How the Media Killed Charlie Kirk and Are Fanning Political Violence
“When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence.” —Charlie Kirk
Videos circulating online show Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erica Kirk, being rushed out of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner minutes after shots rang out in a failed assassination attempt on President Trump. Through her tears, she says, “I just want to go home.” Coming less than a year after her husband’s assassination, the moment was a painful reminder that the targeting of both Charlie Kirk and President Trump stems from an ongoing media campaign to foment hatred against them.
With Kirk, that campaign succeeded. With Trump, it has failed at least five times. Meanwhile, Erica Kirk lives not only with the grief of losing her husband but with the relentless attacks on his name and legacy.
Christian conservative commentator Charlie Kirk built his career visiting college campuses and engaging in open debate with anyone who disagreed with him. The media portrayed him as a racist and homophobe, and as with Trump, many on the left posted calls for his death online. When he was killed, the celebrations were widespread. Those who justified his murder repeatedly cited media fabrications about what Kirk believed and what he had said.
The documented record shows that media coverage and social media amplification produced outright fabrications, decontextualized clips, and false attributions, some circulating the day he was murdered and used to justify his killing.
The Racial Slur Fabrication: A viral post on X, viewed more than 16 million times in less than two days, falsely claimed Kirk had called an Asian woman in his audience a racial slur during a debate, accompanied by a TikTok montage captioned “He made millions off of his racism and sexism.” What Kirk actually said was “I live like a capitalist every single day, Cenk!” directed at Cenk Uygur, co-host of The Young Turks, who had interrupted from the floor during a debate Kirk was having with Hasan Piker at Politicon in October 2018.
Uygur is a Turkish-American man, not an Asian woman, and he was a debate participant, not an audience member. The full video, posted by The Young Turks themselves, confirms this.
The “Stoning Gay People” Fabrication: One of the most egregious examples involved author Stephen King spreading the claim that Kirk had advocated stoning gay people. Kirk had been discussing comments made by YouTube personality Ms. Rachel, who cited Bible scripture in support of Gay Pride Month. Kirk’s point was that the same scripture contains harsh prohibitions; he was arguing she was quoting the Bible selectively.
Kirk’s full statement was: “So you love God, so you must love his law. How do you love somebody? You love them by telling them the truth, not by confirming or affirming their sin. And it says, by the way, Ms. Rachel, might want to crack open that Bible of yours, in a lesser reference, part of the same part of scripture is in Leviticus 18, is that thou shall lay with another man shall be stoned to death. Just saying. So, Ms. Rachel, you quote Leviticus 19, love your neighbor as yourself. The chapter before affirms God’s perfect law when it comes to sexual matters.”
After backlash, King retracted the claim and apologized.
“Black Women Do Not Have the Brain Processing Power”: A viral post attributed to Kirk claimed that Black women as a class lack the brain processing power to be taken seriously. What Kirk actually said, on his July 13, 2023 show, was this, directed at four specific women who had each publicly identified themselves as affirmative action beneficiaries in the weeks after the Supreme Court ended affirmative action in college admissions:
“If we would have said three weeks ago that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative-action picks, we would have been called racist. But now they’re coming out and they’re saying it for us. They’re coming out and they’re saying, ‘I’m only here because of affirmative action.’ Yeah, we know. You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.”
Kirk never mentioned race. He named four individuals who had made that admission themselves and responded to their own public statements. The media stripped the self-identification that triggered his remarks and rebroadcast the “brain processing power” line as a blanket statement about all Black women.
The AEI found that Snopes knowingly substituted a categorical statement about an entire demographic for the narrower, specific one Kirk had actually made and called it journalistic dishonesty.
“Black People Were Better Off as Slaves”: The claim that Kirk said Black people were better off under slavery has no documented source, no verified clip, no transcript, and no credible outlet attributing those words to him. It circulated as character assassination without evidentiary basis.
“The Civil Rights Act was a mistake”: Kirk did make the statement, but the media stripped its policy argument entirely. In December 2023 at AmericaFest, Kirk said: “I have a very, very radical view on this, but I can defend it, and I’ve thought about it. We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the mid-1960s.”
His argument was that the Act created what he called a “permanent DEI-type bureaucracy” that has limited free speech, a position rooted in legal scholarship, including Christopher Caldwell’s The Age of Entitlement, which argues the Civil Rights Act functioned as a rival constitution that frequently clashed with the original.
The underlying policy claim, that Great Society welfare programs damaged Black family structure, is supported by decades of data. The Institute for Family Studies reports that in 1950, just 9% of Black children lived without their father, and by 1960 the Black marriage rate remained close to the white marriage rate despite open racism and widespread poverty.
By the mid-1980s, Black fatherlessness had skyrocketed; today, only 44% of Black children have a father in the home. The rate of Black out-of-wedlock births rose from 24.5% in 1964 to 69% by 2022, per Heritage Foundation data drawn from federal statistics.
The Heritage Foundation further notes that in 1959, despite a Black poverty rate of roughly 55%, more than 75% of Black children were born to married parents, a figure that has since inverted. Brookings confirmed the 1965 baseline of 24% and documented the trajectory through 1990. Economists Walter E. Williams and Thomas Sowell, both Black, argued the Great Society expansion contributed directly to the destruction of Black family formation. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a liberal Democrat, made the same warning in his 1965 report and was attacked by the left for it.
“Gun Deaths Are the Price of Freedom”: Kirk’s actual statement was: “It’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our God-given rights.” This was reframed as a callous endorsement of mass death.
“Buy Weapons, Buy Ammo, You’re With People Who Want to Kill You”: The viral framing of this quote claimed Kirk directed it at an Israeli student facing death threats from pro-Hamas peers on campus. That account appears to originate from a single Medium blog post with no primary source citation and is not verified.
The primary source is Kirk’s own podcast, where he said: “There’s not much you can do, folks. You have a government that hates you, you have a traitor as the president. Buy weapons, I keep on saying that. Buy weapons. Buy ammo. If you go into a public place, bring a gun with you, and if you live in a state that doesn’t allow you to do it, I got nothing for you, man.”
It was a general Second Amendment argument directed at his podcast audience, not targeted advice to any individual.
The Truth About Kirk’s Final Moments: A persistent myth holds that there was karmic irony in Kirk’s death, that a man who once said gun deaths were an acceptable cost of the Second Amendment died defending that position. The verified transcript of his final moments, however, shows that Kirk was shot mid-exchange in a discussion about transgender mass shooters, not gun rights:
ATTENDEE: Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?
KIRK: Too many.
ATTENDEE: In America, it’s five. Now, five is a lot, right? I’m going to give you some credit. Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last 10 years?
KIRK: Counting or not counting gang violence?
The shot came immediately after Kirk’s last words. His killer, Tyler Robinson, was in a romantic relationship with a transgender partner.
Even in reporting his death, mainstream media lied, and until today, most liberals and critics believe there was some karmic irony in that a man who supported the Second Amendment was killed defending the Second Amendment. However, the truth of the alleged irony is that Charlie was discussing trans shooters when he was shot by someone in a relationship with a trans person.
The post How the Media Killed Charlie Kirk and Are Fanning Political Violence appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.