Contradictions . . .
Monday, September 15, 2025
It's the Moon's day . . . Forecasts indicate a slight rain chance today for TulseyTown. Moderate Southerlies continue to bring the 90's for two more days. Highs in the 70's starting Wednesday. Stay tuned.
Carpet crawlers heed their callers. You've got to get in to get out. – Genesis lyric
Today's blog is dedicated to the following essay, printed here with permission from the author.
Charlie Kirk, 21st Century Schizoid Man
By Ray Pearcey
There’s a moment in Elia Kazan’s brilliant, largely forgotten, A Face in the Crowd when Andy Griffith’s Lonesome Rhodes commands a television audience with a grin that feels both intoxicating and menacing.[^1] He is charming, improvisational, a showman with a common man’s drawl — and beneath it, a predator, a manipulator, a man who sees people as marks. Rhodes is a creation of the 1950s, but his type has not vanished. He foreshadows a style of public life where charisma and menace are indistinguishable, where performance is both democratic spectacle and authoritarian rehearsal.
Charlie Kirk was not Rhodes, exactly. But like Griffith’s character, he fused performance, business acumen, and national renown into a persona that drew crowds and donors alike.[^2] He was flawed, dual-sided, uncontainable — a figure who embodied the contradictions of a 21st century schizoid man.[^3]
His death is tragic, and it must be said without hesitation. Political violence is not justice, it is collapse. But his life resists simplification.
Kirk was brave in the narrow sense: he showed up. He entered hostile spaces, fielded hostile questions. I watched him lose badly to a pro-life vegan weightlifter.[^4] He fumbled, but he stayed. He engaged. There was something democratic, almost admirable, in that posture — the willingness to be challenged, to answer back, to keep talking.
And yet, he carried with him the chill of something darker. His Professor Watchlist was bureaucratic in name but McCarthyite in spirit: a weapon disguised as accountability.[^5] It encouraged students to monitor their professors, to name names, to turn education into suspicion. The result was fear, silence, distortion — the opposite of free discourse.
Then there were his views on civil rights. Not garden-variety conservatism but neo-Confederate revisionism.[^6] Martin Luther King Jr. dismissed as “awful.” Structural racism waved away as myth. His rhetoric on Islam and women carried the same contemptuous strain, packaged in jokes and soundbites but corrosive in implication.[^7]
How do we hold him?
Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma offers a method.[^8] She writes of Hitchcock — a filmmaker whose work she loves and whose cruelty to women she cannot ignore.[^9] Dederer doesn’t resolve the contradiction; she inhabits it. Admiration and horror together. Not denial, not absolution. Just the paradox itself.
So too with Kirk. His “art” was the open forum, the democratic stage. His substance was distortion and contempt. To admire the form is not to absolve the content. To condemn the content is not to erase the form. To be honest about him is to hold both, as with Lonesome Rhodes: the charisma and the menace, inseparable.
Charlie Kirk was a schizoid figure, split down the middle: democratic in posture, authoritarian in substance. His death is a wound. His life is a warning. And the contradiction — unbearable, unresolved — is the truth.
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Notes & Annotations
[^1]: A Face in the Crowd (1957), directed by Elia Kazan, introduced Andy Griffith as “Lonesome” Rhodes, a drifter turned media star whose populist charisma hides deep corruption. The film is often read as a prescient critique of the entanglement between media celebrity, politics, and authoritarian tendencies.
[^2]: Charlie Kirk founded Turning Point USA in 2012. By cultivating donors such as the Koch network and high-profile conservative media figures, he transformed a small student group into a major political organization. His blend of entertainment, confrontation, and organizing echoed earlier media-savvy populists.
[^3]: The phrase” 21st Century Schizoid Man” references the 1969 King Crimson song of the same name. The song, with its fractured rhythms and apocalyptic lyrics, has become shorthand for the paradoxes and fractures of modern public figures who embody both allure and menace.
[^4]: Kirk’s reputation grew in part from his “Campus Clash” events, where he debated students on issues ranging from abortion to climate change. His willingness to take hostile questions differentiated him from many contemporaries, though his arguments were often shallow or unprepared.
[^5]: The Professor Watchlist was launched by Turning Point USA in 2016. It claimed to identify professors who “discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda.” Critics compared it to McCarthy-era blacklists, arguing it chilled academic freedom and encouraged surveillance of educators.
[^6]: Kirk frequently minimized or dismissed the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement. He described Martin Luther King Jr. as “awful” and argued that systemic racism no longer existed, echoing neo-Confederate revisionist narratives that downplay racial inequality and reinterpret the Civil Rights era as overreach.
[^7]: Kirk’s commentary often extended to Islam, which he portrayed as a monolithic and threatening force, and to women, whom he discussed in ways critics saw as patronizing or contemptuous. His rhetoric exemplified a politics of polarization rather than dialogue.
[^8]: Claire Dederer, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, Knopf, 2023. The book explores how audiences grapple with beloved art produced by morally compromised creators — from Roman Polanski to Woody Allen to Hemingway.
[^9]: Alfred Hitchcock is central to Dederer’s meditation. While Hitchcock remains one of cinema’s great auteurs, his documented harassment and control of female actors (notably Tippi Hedren during the filming of The Birds and Marnie) complicates his legacy. Dederer models a way of holding both admiration for his films and horror at his behavior.
– Ray, sent from my iPad, 9.14.25