Posted On: Friday - September 19th 2025 8:58PM MST
In Topics: Internets Pundits Race/Genetics
Wait, what? This sounds like it should be a Steve Sailer post. First off, Peak Stupidity will not submit to the stupidity of yet another aggrieved ordinary Black! guy who's been elevated to "that smart Black guy" and who deigns to designate himself with some nonsensical unpronounceable African name. Hell, we don't even use foreign accent marks here, unless it's a cut-and-pasté accident.
Mr. Sailer enjoys making some light-hearted ridicule on occasion (we are a little more heavy-hearted here), so he has designated this pundit "Tennessee Coates", that being the closest pronunciation he and his commenters could come up with. The guy's not from Tennessee though - you're thinking of Jed, he of the
Is this post more of that tiring pundit v pundit discussion? This guy is critical of this other guy who reviewed a book by that guy about this, which I don't agree with, as you can read about in my own review ...That's not normally our way here, because, as we explained in the 7 1/2 y/o post Pundit vs. pundit during the slow death of the Lyin' Press:
It's all in their pundit world, and one wonders how important all the discussion is, even though it may be about all the major problems of the day. It could be VERY IMPORTANT stuff for the public to know about (some of the time), but these guys need to think about once in a while that, hey, not 10 % of the American public has ever heard the names of any of you people, and maybe 2 % read any of you people consistently! What's the point, then?Well, that's been changing, a point we'll get to later...
Let's start with what Charlie Kirk thought, as the former pundit doesn't really matter here. I'm not quite gonna go all Ron Unz on ya', with:
I don’t spend any time on social media nor do I have any interest in the mainstream conservative movement, so I’d only been very slightly aware of Charlie Kirk prior to his sudden assassination on Wednesday,...There ya' go again ... To be fair, in his next paragraph he admitted he knew a little more. As I've written, I've been well aware of who Charlie Kirk was for most of the time he was a well known, but I was not so aware of all he had to say. I do remember reading from him or hearing him say something I completely disagreed with, most likely about immigration and "They're all good people... LEGALLY!" and that.
Because the www is so huge with masses of words, pictures, and video that are overwhelming, I try to find an excuse NOT to, excuse me, "follow" (in the actual sense) someone who says one major thing I disagree with. This is not the "false in one, assume false in everything" idea. There's just not enough time in life, so I'll read or listen and then, "Ahaaa, OK..." [click] "... enough of this guy." I imagine I miss out on some good people this way - you're never gonna agree with everything from one guy anyway.
I was pretty much right about the cuckiness of early Charlie Kirk though. Then, he was in his mid-20s during that time. I thought numerous stupid things in my 20's too, but, OTOH, the world didn't have so much stupidity to offer, so it wasn't too bad. I remember watching this Nick Fuentes rail against Mr. Kirk on some of these issues, so I figured I'd write the latter off some years ago.
Charlie Kirk had changed his views quite a bit over the last few years of his short life. Our commenter E.H. Hail speculated - 4 possibilities and 1 more in the comments, IIRC - on why he invited Steve Sailer to speak with him in December '23 - Why was Steve Sailer invited on “The Charlie Kirk Show” for the first time in October 2023?. No matter what the reason, you don't go inviting a guy with a Wikipedia page like iSteve without having gone out on your own a bit from Conservative Inc. I don't know if it was opportunism or not, but Mr. Kirk said a lot over the last few years on race and immigration that I heartily agree with. Unfortunately, I'm finding out most about this after his murder.
About that Wikipedia, I've written before of the unintended efforts of wiki editors (that word here being a stand-in for "the unmoderated contributors whose words are left unscrubbed"). See How to use Wikipedia, that post having used Marjorie Taylor Greene's page as an example. It's like this: Let me look up this one guy, Peter Brimelow. Wait, what, Peter Brimelow "...is a known White Supremacist.", you say? I don't know, but he might be on my side. "He said THIS!" Hey, cool. "... and he also did THAT!" Wait, didn't any editor provide a link so I can sign up for his newsletter? He is anti-immigrant!" Actually, no, he's anti-mass-immigration, but thanks - do you have a link to where I can donate?
