Fact-checking alleged Charlie Kirk quotes

After Charlie Kirk’s assassination many mainstream news platforms did not wait long to start regurgitating online claims about supposed evil things Charlie Kirk has said throughout the years. What the exact motivation behind behind these choices is, remains to be seen, but it is clear that certain people who disagreed with Kirk’s views ran towards such claims in order to either legitimize Kirk’s violent death or to suggest that he somehow reaped what he sowed.
When confronted with such claims, I noticed that many supposed quotes by Kirk were not based on truth. Often lies or half-truths were told. Rarely was the quote exact and when it was, it was often taken out of context.
I decided to take the time to fact-check 7 such claims. I choose them randomly, to see if any of the claims were truthful. A few of them were true or partly true, but lacking a strong-man explanation from Kirk’s own point of view. But in most cases the claims can be accurately described as lies or deliberate half-truths.
Below I describe the claims, one by one, with my commentaries.
1. Gay people should be stoned to death
False: Kirk never said this as a separate statement or wish for American law. Th is lie started when left wing author Stephen King took to X on September 11, one day after Kirk’s assassination, and
claimed that Kirk had said that “advocated stoning gays to death”. He later
retracted
this claim and apologized. King acknowledged that Kirk only mentioned a passage about stoning people after sleeping with the same sex from the Old Testament, in order to show someone they were cherry picking verses about love as if the Bible doesn’t condemn sin. Kirk did call this penalty “part of Gods perfect law” as can be heard in the
original footage, but that does not equal advocating for the same laws in todays society.
2. Most people are scared when they see a black pilot flying a plane
False: He never said this exact quote or anything of similar meaning. What really happened was that during a conversation Kirk was discussing affirmative action and how it creates bad ways of thinking, because it is known that certain people get jobs because of affirmative action, not because they were the best for the job. This can result in people second guessing the quality of the captain of their flight if he or she happens to be black. Kirk immediately added:
“I don't wanna think that way. And no one should, right?”
So, Kirk wasn’t saying that he distrusts black people having the capacity to be pilots. He was demonstrating how affirmative action can make people weary of how people got to a position, especially when it’s such a crucial job that people’s lives depend on it. Kirk went on to say:
“I want to be as blunt as possible because now I'm connecting two dots. Wait a second, this CEO just said that he's forcing that a white qualified guy is not gonna get the job. So I see this guy, he might be a nice person and I say, "Boy, I hope he's not a Harvard-style affirmative-action student that … landed half of his flight-simulator trials."
3. Taylor Swift should reject feminism and submit to her husband
True. In a
video
on his own platform, Kirk took the time to congratulate Taylor Swift’s engagement and said that he wished for her that this step would make her more conservative. Kirk said he wanted them to have many children. Then he went on to say she should leave feminism and submit to her husband. Kirk said that he was saying all of these things without any sarcasm. It can be assumed that Kirk believes in the, according to many, Biblical principle that women should submit to their husband. However, in general Christians do not believe this to mean that a woman is worth less than a man, but rather that there are God-ordained roles for men and women.
4. No one should be allowed to retire
False. What Charlie Kirk really said was that he didn’t think people should retire, saying it’s not Biblical. This is more an advice than something he would like to see enforced by law. When it comes to the law, he did advocate for raising the age of retirement. Here’s the full context:
“Now, I will say that for future retirees, people under the age of 45, we should absolutely raise the retirement age. I’m going to say something very provocative. I’m not a fan of retirement. I don’t think retirement is biblical,” he said. “You say, ‘Charlie, I’m just gonna retire and I’m just gonna go golf.’ I think, what a waste of the gifts that God has given you.”
5. British Colonialism was what “made the world decent”
True. Charlie Kirk said this at the beginning of his
show
on September 22, 2022. The context is that he was about to speak to professor Bruce Gilley, a political scientist who has written a book called The Case for Colonialism and is of the opinion that British Colonialism was mostly helpful to the lands they settled it, because it uplifted its people to a more modern, more fair and more liberal standard of living and ruling. It seems obvious that Kirk agreed with a lot of what professor Gilley was coming to convey.
Needless to say, this is a controversial opinion. One could ask ‘What about slavery?’ Gilley spoke about this, saying that Spanish and Portuguese enslavers felt they were rescuing African slaves from the hardships of Africa, where slavery was rampant and much more harsh.
Gilley also said that “None of this made their enslavement right. But then little of what happened to the wretched of the earth in that era was right by contemporary standards. There is a historical bait and switch when contemporary critics charge European colonialists with all sorts of modern crimes: stealing land, owning slaves, shooting lions. These charges appeal to norms and expectations that emerged later from Western civilization itself, and only from Western civilization. Stealing land, owning slaves, and slaying wildlife were, after all, the national sports of pre-European contact African, Arab, and native American cultures.”
6. The guy who assaulted the Pelosi’s should be bailed out
False. The
full clip in which this statement is found, to me, clearly shows that he spoke those words sarcastically. The full statement shows that Kirk had doubts about the Democrat narrative, which said that there might be a link between the attack and Republican rhetoric. For instance, Kirk said “Why is the conservative movement to blame for gay schizophrenic nudists that are hemp jewelry makers breaking into somebody's home, or maybe not breaking into somebody’s home. Why are we to blame for that?”
Immediately after saying this, Kirk asked, sarcastically: “And why is this guy still in jail? Why hasn’t he been bailed out?” as if to say that some Republican would have bailed him out by now, if he was such a hero to them. Kirk then continued, again sarcastically, saying that “If some amazing patriot out there … wants to really be a mid-term hero, someone should go and bail him out … and go ask him some questions.” Kirk then called into question why this attacker was possibly being charged with attempted murder and a political assassination attempt, saying that even those kinds of attackers are let out on bail the next day in many situations, implying that “if you go after the Pelosi’s” those rights to not apply.
So no, Charlie Kirk did not literally want someone to bail out an attacker who did something Kirk called “awful” and “not right” in the same breath. Only sarcasm makes sense for some of these statements and I think the video shows this.
7. Gun deaths are acceptable in order to have a 2nd amendment
Partly True. Kirk did not say the exact words in this rumored quote. What he actually said at a Turning Point event in Salt Lake City 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.”
Also, Kirk emphasized that he was being rational and pragmatic about this trade-off, arguing that the right to bear arms is too important to let gun deaths (those caused by legal gun-owners one must assume) get in the way of that. This says nothing about the way he felt about gun violence. He was obviously against gun violence and thought they should be prevented. He just didn’t believe that a ban on legal firearms should be the sacrifice to achieve that goal. One may compare it to liberals accepting a number maternal deaths every year, due to legal abortion. One could argue that deaths from pregnancy are still more frequent. Similarly, one could argue that the amount of deaths without the Second Amendment could increase if the government decided to turn on its own people, as has happened many times throughout history.



