There is, after all, a pervasive worry, among the political class, that college students, ensconced in their own bubbles, could use a bit of shock therapy from a man unconcerned with preferred pronouns, trigger warnings, and the humanity of Palestinians. But it also shows how the political class’s obsession with universities blinds it to everything else. And the everything-else of Kirk’s politics amounted to little more than a loathing of those whose mere existence provoked his ire.

Faced with the prospect of a Kamala Harris presidency, Kirk told his audience that the threat had to be averted because Harris wanted to “kidnap your child via the trans agenda.” Garden-variety transphobia is sadly unremarkable. But Kirk was a master of folding seemingly discordant bigotries into each other, as when he defined “the American way of life” as marriage, home ownership, and child-rearing free of “the lesbian, gay, transgender garbage in their school,” adding that he did not want kids to “have to hear the Muslim call to prayer five times a day.” The American way of life was “Christendom,” Kirk claimed, and Islam—“the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America”—was antithetical to that.

Kirk habitually railed against “Black crime,” claiming that “prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people.” He repeated the rape accusations against Yusef Salaam, a member of the exonerated Central Park Five who is now a New York City councilman, calling him a “disgusting pig” who had gotten away with “gang rape.” Whatever distaste Kirk held for Blacks was multiplied when he turned to those from Haiti. Haiti was, by Kirk’s lights, a country “infested with demonic voodoo,” whose migrants were “raping your women and hunting you down at night.” These Haitians, as well as undocumented immigrants from other countries, were “having a field day,” per Kirk, and “coming for your daughter next.”

There was an “anti-white agenda,” Kirk howled. One that sought to “make the country more like the Third World.” The southern border was “the dumping ground of the planet,” he claimed, and a magnet for “the rapists, the thugs, the murderers, fighting-age males.” “They’re coming from across the world, from China, from Russia, from Middle Eastern countries,” he said, “and they’re coming in and they’re coming in and they’re coming in and they’re coming in…”

Kirk’s bigotry was not personal, but extended to the institution he founded, Turning Point USA. Crystal Clanton, the group’s former national field director, once texted a fellow Turning Point employee, “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE. Like fuck them all … I hate blacks. End of story.” One of the group’s advisers, Rip McIntosh, once published a newsletter featuring an essay from a pseudonymous writer that said Blacks had “become socially incompatible with other races” and that Black culture was an “un-fixable and crime-ridden mess.” In 2022, after three Black football players were killed at another college, Meg Miller, president of Turning Point’s chapter at the University of Missouri, joked (“joked”) in a social media message, “If they would have killed 4 more n-ggers we would have had the whole week off.”

The tragedy is personal—Kirk was robbed of his life, and his children and family will forever live with the knowledge that a visual record of that robbery is just an internet search away. And the tragedy is national. Political violence ends conversation and invites war; its rejection is paramount to a functioning democracy and a free society. “Political violence is a virus,” Klein noted. This assertion is true. It is also at odds with Kirk’s own words. It’s not that Kirk merely, as Klein put it, “defended the Second Amendment”—it’s that Kirk endorsed hurting people to advance his preferred policy outcomes.

What are we to make of a man who called for the execution of the American president, and then was executed himself? What are we to make of an NFL that, on one hand, encourages us to “End Racism,” and, on the other, urges us to commemorate an unreconstructed white supremacist? And what of the writers, the thinkers, and the pundits who cannot separate the great crime of Kirk’s death from the malignancy of his public life? Can they truly be so ignorant to the words of a man they have so rushed to memorialize? I don’t know. But the most telling detail in Klein’s column was that, for all his praise, there was not a single word in the piece from Kirk himself.

More than a century and a half ago, this country ignored the explicit words of men who sought to raise an empire of slavery. It subsequently transformed those men into gallant knights who sought only to preserve their beloved Camelot. There was a fatigue, in certain quarters, with Reconstruction—which is to say, multiracial democracy—and a desire for reunion, to make America great again. Thus, in the late 19th century and much of the 20th, this country’s most storied intellectuals transfigured hate-mongers into heroes and ignored their words—just as, right now, some are ignoring Kirk’s.

