I forgot to mention that part. In fact, it seemed as if one of the main reasons for holding these college “events” was to gather material for his YouTube channel. Kirk claimed the videos “weren’t edited”, but they clearly were, since they quickly jumped from one questioner to another. And, strangely, all of the questioners appeared to be dumbasses that he easily dismissed.
The debate mentioned by the OP, with 12 college students in one room, appeared to be a kind of cross between his reasonable one-on-one persona and the raging maniac in front of large crowds.
Just wanted to say I just finished reading Thornley’s book, and it was surprisingly readable. Definitely felt like a first book, but not bad. Mostly a string of chapters on various Marines and essentially what they did on leave. Interesting for that window in time, if nothing else.
Preparing gotchas like “What is a woman?” that often had nothing to do with the topic but were aimed at getting the person onto the defensive
Having his assistants interview potential interlocutors first, to prepare things that charlie could pretend to “guess” about his opponent, and use for gotchas like in (1)
Gave the world the right wing “Intellectual Dark web” idiot grifter brigade? Bari Weiss is the definition of failing up. Be a right wing idiot and you’ll just fail into money and more money.
To most Israelis who’d heard of him, Kirk was just “That guy on YouTube who stood up for Israel”. Very few people here knew of any of his other beliefs, or ever saw him speak of anything else. In the Israeli mind, that makes him a Friend, and you stick by your friends, even if it turns out that they’re jerks.
Netanyahu, of course, knows exactly who Kirk actually was. He’s just doing this to suck up to Trump and American Conservatives.
Among Israelis, is there any serious worry about the long term consequences of the alliance with the far right in America, and the dismantling of the alliance with the Democratic party?
So the Israeli far right are OK with the Trump regime making lists of Jewish professors, and probably other Jewish people in the United States? Because historically, such lists were used to protect Jewish people from the non-Jewish citizenry?
Dude, we have our own problems. Do you really think everyone in Israel is keeping track of everything going on in your country? I know about American politics because I’m a Doper. Most Israelis don’t know much more about what’s going on the United States than you know about the inner workings of the Czech Republic.
Yeah, I was actually surprised last time I was there that people knew even less about American politics than I expected. A lot of my family asked me about American politics, but none of them knew about people like Tucker Carlson, AOC or anyone from “the Squad” in general, MTG, Gavin Newsom, Nick Fuentes, and so on. I figured people wouldn’t be very aware of the details of American politics, but I thought they’d at least know more than Americans know about Israel, at least when it comes to people related to Israel, Jewish people, or Anti-Semitism. I know I’ve seen most of these figures brought up in Israeli news before, but I guess if you aren’t already familiar with them the references to these people may not stick. Which is fair, I certainly don’t know much about French or German politics, for example.
At least I got to talk people through the false slate of electors plot and it’s culmination on Jan 6 which I always like informing people about.
On my last visit to Israel I heard Charlie Kirk brought up once, and like Alessan says, he was just described as “that American who was pro Israel and got assassinated on a college campus”.
Israeli understanding of American politics is almost as shallow and two dimensional as American understanding of Israeli politics. There are two or three famous politicians and people know one or two things about each of them from which they create a caricature that’s more like people of that political wing in their own country than an accurate reflection of the politician in question.
A few month before he died, we were getting ready to play D&D when a party member excitedly showed the table a clip of Kirk defending Israel. I stated slagging on him, quoting stuff I had read here on the SDMB. Everybody looked at me like I was crazy. I sighed and dropped it.
I don’t mean to criticize anyone, but there’s something insidious about the mistaken belief that Israelis are deeply invested in U.S. politics. It feeds the narrative that Israel is nothing more than a colony of America or “the West”, instead of a fairly insular country with its own interests and obsessions. We got our own thing going here, thank you very much.