After Charlie Kirk's Murder, Elite Arrogance Still On Full Display

College students saw Charlie Kirk as the ultimate enemy, so awful he needed deplatforming or worse, but educational swindlers are the real enemies of youth

From Bret Stephens in the New York Times:

It’s too bad that Kirk, raised in a Chicago suburb, didn’t attend the University of Chicago. It wouldn’t have hurt getting thrashed in a political debate by smarter peers. Or learning to appreciate the power and moral weight of views he didn’t share. Or recognizing that the true Western tradition lies more in its skepticism than in its certitude.

It’s too bad Bret Stephens never debated Charlie Kirk. He’d have had to defend the idea that students at places like the University of Chicago are not only “smarter” than ignorant red-staters (and students at schools like Cambridge), but more schooled in the “Western tradition” of “skepticism,” as opposed to “certitude.”

Does Stephens mean currently? If so, that’s rich. The cultural schism now widening under all of us in America has surely been caused at least in part by a shift in the attitudes of the very people Stephens calls “the greatest scholars.” Professors abandon skepticism for certitude in a range of hot-button issues, including a conspicuous one that may have had an impact on Kirk’s murder, transgender ideology.

And “smarter”? Stephens needs a fresh look at what passes for instruction and re-examine whether students are really being taught to think better. He should ask if it’s not instead true that institutional America is and has been systematically ripping off its young, a question Kirk threw at students everywhere, often with devastating results. It’s not surprising that scenes of kids who casually admit they “hate books” but were welcomed to pay tuition anyway haven’t made too many of the “Kirk’s greatest misdeeds” reels currently circulating:

This major plank of Kirk’s traveling-debate act is almost never mentioned in mainstream press rundowns of his views. Press accounts focus on alleged bigotry, xenophobia, and misogyny. However, Kirk’s schtick as a non-college graduate moving from town to town doing verbal battle with ostensibly enlightened clientele of higher education had a key subtext: college embarrasses its customers.

His eponymous book gives predictable focus to the ideological-indoctriniation portion of liberal arts education in particular, but most of his argument centers on things I heard for years from student loan forgiveness advocates: college doesn’t prepare students to enter the workforce, does little to secure income, and is particularly devastating to seas of humanities students duped into thinking they need to mortgage their futures for careers that, like my own, often don’t require degrees.

This part of Kirk’s act has been edited out of the public debate. Most infuriating of all has been listening to media figures at outlets like Salon denounce “Debate Me, Bro” culture as commercial hucksterism that’s “ruined civil discourse.” Not only is Kirk guilty of this, apparently, but also the likes of Joe Rogan, whose podcast is part of the regrettably rising tide of “people who don’t know what they’re talking about arguing with each other under the guise of debate.” These people have the gall to denounce The Joe Rogan Experience as an ignorance-spreading machine when the higher educational system has been gorging itself on trillions in federally-backed loans, just to crank out people with professional skills and so shredded intellectually, they think they have to use terms like “birthing persons.”

Set aside the motive of Kirk’s shooter, which will likely come out in time. The scene of the crime was a college, and the damage such institutions did to young brains in this country is the story that’s most visible on Kirk’s videos, but which America’s opinion-making classes are most interested in keeping hidden: