In the days after conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s tragic murder in Utah, there has been a tidal wave of commentary arguing that his public platform, and most importantly the college campus debating events for which he was most famous, were a sort of last bastion of civil public discourse. On Sept. 11, the day after Kirk was killed, New York Times columnist Ezra Klein declared that “Charlie Kirk was practicing politics the right way,” and argued that he “was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion.”

Klein, and a host of other would-be eulogists, are attempting to frame Kirk and his signature “Prove Me Wrong” events as a modern-day incarnation of the long, necessary tradition of public dialogue and debate within a democracy. It’s a lovely image: Kirk as a modern-day

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