Stop with the Bullshit

Dialogue without listening, states without capacity, science without rigor, logos without quality — the fakes want the glory but not the good-faith grind

It’s been a long, ugly, and dangerous week in American politics, and a hot take is the last thing that is needed in the already-overheated atmosphere of the moment. But I want to take a gander at one of the most howlingly bad takes that emerged this week, namely Ezra Klein’s much- and rightly-dunked upon op-ed-paean to the late Charlie Kirk.

Most people may not have gotten much past the headline, but you really don’t need to, because the whole essay was predicated on a category error so impressive it deserves recognition as its own art form. Klein, who has emerged as the most influential liberal public intellectual, confused Kirk’s heavily stage-managed content-creation pipeline with the difficult, unglamorous craft of democratic engagement. The mistake was not just that Klein misjudged Kirk’s motives (I’m not going to discuss the vile ideological content of Kirk’s politics), it was that he failed to distinguish between authenticity and inauthenticity, between practices that require effort, humility, and risk, and imitations that only borrow the trappings.

Let’s talk directly about what Charlie Kirk’s mode of “politics” entailed. The goal was never good faith engagement with opponents — an indubitable bedrock of democratic politics. Rather, it was always about content creation for his media machine. He did not engage with informed opponents in a spirit of inquiry or persuasion, but instead preferred to spar with jejune undergraduates who he could make look foolish, in order to create social media clips that would go viral among his fans. As a content-creation machine for confirming and amplifying the biases of his fanbase, his “practice” was undoubtedly brilliant — even if he sometimes ended up looking foolish.

But the fact that Klein considers this form of political practice “the right way” is bizarre, especially because Klein himself often demonstrates what genuine dialogue looks like. Consider for example his conversation last month with Yoram Hazony, the brains behind the neo-reactionary “national conservatism” movement. That podcast was truly a model of good faith dialog between two people who sharply disagree politically. It unfolded slowly, sometimes awkwardly, with Klein engaging seriously someone who is just as politically and intellectually experienced as himself. That was practicing politics “the right way” — not because Hazony convinced Klein or vice versa, but both men in the dialog embodied democratic cognitive virtues of attempting to understand before dismissing, and probing assumptions before condemning. Both men took a risk in engaging the other on equal terms. It wasn’t merely about content-creation to amplify priors.

Most of what Kirk produced was a simulacrum of such dialog. His “debates” contained the surface features of dialogue — microphones, arguments about politics, a supposed clash of ideas — but none of the substance. The goal was not persuasion of his interlocutors but the creation of content that could go viral. Everything about these events, from the lame opponents to the camera angles, were stage managed not to promote comprehension but to enact Kirk’s domination routine. It looked like conversation but its function and purpose was fundamentally theatrical. To mistake this for good faith democratic dialog is like mistaking a wax apple for lunch: superficially convincing, but nutritionally empty.

Kirk’s “practice of politics” forms part of a larger pattern: the collapse of good faith, sincerity, and authenticity — what we might call, echoing Cory Doctorow, the enbullshittification of everything.

Authentic versions of human practices are difficult, costly, and sometimes dangerous. They command respect precisely because of the risks involved. Their imitations are easy, cheap, and flattering. They borrow the aesthetic while dodging the substance. Sometimes the imitation is outright lying, but more often it is, in Harry Frankfurt’s famous distinction, “bullshit.” The liar at least cares about the truth: he wants to conceal it. The bullshitter is indifferent: truth is beside the point, what matters is only the performative effect of his words. Kirk’s debates were bullshit in exactly this sense. Whether his opponent has a good argument or whether Kirk’s response was accurate was irrelevant. The only metric that mattered was whether it output a selectively-edited clip that could go viral. Though composed in 1986, long before the commercial Internet even existed, Frankfurt’s description could have been written for social media politics: an entire economy built not on truth or falsehood, but on performative command of the attention economy.

Consider this distinction with respect to governments. James Scott once argued that the definition of a modern government is that it “sees like a state,” building a machinery of taxation, census-taking, and bureaucratic enumeration designed to render their societies legible to the governors. This legibility can be oppressive, but it is real: it creates the capacity to govern. By contrast, Steven Pierce has observed that many postcolonial states merely “look like a state” without actually being one in Scott’s sense. They sport flags, uniforms, and colonnaded buildings, but lack the capacity to collect taxes or deliver services. Police checkpoints sprout across highways, staffed by men in uniform with rifles. The aesthetic is one of authority, but the function is extortion. The checkpoints do not protect; they prey. And yet the performance continues, because it is profitable to the performers. The truth — that governance is absent — becomes irrelevant. Here again, the lie is less important than the bullshit. The roadblock is not pretending to enforce safety; it is indifferent to safety altogether. What matters is that it looks like a state — and that the passers-by pay up. The state as performative bullshit.

