show up and argue with college students. (Apparently this is what passes for “moxie and fearlessness” among some of my fellow members of the chattering class.) Amid backlash, Klein doubled down, insisting that “we are going to have to live here with one another”—as an introduction to an interview with far-right former Breitbart editor Ben Shapiro.
Much about what Klein offers here is objectionable: the appeal to debate as “persuasion,” which confuses the mere appearance of giving and responding to reasons with the substance of good-faith rational inquiry; the silence about the fact that the watchlist Kirk spearheaded generated death threats, along with other evidence that would complicate the narrative that Kirk did politics the “right way”; the breathtaking carelessness or outright dishonesty in deflecting objections to the specific accuracy of this portrayal of Kirk with claims about the general appropriateness of political violence.
More here.
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