Finding A Liberal Charlie Kirk

MY FIRST EXPERIENCE with conservative talk was Paul Harvey, in the mid nineteen sixties. He made conservatism sound pleasant, not by advocating it, but by gently imparting a traditionalist attitude to his subject matter. I had never heard of Rush Limbaugh until he had been famous for awhile, but I started listening to his show, fairly regularly, in the early and mid nineteen nineties. My friends gave me grief for listening to Rush. Rush infuriated me, but I thought I became better at refuting his point of view by learning about it. What I find interesting is that Rush Limbaugh's fame and following does not seem to have outlived him; it almost seems as if he has been forgotten soon after being buried. To me it always seemed as if Limbaugh told one lie after another on his radio show, and his claim that he gave preferential treatment to liberals in answering phone calls on the air seemed like an obvious lie. Rush always presented himself as some sort of guru style leader, the source of guidance for the conservative movement in America. America's conservtives, it now seems, have decided that he was in fact only an entertainer, one among many, not so immortal after all. I must confess I had never heard of Charlie Kirk; I may have heard the name, but not being part of the conservative ecosystem, I paid little or no attention to it. Considering his success and influence on college campuses, you'd think that he could have been as big a redio or television star as Limbaugh or the great but disgraced Bill O'Reilly, for those of you who remember him. His final words before taking a bullet in the neck are enigmatic. Dude asked him how many mass murders have taken place this year, perhaps trying to start an argument, and Charlie Kirk responded with a question: "does that include gang reated mass shootings?", as if including gang related shootings somehow unfairly inflated the total by polluting the purity of the genre. People who get their start by performing in front of college audiences,and who become wildly popular and successsful doing so, usually eventually move on to bigger and financially better things, like electronic mass media. You might suspect that Charlie Kirk would eventually have done this, and indeed might have been as popular and successful on radio or televsion as in student unions, and perhaps have become the heir to Limbaugh and O'Reilly. ON the other side of the isle, it might behoove left wing America to drum up a few people like Charlie Kirk to so effectively move among and enlighten the nation's young adults concerning the boundless virtues of embracing progressive politics and beliefs in general. Conservatism has been winning the public relations battle for a long time, even though surveys consistently indicate the progressive viewpoints on nearly all issues are embraced by amajority of Americans. Where is the liberal Charlie Kirk, or the liberal media Rush Limbaugh type superstar? Charlie Kirk did not reflect that ideology of a majority of young Americans, wasn't even in the mainstream spectrum. Far right conservatism is but a small minority all across America's upper educational fruited plain. Collegiate America is predominantly progressive, because progressive politics is change, and the young embrace change more than older folks, who tend to resist it. Charlie Kirk's greatest legacy could eventually be that he inspired an America founded on tolerance and free speech to defend and preserve those sacred values by eliminating from society any influence which tends to encourage violent responses to them.