Puny Persuasion
Today: Tom Scocca, editor of Indignity; and writer and editor Maria Bustillos.
Issue No. 412
Ezra Klein Does Politics the Wrong Way
Tom Scocca and Maria Bustillos
Victors of HYDRANYM No. 18
The Editors
Ezra Klein Does Politics the Wrong Way
by Tom Scocca and Maria Bustillos
Tom Scocca: Ezra Klein has now recorded two podcast interviews and written a long introduction to a third podcast, all devoted to asserting that it was good and correct to for him to use his New York Times column, hours after Charlie Kirk was killed, to hail Kirk as someone who “was practicing politics in exactly the right way.”
Maria Bustillos: Hi. I am usually annoyed with Ezra Klein, but now I will never pay attention to him again. Why—how can he still think this was a good idea?
TS: The ostensible argument is that Charlie Kirk demonstrated a fundamental belief in engagement and persuasion, so that even if Ezra Klein may have disagreed with his conclusions, Kirk’s methods were at the heart of liberalism.
MB: I would prefer to live in a world where nobody gets shot ever, but I have seen no evidence from Klein or anyone else that Charlie Kirk was going into any of his so-called debates with a view to weighing opposing points of view in good faith.
TS: What is grimly funny about this is that Klein has now demonstrated, across thousands of words and with multiple interlocutors, that he himself is completely immune to persuasion.
People have explained to him over and over again, factually and conceptually, that his version of Charlie Kirk was a complete fiction and that it was genuinely vile and harmful for Klein to insist on cannonballing into the pool with praise for him.
And Klein just brushes them off.
The real and inescapable thing that Klein is saying is that he believes he was in community and fellowship with Charlie Kirk in a more true and important and durable sense than he is in community with the millions of people Kirk sought to marginalize, abuse, and expel from his vision of America.
MB: Yeah because he and Kirk are both “public figures,” people who count.
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