The rewriting and the ignoring were done not just by Confederates, but also by putative allies for whom the reduction of Black people to serfdom was the unfortunate price of white unity. The import of this history has never been clearer than in this moment when the hard question must be asked: If you would look away from the words of Charlie Kirk, from what else would you look away?

Former and current staffers paint a picture of an erratic senator who has become almost impossible to work for and whose mental-health situation is more serious and complicated than previously reported. No one is saying every controversial position (for example, his respectful relationship with Trump) stems from his mental health — but it’s become harder for them to tell which ones do. When I spoke with Fetterman in April and shared those concerns, he denied anything was amiss. He told me that he felt like the “best version” of himself and later texted that the staff turnover at his office was typical of Washington. “Why is this a story?” he asked.

Those first days in the hospital were rough. Fetterman was experiencing delusions. He thought that if he took a bed at the hospital, he would be arrested. He told doctors that he believed members of his family were wearing wires to secretly record him. In one chaotic moment, Fetterman grew convinced that a political rally was being held in the hospital’s lobby and that he needed to break out of his room to attend. David Williamson, Fetterman’s doctor, told me that the main causes of the delusions were the lingering effects of the stroke, dehydration, and depression and that the original medication for the depression could also have been a factor. According to paperwork from Walter Reed, doctors then stopped all antidepressants and put him on other drugs. (Williamson declined to comment on the specifics of the medication plan.)

After six weeks in the hospital, the doctors determined his mental-health issues were in remission. Williamson said, “He expressed a firm commitment to treatment over the long term.” Doctors provided Fetterman with a multi-faceted treatment approach. He needed to stay on his medication and to get his blood checked regularly. It was also important that he stay hydrated, so staff made sure his office fridge remained stocked with Gatorade. He needed to eat healthy and get regular exercise (this was both for his mental health and for the underlying heart problems that had led to his stroke). It was also strongly suggested that he stay off social media, which exacerbated his mental-health challenges. “I’ve never noticed anyone to believe that their mental health has been supported by spending any kind of time on social media,” he said in 2023.

it wasn’t until October 7 that it became clear Fetterman was the most outspoken Israel hawk in his party, offering constant and unconditional support for the military action in Gaza. Early on in the conflict, 16 of his former campaign staffers wrote a letter — anonymously — saying they found his full-throated support for Israel to be a “gutting betrayal.” Jentleson had taken to defending Fetterman on X from such criticisms, posting, “The thing about being a staffer is that no one elected you to represent them.”

In early November, just weeks after the attack, Gisele arrived at her husband’s Senate office and, according to a staffer present, they got into a heated argument. “They are bombing refugee camps. How can you support this?” the staffer recalled her saying with tears in her eyes. “That’s all propaganda,” Fetterman replied. Later, a still visibly upset Gisele pulled the staffer aside. She asked him if members of Fetterman’s team were pushing him to take these stances for political reasons. The staffer told her that the opposite was true: Many of them were as upset as she was. “If you’re pushing back on this, there’s no hope,” the staffer recalled her saying. “This is horrible news.”

Gisele might have disliked what her husband was up to, but his father loved it. Karl Fetterman, an insurance executive, was way more conservative than his son. He used to have a magnet on his refrigerator that warned that his dog bites Democrats, and he watched Fox News constantly. When Fox would air segments about Fetterman’s strong stances on Israel or invite him on as a guest, the senator’s father would, according to former staff, almost always call to say how proud he was.

Gisele then texted that she had told her husband that his staff and doctor were worried about him but that he told her “that’s not true and I guess I am not talking to you today” before hanging up. The doctor had also “said that he was fighting to get access of the Twitter account,” she went on. “Please promise me that he’ll never have access.” The staffer said that Fetterman was asking for the passwords but that he would not give them up. “I told him I don’t want to talk to him until his blood is tested,” Gisele wrote.

There was also the possibility that Fetterman’s illness had drawn out or intensified his existing predilections. In some ways, Fetterman was being the guy voters sent to Congress. He keeps to himself? He cancels fundraising events last minute? He thinks a lot of his colleagues are morons? Make him president already! He was never a particularly easy person to work with — he’d had that reputation throughout his entire political career. So sometimes the staff would debate whether a fundamental change had occurred or they were just imagining things, particularly since there were stretches of time when he was lucid and together. “It got hard to know which way was up,” Jentleson told me. “Was he acting crazy, or were we overreacting? I asked myself that a lot.”

