Confusing rationality for truth is like confusing a map for a territory.
Unfortunately I have encountered a lot of people like Kirk (especially during my philosophy education) who felt that simply declaring a consistent map should allow them to enforce whatever laws or social norms that they have derived from that set of propositions. While the rationality that they have created may be consistent and not care about our feelings, it can really lead to some dark places:
absent ethos and pathos, logic serves as an excellent hiding place for vicious and biased assumptions.
I have been paying attention to Kirk and TPUSA for many years because I find that kind of radically idealistic (as opposed to philosophically materialist) kind of propaganda to be fascinating: once you've detached your premises from the material world, you can justify all kinds of fantastic propaganda.
And my experience of Kirk is that he was a vicious propagandist- likely because he was attempting to marginalize the existence of queer folks like myself.
And I mean "existence" in a very literal sense: his position is that queerness is a mental defect and those doesn't "really" exist except under a layer of blue hair.
If you haven't had that propaganda used against you and your people, you probably don't understand why those of us who have find folks like that to be vicious, even if they weren't part of a larger edifice of state power that would enforce violence against people.
So, just as logical premises often are used to hide biases, folks like Kirk may well have struck an aesthetic position favoring debate while at the same time convincing the folks who have the power to do the actual oppressing.
The response from his fans of getting people fired is explicitly the stakes of the arguments he was making: what do you think the stakes of his arguments were, if not to encourage or guide other peoples' actions?