Where does this Tennessee guy come in? Well, since I mentioned elsewhere that reading is quicker than listening/watching and I pick any excuse to sign off, it's a contradiction to mention that I listened to most (so far) of this Jared Taylor/Paul Kersey podcast.* (Again, I wish I COULD listen to all these and all the James Kirkpatrick/Greg Hood/Kevin DeAnna/same guy ones, but there is simply not enough time.) About 28 minutes into this one, Paul Kersey read out a column by Mr. Coates that is a scathing "expose" of the horrible views of Charlie Kirk.
Why would I listen to this? There must be 2,500 to 5,000 hours of video available on the internet of Charlie Kirk speaking about ... nearly everything. That's the problem, I wouldn't know where to start. There is one The Words of Charlie Kirk video summary I may watch, but we must keep in mind, that with all that's out there, compilations could be made to show he was almost ANY which way, politically. I wanted to listen to Jared and Paul talk for an hour, and they got to reading and discussing the Coates column, so ...
As Mr. Coates' scathing expose was read out by Mr. Kersey, I ran into that Wiki Effect. Though Mr. Taylor noted some flat-out falsehoods**, the opinions of Tennessee Coates had me thinking more and more of Charlie Kirk the more Paul Kersey read Coates' words out to me. He was great, it turns out! That is, if very much of Mr. Coates take (30:00 into the podcast) on the political stance of Mr. Kirk is even half true.
Wait, what, Charlie Kirk thinks BLT-G++ people are freaks and uses the word "trannie"? He said that he doesn't want kids to have to hear Moslem prayers 5 times a day in the streets of America? He asserted that Mayoral candidate Zohar would like to have NYC under Mohammedan rule? (Well, duh.) He railed against black crime and said that "prowling blacks go around for fun and target White people"? He said Haiti was a place infected with demonic voodoo? "The southern border was the dumping ground for the planet and a dumping ground for rapists and thugs"? Man! All that was what Coates said Charlie Kirk said. I can't believe he said all that! We lost a good man. Thank you so much, Tennessee Coates. You've sure got me convinced, for one.
Finally, leaving the worthless Tennessee Coates behind, regarding Fuentes v Kirk, it's a different world now in politics. It has been the case that your big pols were the former mayor of this big city, the "20 year lawmaker from ...", usually lawyers and usually having worked their way up the ladder of political office holding. Now, what, Charlie Kirk starts a Conservative, Christian political movement at 18 y/o and in 13 years is widely known around the nation. Some guy named Nick Fuentes starts saying stuff on internet videos for a few years, and it's Fuentes v Kirk, both widely known guys who are important. For young people, they matter, much more than your Nancy Pelosis, Obamas, and maybe even Trumps. I don't think this change is necessarily a bad thing.
* Usually, they talk about equally much, but on this one, at least the 1st half, it's almost all Jared doing the talking.
** Did Charlie Kirk ever say anyone should be assassinated? I am pretty sure not, but Mr. Coates makes an equivalence including that. There are a couple of other lies I detected.
Comments:
Hail
Saturday - September 20th 2025 9:42PM MST
PS
SafeNow is right to say that most Charlie Kirk event attenders probably did not necessarily care so much about ideas, that they were there for some sort of other reason. It was just a cool place to be, at least for some.
I'd say the reason was essentially entertainment, or trying to mingle with a certain crowd, or the buzz around the things already being buzzed about (a self-licking ice cream cone?).
This is not so far off from what SafeNow remembers from that late-1960s moment although greatly adjusted for the 2010s-2020s. But...
A big difference is that, the b1940s set, then in their twenties -- and some of the b1950s set, still teenagers in the late-1960s but proceeding along a similar path in the 1970s -- had come from a culture that actually highly endorsed family values and at least the idea and baseline-principle of pairing up in stable relationships as a worthy goal, "even" for people in their early twenties. The culture now doesn't really do that. As usual, the effects of fifty years now of modern Feminism are felt.
The other big difference with the pairing-up theory is how much less people actually meet romantic partners in person. A huge portion of that kind of energy and activity is now mediated through screens and "dating apps." A kind of nightmare, in various ways. A techno-dystopia of the kind those same late-1960s people might have read about, or written about, in sci-fi novels.
