"We have to tell our babies to stop crying"
About this Quote
The bluntness is the point: a sentence that sounds like parenting advice but is really a political posture. “We have to tell our babies to stop crying” compresses a whole ideology into nursery language. It’s not just a call for toughness; it’s a demand for emotional discipline, framed as moral hygiene. By choosing “babies,” Kirk isn’t talking about infants. He’s inventing a category of people whose grievances can be dismissed without argument. You don’t debate a baby; you shush it.
The line works because it smuggles in two assumptions. First, that the complaints being made in public life - about rights, fairness, harm, or exclusion - are inherently immature. Second, that the adult response isn’t empathy or policy, but correction. The “we” is crucial: it recruits the audience into a shared role as responsible parents of a nation that’s supposedly gotten soft. That’s a familiar conservative move, but Kirk’s phrasing is extra aggressive because it implies not just disagreement, but contempt for the emotional legitimacy of the other side.
In context, this kind of rhetoric thrives in a media ecosystem where politics is performed like a dominance contest. Reducing opponents to “babies” is efficient: it short-circuits their claims and flatters your listeners as stoic grown-ups. The subtext is a warning, too: feelings are permissible only when they serve the tribe. Everyone else’s pain is just noise that needs to be trained out of the room.
The line works because it smuggles in two assumptions. First, that the complaints being made in public life - about rights, fairness, harm, or exclusion - are inherently immature. Second, that the adult response isn’t empathy or policy, but correction. The “we” is crucial: it recruits the audience into a shared role as responsible parents of a nation that’s supposedly gotten soft. That’s a familiar conservative move, but Kirk’s phrasing is extra aggressive because it implies not just disagreement, but contempt for the emotional legitimacy of the other side.
In context, this kind of rhetoric thrives in a media ecosystem where politics is performed like a dominance contest. Reducing opponents to “babies” is efficient: it short-circuits their claims and flatters your listeners as stoic grown-ups. The subtext is a warning, too: feelings are permissible only when they serve the tribe. Everyone else’s pain is just noise that needs to be trained out of the room.
Quote Details
| Topic | Parenting |
|---|---|
| Source | Later attribution: Charlie Kirk (Charlie Kirk) modern compilation
Evidence:
deaths every single year so that we can have the second amendment to protect our |
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