Ezra Klein Is a Mark

By Jacob Weindling | September 11, 2025 | 1:37pm

Screenshot via The Ezra Klein Show on YouTube

Media New York Times

I detailed earlier this week how my fellow lefties have an opening we are not currently taking advantage of in my piece on the very bad polling for capitalism, and now there is a tragic news peg provided by the assassination of Charlie Kirk that enables me to punch right and tell liberals how some of your faves just don’t get it.

Before getting into anything, it needs to be categorically stated that this was a horrific event, and Charlie Kirk should be alive today. It is difficult for many on the left to feel much empathy for a man who said so many hateful things, but it is not difficult whatsoever to have empathy for his two small children waking up today without their dad. This is yet another awful reminder of the gun violence epidemic in America and how it touches many more people than just those wounded by its bullets. While I always highlight John Hinckley Jr. shooting Ronald Reagan to impress Jodie Foster as a reason to wait until we know the shooter’s motivations, if this is what we fear, political violence only begets more political violence, and there are horrific cautionary tales from around the world that America would do well to heed right now. That said, the man who famously said he “can’t stand the word empathy” and that “it does a lot of damage” may not look at the tongue-bath many mainstream liberals are giving him today as the eulogy he envisioned for himself. There is a 1:1 correlation between thirsty Democratic presidential hopefuls and Democratic governors lowering their flags on 9/11 for Charlie Kirk. We are living in a dril tweet.

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As much of post-2024 election reporting has revealed, the New York Times‘ Ezra Klein has become the chief tribal elder of the Democratic Party’s intelligentsia. When the party can’t come up with something to believe in, they call up one half of the abundance boys and ask for advice. There are many ways to say that Kirk being assassinated at a public event is a horrific thing that has no place in any civilized society, but “Charlie Kirk was practicing politics the right way” in the New York Times is not one of them.

“You can dislike much of what Kirk believed and the following statement is still true,” wrote Kelin. “Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way.” I dislike pretty much all of what Kirk believed and now I firmly believe that Charlie Kirk was smarter and savvier than Ezra Klein is. This is what a mark would say. Kirk knew what he was doing, and he sold his so-called Socratic method very well. There’s a reason Trump liked him more than all the other special boys with microphones in front of their mouths, and it’s because Kirk was a really good sales guy.

“He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion.” Sales, Ezra, that’s the word for persuasion you’re looking for. Not intellectual and rigorous debate like you imagine the Greeks and Romans and all the other old white societies you like to think you’re cosplaying did. Still doing this West Wing-brained shit in the wake of the complete and utter clusterfuck of the 2024 election is tantamount to still believing that professional wrestling is real. No wonder the GOP runs circles around the Democrats. If Ezra Klein was right that trying to use analytical logic was how you broadly convinced people to buy something in America, I would not be here right now, I would have cleaned up scamming people for the merchant services industry and I would still be doing sales.

But I failed at sales precisely because analytical reasoning is the only way my brain works, and people did not buy as much of what I was selling as the guys practicing the art of persuasion in the cubicles next to me, which means you’re all stuck with me now. I know what sales talent looks like because I spent my entire 20s around it. It looks like Donald Trump. It looks like Charlie Kirk. It’s a lot of these folks on the right. They’re good at sales. Klein is right, Kirk was persuasive, but not because he was some unique debater, but because he understood common sales tactics I was taught and failed to implement–and he also had a very good video editing team around him. Anyone who thinks that any clearly edited video on the internet is exactly what it looked like when it was filmed is a mark.

And Ezra Klein is a mark. He’s proving how Charlie Kirk helped take over much of America by masking a sales pitch under the guise of earnest debate and framing it through videos he produced. Now, I do not reserve the derisive term of mark for the less informed political folks throughout the mainstream searching out knowledge, like many earnest readers of Ezra Klein which includes much of the Democratic Senate apparently. People like Ezra Klein exist to help inform people who have better things to do than folks like me who bash their heads against the political wall all day. If Klein thinks that edited videos are depictions of real life, he must be very confused every time he sees Idris Elba walking around. Self-appointed Very Serious People like him are a big reason why our politics is so screwed up.

This was a horrible thing that happened. It’s horrible that we don’t know anything about the shooter and many on the right are calling for Reichstag Fires and to wage war against the left. It’s horrible to see some on the epic posting left celebrate a clear accelerant into hell. Even if Kirk’s entire college tour was not one of genuine debate, it presented itself as such, making the symbolism of a shooter targeting him there that much more jarring. It was a symbolic attack on free speech. Sales is free speech the same way that debate is free speech. Charlie Kirk had every right to produce edited videos of him arguing with college students, and a world where you are shot for doing that is a world that none of us want to live in.

I agree with the phrase that you should honor the dead, but many take it to mean we should lionize them, while true honor is properly depicting someone for who they were, not a fictional fairy tale version of them. We are not demigods, we are simply humans, flawed as anyone else. Erasing those flaws in order to only highlight the good does a disservice to the legacy we leave for the rest of humanity. Charlie Kirk was one of the most effective spokespeople for the fascist movement currently destroying everything we thought we knew about America. He was a very good salesman who convinced people like Ezra Klein his edited videos depicted an earnest debate as it unfolded. In a way, Klein wrote the most generous eulogy today that no right-wing commentator could author, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that one of Charlie Kirk’s ultimate legacies was outfoxing the chief thinkers in the Democratic Party.