To return the Kirk spectacle specifically. The huge funding "Turning Point USA" had, from near its start already, meant it was always a good show. And they had a slick social-media operation -- remember that Charlie Kirk is entirely a product of the social-media era -- so the excitement could be scaled up far beyond what most iterations of Charlie Kirk "campus activism" people of bygone years could do (or more than most would've wanted to do, probably).
Arguing in public is just fun for some people. It's rarely productive. But it can be seen as a sport. (Formal debating is itself considered something of a respectable intellectual sport.)
College campuses have always had people like this. People who have a kind of showmanship or performance instinct and want to man little "Debate me on x issue" booths on campus, or the like; down to the common sight of people who hand out political flyers and try to engage college-campus passers-by in conversation, and so forth.
There are something like dozens of Charlie Kirks on even the smallest of college campuses in the USA, and some of them are indeed on the Right. Elements of the Alt-Right in the mid-2010s were doing the same sorts of things (except without Kirk's huge Israeli and dual-citizen funding).
It's been my observation that most of what we call "politics" involves people who don't care about ideas. Curiously, the most politically active people I've known didn't seem to particularly care about the study of ideas. It was more of a sport, sports-team fandom, or like a fan-club. That was true before social media too.
SafeNow is right to say that most Charlie Kirk event attenders probably did not necessarily care so much about ideas, that they were there for some sort of other reason. It was just a cool place to be, at least for some.
I'd say the reason was essentially entertainment, or trying to mingle with a certain crowd, or the buzz around the things already being buzzed about (a self-licking ice cream cone?).
This is not so far off from what SafeNow remembers from that late-1960s moment although greatly adjusted for the 2010s-2020s. But...
A big difference is that, the b1940s set, then in their twenties -- and some of the b1950s set, still teenagers in the late-1960s but proceeding along a similar path in the 1970s -- had come from a culture that actually highly endorsed family values and at least the idea and baseline-principle of pairing up in stable relationships as a worthy goal, "even" for people in their early twenties. The culture now doesn't really do that. As usual, the effects of fifty years now of modern Feminism are felt.
The other big difference with the pairing-up theory is how much less people actually meet romantic partners in person. A huge portion of that kind of energy and activity is now mediated through screens and "dating apps." A kind of nightmare, in various ways. A techno-dystopia of the kind those same late-1960s people might have read about, or written about, in sci-fi novels.
To return the Kirk spectacle specifically. The huge funding "Turning Point USA" had, from near its start already, meant it was always a good show. And they had a slick social-media operation -- remember that Charlie Kirk is entirely a product of the social-media era -- so the excitement could be scaled up far beyond what most iterations of Charlie Kirk "campus activism" people of bygone years could do (or more than most would've wanted to do, probably).
Arguing in public is just fun for some people. It's rarely productive. But it can be seen as a sport. (Formal debating is itself considered something of a respectable intellectual sport.)
College campuses have always had people like this. People who have a kind of showmanship or performance instinct and want to man little "Debate me on x issue" booths on campus, or the like; down to the common sight of people who hand out political flyers and try to engage college-campus passers-by in conversation, and so forth.
There are something like dozens of Charlie Kirks on even the smallest of college campuses in the USA, and some of them are indeed on the Right. Elements of the Alt-Right in the mid-2010s were doing the same sorts of things (except without Kirk's huge Israeli and dual-citizen funding).
It's been my observation that most of what we call "politics" involves people who don't care about ideas. Curiously, the most politically active people I've known didn't seem to particularly care about the study of ideas. It was more of a sport, sports-team fandom, or like a fan-club. That was true before social media too.
Adam Smith
Saturday - September 20th 2025 7:43PM MST
PS: Good evening, y'all...
https://i.ibb.co/G4nwNnZ3/Girls-Say-Yes.jpg
Mrs. Smith and I saw a 𝑅𝐼𝑃 𝐶ℎ𝑎𝑟𝑙𝑖𝑒 𝐾𝑖𝑟𝑘 billboard on the way home from Costco the other day...
https://i.ibb.co/XxDR3Nwx/RIP-Charlie-Kirk-Billboard.jpg
(I guess that's a thing now.)(Weird.)
And here's that Tennessee Coates story you were talking about...
https://archive.is/vKDz6
I read it and thought, 𝑊ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒 ℎ𝑒𝑐𝑘? 𝐼 𝑙𝑜𝑣𝑒 𝐶ℎ𝑎𝑟𝑙𝑖𝑒 𝐾𝑖𝑟𝑘 𝑛𝑜𝑤.
