The Baptist and Bootlegger dynamic of the culture wars led to the death of Charlie Kirk.

Part One.

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Open your ears; for which of you will stop
The vent of hearing when loud Rumour speaks?
–Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part II.

Nearly a decade ago, Charlie Kirk began his extraordinary career as Donald Trump Jr.'s bag man. Around the same time, Claire Lehmann was launching an online magazine based on a forum I created on 2008 called Darwinian Gender Studies (DGS): Critical Thinking Not Critical Theory. Lehmann had been a trusted admin in the forum for years, but just as she was launching Quillette, she attempted to destroy it. Out of the blue, she accused a fellow admin of “misogyny” after he criticised feminism. You can judge for yourself here if that accusation was justified. In my opinion, it was not. One look at the flimsy evidence and weak, emotional arguments she created against this man is proof of that. She'd been secretly scheming with others, collecting allies (as evidenced in the link). Following the female intrasexual playbook, she couldn't go after me directly without risking her own reputation at the time, so she chose an easy target–a man–though her main objective was me and the forum I had created. It's my belief she wanted to destroy the forum so she could pretend Quillette was an original idea with no inspiration or precursor. To date, every time she is asked about the inspiration for Quillette, she lies by omission. All while insisting she and her magazine stand on “truth” and “principles”.

Many of you might find this information of little worth. That’s fine by me. I’m not here to turn weasels into wolves. But some discerning minds among you might find it very valuable indeed, because it tells a story that goes way beyond this personal anecdote, and takes us right up to the tragedy that unfolded at Utah Valley University's Fountain Courtyard this last week.

On the coattails of Quillette, a cottage industry of supposed "centrist" and "heterodox" media emerged, all keen on diagnosing a culture war but providing little in the way of a cure. This was odd, as many of Quillette’s first writers had been members of DGS, and by that time we had spent seven years predicting the then-nascent culture war, studying its etymology and spread. We had also identified the problem–feminism. Feminism is THE vector of the culture war; it is the vein through which all its cohorts—wokeism, intersectionality, CRT, and trans ideology—are mainlined. This was around the time of GamerGate 1.0 and, in 2014, I had written one of the most popular defences of GG at the time, which was supported and re-tweeted by Christina Hoff Sommers.

Gender, pronouns and trans lunacy were still to come. Feminists first tried to weaponise Title IX against men with a “rape culture on campus” narrative. When that didn’t work, they pivoted to using Title IX against women by leveraging transgender ideology. This was all predictable at the time, but as Lehmann explicitly told me, after I offered to write something for the outlet, “I'm just not interested in gender."

“You cannot imagine what sorrow and anger seize one's whole soul when a great idea is picked up by some fools and dragged into the street, and one suddenly meets it in the flea market, unrecognisable, dirty, askew, absurdly presented, without proportion, without harmony, a toy for stupid children.”

–Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons

The subsequent suppression of all we had learned and studied in DGS about the fraud of feminism, its Trojan horse strategies, its protean shape-shifting, its malevolence towards men and women alike, the meaningless trope of “equality”--meant that the subsequent succession of middle-class careerists in "new media" could nurture the culture war for as long as it was profitable. Many even got into bed with feminists. Soon, the full horror of woke and trans ideology was allowed to reach its full flowering, and the harms done in its name (chemical castrations, unnecessary surgeries, mass delusion) were allowed to wreak havoc across a generation of young people, the culture war cannon fodder.

Root causes were not examined. Only symptoms. This was perfect for the new woke and anti-woke industry alike. Those on the left profited from NGO corruption, those on the centre and right profited from a reactionary response. Both were profiting, and neither had a serious interest in stopping the gravy train.

This is the dynamic of the Baptist and the Bootlegger.

"Baptist and Bootlegger" was coined by economist Bruce Yandle, to illustrate how special interests cloak self-serving agendas in the language of public good. It is important to know that today, the “baptist” and the “bootlegger” are interchangeable identities. Originally based on the prohibition era, it describes a strange bedfellow political alliance where seemingly opposing groups—moralists (prohibition Baptists, who advocated for temperance and prohibition for ethical reasons) and gangster profiteers (bootleggers, who illegally sold alcohol for gain)—teamed up to advance a common policy that fiscally benefited both. In the micro culture war, "Baptists" and “Bootleggers” can either be outraged lib moralists like Graham Linehan waking up after drunk tweeting to find his West-end play needs some tweaks; trans activists shaking their blue gory locks against “phobes”: opportunists on both sides being as offensive as possible for pay, or actual people with no skin in the game losing livelihoods because they sang along to a rap song and said “nigger” out loud. Look there! I wrote it ‘out loud’.

Point being, there’s no difference. In the meta-culture war, there’s even less difference.

Part 2 tomorrow…
Edit. Addendum:

*By Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America - Charlie Kirk & Donald Trump, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=134984195