Years after the stroke, Fetterman continues to struggle with auditory processing. To chat with me, he had put an iPhone on the table that transcribed my questions to him in real time. Sometimes Fetterman wouldn’t finish reading a question before answering, and other times his sentences could come out a bit garbled. After a podcast taping earlier this year with The Bulwark, the interviewer Tim Miller came away feeling like Fetterman might not be all there. “He’s struggling,” Miller said in a separate podcast taping. “He’s, like, really struggling. And I just think coming off of the Biden thing, we should not be hiding the ball on this sort of stuff.”

But in my conversation with Fetterman, I didn’t find any indication that the stroke had left him cognitively impaired. Our interview lasted just over an hour, during the first half of which he seemed excited to discuss just about anything I threw at him. He had problems with the way Democrats had estranged themselves from the public, he said, but still had no intention of leaving the party to become a Republican or even an independent: “Same chance I’m going to end up with a beautiful head of hair.”

He said that no one in his staff would know about his personal health situation and that anyone who told me otherwise was simply misinformed. “There’s not really anything to respond when that’s just not accurate,” he said. “What they say,” I pressed on, “is that they’ve witnessed ups and downs that could be associated with kind of a relapse. And they also worry that the medication that you’re on is not just for depression, but more serious drugs that if you’re not on them would be a problem. Is there truth to that?” “I don’t have any comment on that,” he said. “I’m going to go off record. Go off record. Go off record.” I cannot report what Fetterman said over the course of the next four minutes, but I can say that after he was done talking, I found myself in the hallway outside his office making awkward small talk with one of his press aides. Five minutes later, the door opened and I was ushered back in. The office felt different now. Quiet and tense. Fetterman was still in the same chair but slumped into himself, like a deflated parade float. His shoes were now on, and he avoided looking at me. Finally, I broke the silence. “Anything to say about that?” I asked, hoping to pick up our conversation where we had left off.

Trump, early on, dropped any last vestiges of what a modern political campaign should look like, continuing to stump in rallies across swing states, even after multiple assassination attempts forced the former president to encase himself in a cube of agony. He whittled down his campaign into a simple message: “I will make you wealthy and hurt everyone you hate.”

unlike the Harris campaign, he only relied on the internet for propaganda, following his son Barron’s advice, who reportedly was the one pushing him to spend his time doing manosphere podcast interviews. Meanwhile, his vice presidential pick, JD Vance, gave him an important line to Silicon Valley’s most radicalized CEOs and the country’s two most-brainrotted men, Elon Musk (metaphorical brainrot) and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (literal brainrot).

In terms of what we can expect from Trump’s second term, conservatives have already laid out their blueprint online. They’ve spent the last four years reshaping the architecture of the social web to match their designs for American society at large. It has been easy to laugh off Musk’s purchase of Twitter and its subsequent drop into irrelevance. But irrelevance was never a bug, but a feature. Big Tech monopolists, many of whom are now congratulating Trump on his win today, have successfully created an internet of paranoid cul-de-sacs, where no one trusts each other and nothing can break through the noise.

He’s identified real problems with our system and possesses the political will to pursue real change. Paired with a Republican majority in both chambers of Congress, he could genuinely achieve what his predecessors could not and pass major immigration reform during his term. But the sweep of these actions — mobilizing the military, pausing asylum, halting the parole process, trying to end birthright citizenship — will incur far more costs than benefits. The innocent people who are trying to flee danger or persecution in their countries and immigrate to the United States legally out of a sincere motivation to better their lives, who often help our country grow and stimulate our economy, will be caught in the machinery of these changes. All told, these executive actions are a step in the wrong direction.

Our system tends to exacerbate criminal behavior more than rehabilitate it, and the United States uses imprisonment as a punishment far more often than is productive or necessary. When it comes to the January 6 defendants, I fully support consequences for those who broke the law, but I also believe the Justice Department acted improperly in how it handled many cases.  The biggest example of this prosecutorial overreach came in a recent Supreme Court ruling that found the DOJ wrongly charged hundreds of rioters under an obstruction of justice statute that elevated the severity of their cases. This case did not fall along ideological lines; Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson joined the majority in the 6-3 decision, while Amy Coney Barrett dissented. At the time the ruling came down, roughly 50 defendants had been convicted and sentenced on that obstruction charge alone, and 27 of them were incarcerated.

