Last year, political podcaster Charlie Kirk was murdered. Since his death, Republicans have tried to make him a martyr of political debate, dying for the oh-so-valorous purpose of pwning college students for YouTube likes. 

Kirk’s death created space for even some on the left to mourn his passing, on account of the fact he stood for “political understanding”, or to “bridge the gap” between left and right wing ideas. Neither of those are true, of course. What he did wasn’t even really debate. He created theatre, smugly arguing his points to amateurs who couldn’t phrase their points quite as neatly as Kirk could. 

This is the essence of modern debate culture. No longer is it about understanding, it is about winning.

In modern political debates, the two sides are simple. One side says that people deserve human rights, and the other says that they don’t. 

The common argument for these debates is that it is just a matter of political difference. A political difference is a difference in how one would like their taxes to be handled. It’s a difference in who they would like to represent them in office. A political difference, to be frank, is not about if someone deserves the right to exist. 

For those on the side of opposing human rights, their arguments hold no stakes for their own personal well-being. They get to continue living with their human rights because those are not the ones up for debate. Yet.

Centrism is an insidious disease. We cannot hear out both sides when one side wishes death on the other, and the current culture around debate and political difference is concerning. Sometimes, I feel like I’m in an episode of the Twilight Zone. It’s a sort of political theater, in and of itself, where one side is so cartoonishly evil that if they were villains within a dystopian plot, it would be panned for being too on the nose (or beloved for being so on the nose it’s camp). 

More than anything, I’m tired. I’m tired of justifying my existence as a queer person. I’m tired of justifying reproductive rights. I’m tired of seeing the people who are in power do nothing to help those who are vulnerable, and those who justify it.

In the culture of debate, all world views are equally valid. In the real world, that’s just not true. Personally, I would not take the worldview of an astronaut who has stood on the moon’s surface at the same level of validity as a particularly imaginative child on the subject of whether or not the moon is made out of cheese. 

My disdain of fake debaters does not just come from the conservative ones. There are plenty of left-wing debaters, particularly those who go on live streams to debate, that I could criticize endlessly. Their participation in the culture legitimizes it. They too are creating theatre, which brings it back to the reason debate culture has become what it is.

Monetized.

Political content on platforms like YouTube, Twitch and Tik Tok is nothing new, but it is divisive enough that it is a money printing machine. There’s a reason that so many conservative grifters have made their way to these platforms. In a culture of rage bait, political content thrives like germs during flu season on an elementary school door knob.

I am not sad that Charlie Kirk is dead. It’s tragic, of course, that he was murdered in front of so many people. The people there to watch the debate did not deserve to see a man violently killed in front of them, but I am not sad that Charlie Kirk is no longer in the world. His content, and adjacent content, does genuine harm. Everything he spewed before he died was vitriolically hateful towards people more vulnerable than him, and most egregiously, he helped normalize the idea that it can be “just a debate” when what is at stake is human lives.