Charlie Kirk Edits Out the ‘South Park’ Line About His Own Deceptive Video Editing
If you can’t “totally pwn” woke students without cutting their best arguments out of your little YouTube video, are you really a masterdebater?
This is the implicit question asked in South Park’s recent parody of Charlie Kirk, Turning Point USA co-founder and conservative political entertainment kingpin who rose to national prominence through his viral debate videos that featured him “destroying” purple-haired, bleeding-hearted college kids with canned slams about abortion rights and gender politics. In the mid-2010s, a massive media industry revolving around this kind of heavily edited and proudly biased political content emerged with Kirk leading the pack as one of the loudest voices and smallest faces on the market.
In last week’s new South Park episode “Got a Nut,” Trey Parker and Matt Stone satirized both the economics and the deceptive video production practices of the industry that made Kirk and his conservative colleagues some of the most influential figures in modern America. Following the episode’s release, these demagogues very predictably attempted to reframe South Park’s not-very-subtle attacks on their industry and their integrity as somehow complimentary, insisting that Parker and Stone are laughing with them, not at them.
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Case in point: When Kirk recorded himself reacting to his South Park parody in “Got a Nut,” he and his podcasting team cut the line in which Cartman, who spent the episode imitating Kirk, who, in turn, copied Cartman’s entire shtick and turned it into a career, admitted that his debate videos are rigged in his favor. “I’m getting really good at this! I have my arguments down rock-solid, these young college girls are totally unprepared so I can just destroy them,” Cartman tells his mom of his masterdebating. “And, also, edit out all the ones who actually argue back well.”
Guess which half of the line was missing from Kirk’s stream?
In “Got a Nut,” Cartman is outraged to learn that South Park Elementary School has a resident right-wing troll who is receiving national attention: Clyde Donovan. Following in the footsteps of Kirk and his ilk, Clyde hosts a far-right “debate” podcast where he hawks supplements and hurls slurs at young women just to make some easy money, which infuriates the very-genuinely-fascist Cartman who accuses the entire conservative political entertainment scene of “stealing my shtick.”
Not to be beaten at his own game, Cartman gets the ugliest haircut imaginable and starts his own heavily edited debate channel, and masterdebating quickly takes over his life as he aspires to win the Charlie Kirk Award for Young Masterdebaters. Unfortunately, since the right-wing media machine values grifters more than true believers like Cartman, he loses the prize to Clyde.
Kirk, whom South Park literally accused of ripping off Cartman’s vicious bigotry for massive financial gain, has spent the last week attempting to convince his followers that South Park was actually very supportive of his masterdebating, as the show wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble of copying his pro-life arguments on college campuses across the country verbatim if they didn’t believe that he was in the right.
However, much like Kirk’s many viral abortion debates with screaming, septum-pierced 19-year-olds, his claim only looks remotely reasonable if you cut out the most crucial counter-argument.
Imagine if Kristi Noem came out and claimed that, much like herself, South Park must be pro-dog murder.
