Thursday afternoon’s hottest toilet read is in the Politico magazine, and it is called “Charlie Kirk needed a friend.”
Written by Kyle Spencer, the article is adapted from a book called Raising Them Right: The Untold Story of America’s Ultraconservative Youth Movement and Its Plot for Power, which we guess is about all these gross, grubby little Charlie Kirks we have running around now and what kind of failed homes produced them. Dunno, not gonna read it.
This adaptation reminds us of other stories we’ve read in the past about how Kirk was insufferable, obnoxious, friendless, and not very accomplished in high school, and how he took that seething white man resentment and turned it into his current rightwing grifting career.
It starts in 2009, when Barack Obama was inaugurated, and Kirk was a student at Wheeling High School, in the burbs of Chicago. Spencer describes this as the origin story for “the frat-boy handsome fundraising savant who has made it his mission to make the GOP cool.” And that’s the point you’ll probably close tab. Because we know “frat-boy handsome,” and Charlie Kirk is not that. How did this get by an editor? The Politico story uses only the nicest pictures of Kirk, but we know the truth (above). And we know the other truth (below).
How are we supposed to take the Politico seriously ever again if it’s calling Charlie Kirk sexy in paragraph number three?
Other highlights of the article about Charlie Kirk are:
- his classmates thought he was “rude” and even people he was friendly with thought he was “arrogant.”
- when he was 14 he was a “a Reagan-obsessed 14-year-old who believed in small government, worried about the budget deficit and had a preternatural interest in trickle-down economics,” which is a really complicated way of spelling “what a fucking dork.”
- he called liberal teachers in high school “post-modern neo-Marxists,” so we assume his teachers thought he was a loser too.
- one time he asked a teacher, if guns make people violent, if it’s also true that “forks make people fat.”
- classmates thought he had a “superiority complex,” oh what a surprise.
- actually it sounds like he wasn’t all that accomplished in high school, which might explain why West Point didn’t want him.
- he was captain of the varsity football and basketball teams, but “neither of those teams was very good,” writes Spencer.
- sounds like he was a super shit friend to one of the only friends he actually had in high school, Maria Krutikova. We won’t type it out here, but if you want to learn about it, go to Politico and Ctrl-F that name.
The rest of the article is about what happened when Kirk graduated high school and instead of going to college started hanging out with his true real best friends, the old conservative weirdos in their 70s who started bankrolling his earliest grifting. They thought he was a dork at first, too. Not our words:
At first, even for them, Kirk didn’t read as all that suave. In the beginning — according to Joe Walsh, then an Illinois Republican congressman who eventually had a falling out with Kirk and became a vocal Never Trumper — a lot of aging GOP donors thought Kirk seemed like a dork.
Not wrong.
In summary and in conclusion, we don’t feel like reading the rest of the article and again, we are not reading the book of somebody who describes Charlie Kirk as “frat-boy handsome.”
THE END, OPEN THREAD.
[Politico]
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