So, yeah... I'm going to go read post 3351 now. Cheers! ☮️
https://i.ibb.co/G4nwNnZ3/Girls-Say-Yes.jpg
Mrs. Smith and I saw a 𝑅𝐼𝑃 𝐶ℎ𝑎𝑟𝑙𝑖𝑒 𝐾𝑖𝑟𝑘 billboard on the way home from Costco the other day...
https://i.ibb.co/XxDR3Nwx/RIP-Charlie-Kirk-Billboard.jpg
(I guess that's a thing now.)(Weird.)
And here's that Tennessee Coates story you were talking about...
https://archive.is/vKDz6
I read it and thought, 𝑊ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒 ℎ𝑒𝑐𝑘? 𝐼 𝑙𝑜𝑣𝑒 𝐶ℎ𝑎𝑟𝑙𝑖𝑒 𝐾𝑖𝑟𝑘 𝑛𝑜𝑤.
So, yeah... I'm going to go read post 3351 now. Cheers! ☮️
Moderator
Saturday - September 20th 2025 7:22PM MST
PS: Thanks for backing up what I would have thought, and I've written about, from your own experience, SafeNow. I would say that's even more the case for things like the anti-nuke or anti-apartheid protests of 1 - 2 1/2 decades later.
The Charlie Kirk crowd would have a similar reason for attending to an event. One reason is not just hooking up but meeting like-minded people, as it's not just about some public policy (Vietnam or civil rites, whatever) but a whole differently-minded person you'd meet, say at Turning Point events vs. some trannie rights crap... VERY different people.
The young Conservatives at the CK events would generally not be as promiscuous as those in that 1960's crowd, maybe slightly disappointing for the guys, even if that's not supposed to be their attitude.
The Charlie Kirk crowd would have a similar reason for attending to an event. One reason is not just hooking up but meeting like-minded people, as it's not just about some public policy (Vietnam or civil rites, whatever) but a whole differently-minded person you'd meet, say at Turning Point events vs. some trannie rights crap... VERY different people.
The young Conservatives at the CK events would generally not be as promiscuous as those in that 1960's crowd, maybe slightly disappointing for the guys, even if that's not supposed to be their attitude.
SafeNow
Saturday - September 20th 2025 3:21PM MST
PS
“For young people, they matter”
Back in my Vietnam era, Joan Baez popularized a meme in which three girls sat on a couch, fetchingly, above the caption reading “Girls say Yes to boys who say No.” (Google it) Maybe it was a different era, but the main reason back then to go to a protest or event was hoping to meet a lay-able person right then and there, or, the next day, to be able to say to someone: Yes, I was there. Do you think young people shlepped to New Hampshire to campaign for McCarthy because of his compelling political rhetoric?
I can’t prove it, but I think at least many, and probably most, of the people who shlepp to a Charlie college event are there to indulge their “biological imperative” and not to mull over putatively superb political argumentation. Sorry, Charlie.
“For young people, they matter”
Back in my Vietnam era, Joan Baez popularized a meme in which three girls sat on a couch, fetchingly, above the caption reading “Girls say Yes to boys who say No.” (Google it) Maybe it was a different era, but the main reason back then to go to a protest or event was hoping to meet a lay-able person right then and there, or, the next day, to be able to say to someone: Yes, I was there. Do you think young people shlepped to New Hampshire to campaign for McCarthy because of his compelling political rhetoric?
I can’t prove it, but I think at least many, and probably most, of the people who shlepp to a Charlie college event are there to indulge their “biological imperative” and not to mull over putatively superb political argumentation. Sorry, Charlie.
Now, that was the best of it for men, at least getting-laid-wise, which is the point of it for young men, biologically, as far as Feminism goes. As this wave of Feminism took shape, things turned against men in a lot of ways, the AA, the huge increase in no-fault divorce (or any divorce), etc. It didn't help women out one bit either, as much as they've been indoctrinated to think otherwise.
Yeah, from what I've heard about the internet dating nowadays, it's got to be a nightmare for all men but a select few - selected based on a few things seen on the internet by picky women (all of them).