Science, too, has its bullshit twin: so-called pseudoscience. Genuine scientific work is punishing: experiments fail, hypotheses collapse, reviewers sneer, careers stall. Above all, science accepts the possibility of being wrong. That humility is what makes it trustworthy. Pseudoscience cannot accept such humility. It craves the prestige of science and takes on its trappings — the white coat, the jargon, the graphs — without accepting its discipline. The result is a facsimile: journals that mimic peer review but never reject manuscripts so long as they confirm cherished beliefs, conferences that feature badly dressed people reading aloud boring papers, popularizers who push the message to a poorly-informed audience. What matters is that it looks like science, that it comforts an audience, that it flatters priors. Science is inquiry. Pseudoscience is performance. Authenticity lies in the willingness to be disproved. Inauthenticity lies in donning the aesthetic of rigor while never accepting its risk.

Counterfeit luxury brands do the same thing in the language of commerce. A Louis Vuitton bag purchased at a street stall in Bangkok can look almost indistinguishable from the real thing. The pattern is right, the logo attracts, the aura of exclusivity shimmers. But it is not the product of costly craftsmanship, durable materials, or decades of accumulated brand equity. It is a simulacrum, designed not to perform the high-quality function of a real luxury good but rather to signal the appearance of one for socially performative reasons. The buyer is often in on the trick: they want the social recognition of a logo without paying the premium. Again, this is not always lying; it is bullshit. Whether the bag is real is irrelevant; what matters is that it’s cheap and looks “real enough.” The prestige of the genuine brand is borrowed by the counterfeit while producing none of the quality that underwrites it. Authentic brands accumulate legitimacy over years of investment; counterfeiters free-ride on that legitimacy by selling the look. Authenticity here is the cost of production; inauthenticity is the shortcut.

These examples all rhyme. Authentic practices are slow, costly, and sometimes dangerous: dialogue requires humility, governance requires capacity, science requires discipline, and brands require investment. Inauthentic practices are fast, cheap, and rewarding. They produce the look without the work, indifferent to whether the thing is real, so long as the effect is convincing enough. The intellectual equivalent of empty calories.

The social cost of all these practices is not only that the fakers are cheating the people who do the real work, but more deeply, that they erode the category of the real. Kirk’s pseudo-debates trained audiences to misrecognize domination spectacles as democratic dialog. Governments that merely “look like” states normalize predation as governance. Pseudoscience muddies the authority of real science, making voters and patients doubt whether expertise exists at all. Counterfeits hollow out the value of brands and weaken the very notion of quality. In each case, the parasite gnaws away at the host. Frankfurt’s warning about bullshit is apt: once indifference to truth becomes widespread, the very category of truth loses meaning. The counterfeit becomes “good enough.” The real is devalued.

Jean-Paul Sartre’s distinction between good and bad faith helps to explain why this persists. Good faith requires acknowledging what one is really doing. It demands that dialogue be recognized as risky, governance as difficult, science as humbling, branding as costly. Bad faith is self-deception: living inside the imitation as if it were the real thing. Kirk very likely believed that he was “practicing politics the right way.” The uniformed thug at a roadblock may believe he is governing. The pseudoscientist may claim he is merely raising questions. The counterfeit buyer may insist the bag is “just as good.” These are not pure cons; they are inauthentic practices performed in bad faith, half-or-more-believed by their practitioners. That is why they are sticky: they are not only frauds on others but frauds on the self.

Klein’s error was to treat Kirk’s bad-faith performances as good faith practice. But the distinction matters. A society that cannot tell the difference between authentic and inauthentic, between truth and bullshit, between good faith and bad, is a society in which legitimacy is slipping away. The clip is not the conversation. The roadblock is not the state. The graph is not the science. The logo is not the brand.

The authentic article is costly; that is why it deserves respect. The inauthentic version is cheap; that is why it spreads. The question is whether we still care about the difference — or whether we are content to live among counterfeits and call it real.