I watched a fair bit of him a couple of years ago as my son was asking about him (which at the same time made me realise just how much the online political influencers, particularly from America, have traction over here, he asked because people at his uni were talking about him).
To me, he’s the perfect example of how much we’ve regressed in our political discourse. His debating vids are a moron up against another moron arguing about things that as a society, we had a greater shared understanding and much more nuanced and mature debate about 50 years ago. Where he clearly wasn’t a moron was how well he built his platform and influence, which to me makes it even more depressing.
I also find it very worrying that there’s British commentators, and even a former PM in Johnson, normalising his views. I get it in America, but we’ve long since moved past evangelical Christian views being considered mainstream or even palatable in some areas.
I’ve seen a lot of discourse around the use of labelling people far right and people using that term to describe people like Kirk being the problem, whereas particularly for our country, he’s espousing views that really not that long ago were absolutely considered far right for us. It’s what’s deemed acceptable views and opinions that have seemingly changed and been normalised, not that we’ve all suddenly made people with slightly right of centre views unacceptable. They’re just now seemingly considered to be “leftists” by some as we’ve shifted right so much and so quickly.
That’s the world we’re in now though. God knows what needs to happen before we actually start moving forward again.