Robert Whitcomb: The very profitable outrage eco-system

PROVIDENCE

Charlie Kirk, like his Great Gilded Leader Trump, found that demagoguery can be very lucrative, especially as the educational level continues to slide in the U.S. The very able organizer was making a nice pile as  co-founder and CEO of the far-right, marketed-to-young-people Turning Point USA. That was before Tyler Robinson, 22, like Mr.  Kirk a son of  affluent Republican parents, allegedly shot the 31-year-old to death. Making such gruesome attacks easier is that America is awash in guns, to no small degree because of Republican antipathy to any gun control. (Robinson’s gun was apparently his grandfather’s.) In the past few decades, the National Rifle Association, the gun industry and the Republican Party have essentially merged.

Of course, America has always been heavily armed, but it has reached astronomical levels, with 400 million guns now; of course plenty of people don’t own any.

 (I myself inherited from my father an 80-year-old 12-gauge shotgun and a .22 rifle; a late 19th Century shotgun  (too dangerous to use!) from my maternal grandfather’s Upstate New York farm,   and a revolver that my paternal grandfather carried on the train between Brockton and Boston as he was ferrying cash and  checks for a shoe company.  All since have been dispersed elsewhere. But we still have  the Civil War rifle from Kentucky that my wife inherited. Kentucky was a Border State, and so we don’t know whether it was used by a Confederate  or Union soldier, or just for hunting wild animals, or neighbors the owner didn’t like. The Bluegrass State, like many former Slave States, has always been a pretty violent place.)

In any event, it’s been noted that both Mr. Kirk and Robinson came from the same toxic  digital/podcast/cable-TV/YouTube ecosystem, in which violent threats abound.

Mr. Kirk’s shows, rife with bigotry, brought him an estimated net worth of $12 million at his death. His salary for running his right-wing machine was $407,000 back in  2021, the last year for which his pay was reported. But then, he was a charismatic leader to his pumped-up followers, most of them young and  overwhelmingly white, and few of whom were interested in researching, let alone challenging, his assertions.  We seem to be heading into a post-literate society. Mr. Kirk was aided by many Americans’ staggering willful ignorance about the history of their own country.

Never let the facts get in the way of a story if that brings in more revenue! Just ask the remarkably cynical  and amoral Rupert Murdoch, of Fox News, and Mark Zuckerberg, of Facebook, who have made BILLIONS from the lies-and-outrage industry.

The  charismatic provocateur  Kirk had famously said he didn’t like the word “empathy,’’ preferring the word “sympathy,’’ though in his vitriolic  remarks he often showed little of either, though obviously he could be warm and charming when needed.

Here are the standard definitions of two kinds of empathy:

Cognitive empathy: The mental ability to understand another person's perspective, thoughts, and feelings without necessarily feeling them yourself. 

Emotional empathy: When you “feel” another person's emotions. What they are experiencing emotionally has an impact on your emotional state.

Here’s one of  self-proclaimed Christian Mr. Kirk’s  not untypical remarks:

“Joe Biden is a bumbling, dementia-filled Alzheimer's, corrupt tyrant who should honestly be put in prison and/or given the death penalty for his crimes against America.”

Here’s a bunch of other interesting remarks by Mr. Kirk.

Of course, it will get worse.

Last Wednesday Britain’s Channel 4 ran a  long fact-checking show on Trump’s lies so far in his current regime. But they’d need a helluva lot more time to play them all.

Robert Whitcomb is editor of New England Diary.