The caliber of argument on social media has not really declined because it was never really that great to begin with. And there are a lot of mendacious people on social media, and a lot of dumb ones, but mostly they are people who do not argue or comment for a living. I do that, both at Townhall and as a lawyer, so I think my perspective is a little bit skewed compared to everyone else’s. But you’ve probably noticed that.
What is the role of a pundit? First of all, what the hell is a “pundit” and where the hell did that weird word come from? OK, that’s not really the point. A pundit is simply somebody who gives his observations and opinions. I do that. I’m a columnist here at Townhall, and I write books and I go on media and I run my mouth – by the way, you should be watching my Stream of Kurtiousness videos and listening to my Unredacted podcast every week to make the most of your Townhall VIP experience!
But what am I supposed to do with those platforms? What’s the purpose of all this? If you listen to people on social media, apparently the purpose is to become the tool of particular candidates or viewpoints, and to articulate them and nothing else. But I’m not going to do that. That’s not my job. My job is to say whatever I think. And that’s what I’m going to do.
A favorite claim when I say something that people don’t want to hear in a column or in social media is that I’m somehow being paid by the opposition. Well, I am being paid by Townhall, but what I’m being paid for is to say what I want and what I think. I don’t get a memo or any guidance or anything else. How does a current column come about? I get an idea in my head and I write it, then I send it in and the gang at the Townhall HQ tries to clean up my myriad typos – typos are the bane of my existence – and then it gets published. There’s no coordination. There’s no approval process. I write it and they put it up. And at the end of the month I send an invoice and I get a check.
Is there anything I can’t write about? I don’t know, because in about 11 or 12 years here at Townhall I’ve never had somebody tell me I can’t write about something. I know they don’t like outright parodies, like a column about some hilarious event that never happened, like a successful Bulwark wedding night. But that’s more of a format question and not one of content. Sure, sometimes I describe some bizarre erotic practice of the mutants over at the Lincoln Project and somebody goes “Kurt, are you sure you wanna go down that road?” and I’m like, “Fine, go ahead and cut the reference to George Conway ‘gobbling an MSNBC hot pocket’.”
But no one ever says “This week we have to like Trump,” or “This week we have to like DeSantis,” or “This week we have to like Asa Hutchinson,” which would never occur to anybody to do anyway. Nor would doing that make sense. The purpose of Townhall is to have a variety of viewpoints. There are plenty of people at Townhall who totally disagree with everything I’m saying. Some of them seem to agree. I could guess you could call it diversity, and that’s the only kind of diversity that matters – the diversity of thought.
That’s a good thing. We want conservatives raising variety of arguments. That’s how you get stronger. That’s how you pick the good arguments. That’s the marketplace of ideas. We is conservatives should encourage it, though some people don’t seem to like it. Some people seem to think that we should all walk in lockstep. Coincidentally, what we should walk in lockstep about is exactly what they happen to think. Well, I was never very good at marching in the Army and I’m not very good at marching in the commentary world either. And I don’t think you want me to be.
My job is to say what I think. What I think may be wrong or it may be right. You get to be the judge. My role is to put a set of ideas in front of you, preferably in an amusing manner. Ideally, it will be one of many different sets of ideas that you look at. You pick and choose what to think.
See, my job is not to tell you what to think. I find it very annoying when people on social media get mad at me because they imagine that I’m telling them what they should think. That’s the furthest thing from the truth. I don’t want to tell anybody anything. I’ve been a commander. I know what commanding is. I’m arguing. And it’s up to you to decide whether I make sense, or no sense, or a little sense, and to decide what to do with my ideas just as you do with everybody else’s. You have to make your own decision. You’re an American citizen. You are in charge. I am an advisor.
That doesn’t mean I don’t believe what I’m saying. I’m not going to write anything else. I’m a little stubborn about the whole self-respect thing. I want to have some. And if I was just parroting back what some people want to hear so that they would like me, I would feel like a loser. This would be because I was a loser. And I’m too old to start feeling like a loser.
One of the threats I get on social media is that I’m going to lose all my fans. It brings to mind back when you were a kid and you complained to your mom that some other kid hit you with a bat and then she says “Well, then Jimmy isn’t a very good friend.” You’re not much of a fan if your support is based solely on me repeating exactly what you already think. I will say something on Twitter – I refuse to call it X because I think that’s silly and Elon is inevitably going to change it back to Twitter someday when the mood hits him – and lose a couple hundred followers. And then I’ll get others back over the next couple days. Oh well. If I’m annoying, don’t read me. But if you get annoyed because I’m not saying something I don’t believe, the problem is not me. The problem is you.
But you’re not like that. You guys at Townhall VIP are more sophisticated than some of the folks out in the Interwebs. You don’t take this stuff personally. I was recently at an event with very prominent and very loudly pro-Trump people. You know what we talked about? Pretty much everything else besides DJT and RDS. Nobody got mad. Nobody started yelling at me because I like Meatball DeSanctus. It was cool. And it was also smart. Because at some point somebody’s going to get nominated and we all have to pull together to win in 2024. I’m gonna keep doing what I do to help make that happen.
Follow Kurt on Twitter @KurtSchlichter. Get his non-fiction book We’ll Be Back: The Fall and Rise of America, as well as Inferno, the seventh book in the Kelly Turnbull People's Republic series of conservative action novels set in America after a notional national divorce. Number eight, Overlord, drops this fall!
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