The president pardoned the vast majority of the convicted rioters of all wrongdoing in a sweeping manner, with an apparent lack of knowledge of or care for the crimes he was excusing and without expressing any remorse for the pivotal role he played on that day.

Biden is the first President in decades to treat government as the designer and ongoing referee of markets, rather than as the corrector of markets’ dislocations and excesses after the fact. He doesn’t speak of free trade and globalization as economic ideals. His approach to combatting climate change involves no carbon taxes or credits—another major departure, not just from his predecessors but also from the policies of many other countries. His Administration has been far more aggressive than previous ones in taking antitrust actions against big companies.

Another way of thinking about Biden’s approach is through terminology devised by the political scientist Jacob Hacker: it rejects redistribution as a guiding liberal principle, in favor of “predistribution,” an effort to transform the economy in a way that makes redistribution less necessary.

"Even a cursory dip into the statistics of social and economic well-being reveals that Florida falls short in almost any measure that matters to the lives of its citizens. More than four years into the DeSantis governorship, Florida continues to languish toward the bottom of state rankings assessing the quality of health care, school funding, long-term elder care, and other areas key to a successful society," Kleinknecht said. Teacher salaries are among the lowest, unemployment benefits are stingier than any other state’s, and wage theft flourishes.

Money became increasingly fake-seeming as it diverged more and more from a hard day’s work and most conventional wisdom.

The growing number of people taking chances that they barely believed in (starting an Onlyfans, going all in on a memecoin, becoming a performative racist for clicks) reflected a rational response to seeing absurd and/or conventionally shitty ideas have outsized success (Bored Apes, Trump, the Babyccino).

bucking conventional wisdom in any direction became the order of the day. Contrarianism became incredibly popular. Taking the diametrically opposed position to consensus as a shortcut to standing out in a crowded and volatile field was a key Clown Town strategy.

As a subset of contrarianism, Hot Sauce Behavior became especially popular. Hot Sauce involves taking something basic or mid and applying a socially forbidden or mysterious spice to it (in place of, or to function as, the X factor or the je ne sais quoi). This element had to be shocking, bad, atavistic, or otherwise “not normal”—it could be Nazism, grooming, the Occult, Catholicism, outright aggression, the threat of violence, or the attitudes of obscure-to-you political groups—but in smallish amounts. It made peoples’ hearts race and adrenaline pump while they consumed something otherwise bland. (This was the Tension Economy as the new Attention Economy.)

If the 2020 degen was a gambler willing to go all in on a whim… …the 2023 degen is a sophisticated risk manager We have found ourselves in a new cultural era in which multiple overlapping crises and rising interest rates have led to an emergent reckoning. It is now widely understood that it was very stupid to play crazy games with tons of excess money instead of actually improving material reality. But certain questions remain: What the fuck is anything worth today? What’s the best way to manage risk while it all comes falling down?

In chess, today’s average player is more skilled than the one from yesteryear because online exposure of advanced theory has led to regular players making the moves of masters. As Virgil once said, “One kid does a new skateboard trick, then hundreds more can do it the next day around the world.”

Everyone should be able to use their increased intelligence and awareness to better navigate the world. In reality, the irony is painful: When everyone gets smarter, things get harder. If everyone is reassessing the most-effective-tactics-available all the time, it gets harder and harder to win, even though you’re smarter and “should be in a better position.” The Yale admissions office realizes thousands of applicants have watched the same obscure how-to-get-into-Yale TikTok, and decides to change the meta: Leadership is no longer a valuable quality.

Max Pain means, even when you’re right, you’re wrong; it describes a climate in which everyone’s opinion is right at some point, but never at the right time.

This article proposes to explain why education is so difficult and contentious by arguing that educational thinking draws on only three fundamental ideas&emdash;that of socializing the young, shaping the mind by a disciplined academic curriculum, and facilitating the development of students' potential. All educational positions are made up of various mixes of these ideas. The problems we face in education are due to the fact that each of these ideas is significantly flawed and also that each is incompatible in basic ways with the other two. Until we recognize these basic incompatibilities we will be unable adequately to respond to the problems we face.