Viral Claims About Charlie Kirk’s Words – FactCheck.org

Since the fatal shooting of Charlie Kirk on Sept. 10, social media users have shared posts showing, quoting or paraphrasing remarks the posts attribute to the conservative activist. Many readers have asked us to provide the facts on whether Kirk, the founder of the youth political group Turning Point USA, made several of these comments.

We’ll review some of the statements that our readers asked about and correct a viral social media post that got what Kirk said wrong.

While he did say many of the statements, some have been misrepresented or not presented with full context.

False Claim of an Asian Slur

A popular post on X incorrectly claimed that Kirk used a slur for Asian people.

“That time Charlie Kirk called an Asian woman in the audience ‘c—-’ multiple times,” the post reads, spelling out the slur in full, and accompanied by a montage video from TikTok. “He made millions off of his racism and sexism.”

The video, however, does not show Kirk using the slur. Rather, as an X Community Note explains, Kirk was shouting at Cenk Uygur, a co-host of the Young Turks, a progressive online news show, and using his first name. The two men were at Politicon, an annual nonpartisan political convention, in October 2018.

“I live like a capitalist every single day, Cenk!” Kirk said angrily to Uygur, after Uygur interrupted a debate Kirk was having with the Young Turks’ Hasan Piker about what political views young people should have. “Come on, Cenk, let’s go,” he said later. 

The Washington Examiner reported on the exchange at the time, and the Young Turks also posted a clip to YouTube, along with the full debate.

In less than two days, the inaccurate post was viewed more than 16 million times on X.

Civil Rights Act

Multiple readers forwarded us a viral graphic that makes reference to things Kirk said about the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Jewish people, gay people and the Second Amendment. We’ll get to the last three in a bit.

Kirk did say that it was a “huge mistake” to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As the National Archives explains, the law “prohibited discrimination in public places, provided for the integration of schools and other public facilities, and made employment discrimination illegal.” 

According to a 2024 Wired story, Kirk made the remarks in December 2023 during America Fest, Turning Point’s annual conference.

“I have a very, very radical view on this, but I can defend it, and I’ve thought about it,” the story quoted Kirk as saying. “We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s.”

In Kirk’s view, the story explained, the Civil Rights Act has led to a “permanent DEI-type bureaucracy,” referring to diversity, equity and inclusion, that has limited free speech.

The story also quoted Kirk as saying that Martin Luther King Jr. was “awful. He’s not a good person. He said one good thing he actually didn’t believe.”

Those comments are not available in the recordings posted to YouTube of the conference that year. The reporter who wrote the Wired story, however, confirmed to us that while attending the event as a journalist, he had witnessed the remarks, which were made not on the main stage, but in a smaller conference room.

Kirk also did not dispute the statement when he responded to an email from Wired the day before the story was published. Reading from the email, Kirk introjected to say that it was “true” that he had described King as “a bad guy” and “also true” that it was his “self-described very, very radical view that the country made a mistake when it passed the Civil Rights Act.”

When the email asked why Kirk believes passing the legislation was a mistake, Kirk said, “Now, again, apparently, they don’t listen to the show. Because we do that at least once a week, right? Once a week, we talk about why the Civil Rights Act was a mistake.”

A few days later, Kirk released an 82-minute podcast episode titled, “The Myth of MLK,” which in part discusses “how the ‘MLK Myth’ keeps America shackled to destructive 1960s laws that have replaced the original U.S. Constitution,” according to the summary description on the podcast’s website.

Later that year, Kirk echoed similar sentiments about the Civil Rights Act. The legislation, he said on his podcast in April 2024, “created a beast, and that beast has now turned into an anti-white weapon.”

‘Jewish Money’

The viral graphic alleges that Kirk, who was a strong supporter of Israel but had been accused of antisemitism numerous times during his career, “blamed ‘Jewish money’ for ruining American culture.” We did not immediately find instances of Kirk using the specific phrase “Jewish money,” but he repeatedly made similar remarks regarding the funding of liberal causes or institutions.

Weeks after the Oct. 7 attack on Israel in 2023, Kirk argued in an Oct. 26 episode of his podcast that Jews had funded antisemitism in the U.S. by supporting liberal causes.

“Jewish donors have a lot of explaining to do. A lot of decoupling to do,” he said. “Because Jewish donors have been the No. 1 funding mechanism of radical, open border neoliberal quasi-Marxist policies, cultural institutions and nonprofits. This is a beast created by secular Jews. And now it’s coming for Jews, and they’re like, ‘What on Earth happened?’ And it’s not just the colleges. It’s the nonprofits, it’s the movies, it’s Hollywood, it’s all of it.”

About two weeks later, Kirk again made a similar argument. 

“Jews have been some of the largest funders of cultural Marxist ideas and supporters of those ideas over the last 30 or 40 years. Stop supporting causes that hate you,” he said on his podcast. “Until you cleanse that ideology from the hierarchy in the academic elite of the West, there will not be a safe future. I’m not going to say Israel won’t exist, but Israel will be in jeopardy as long as the Western children, children of the West, are being taught, with primarily Jewish dollars, subsidizing it, to view everything through oppressor/ oppressed dynamic. Until you shed that ideology, you will not be able to build the case for Israel, because they view Israel as an oppressor.”

In another podcast 10 days after that, Kirk returned to the topic when defending Elon Musk from complaints of antisemitism, agreeing with part of a controversial X post that Musk had called “the actual truth.” Kirk also said he agreed with conservative commentator Tucker Carlson that Jewish Americans “have primarily been financing cultural Marxist ideas.”

“Some of the largest financiers of left-wing, anti-white causes have been Jewish Americans,” Kirk said. 

In the same episode, Kirk rejected complaints that he was antisemitic, saying that in earlier episodes he had said he was “glad that Jewish Americans are reconsidering their financing of cultural Marxism, and people misunderstood it intentionally and slandered us as being antisemites.”

“Cultural Marxism” is considered by some, including the Southern Poverty Law Center, as an antisemitic conspiracy theory. At its most extreme, it refers to the idea that a small group of Jewish immigrants in the U.S. worked to subvert Christian culture in America and spread progressive values.

The phrase sometimes is “a colloquial analogy for political correctness” and is “often used, without antisemitic intention, to describe liberals, progressive movements and others,” the Antisemitism Policy Trust, a U.K. nonprofit, explained in a 2020 briefing. “However, in reality, it is a shadowy term openly used by antisemites, neo-Nazis and others with nefarious intentions.” The group “strongly recommends” that people avoid using the phrase.

Gay People

The graphic goes on to say of Kirk, “He said gay people are ‘destructive’ and endorsed having them put to death.”

The source is not clear, as we couldn’t find anything relevant that used the “destructive” word. But part of that claim could be a reference to something Kirk said while discussing comments about passages in the Bible made by Rachel Anne Accurso, better known as the YouTube personality Ms. Rachel.

In a June 8, 2024, episode of his podcast (at around the 1:00:00 mark), Kirk reacted to Accurso posting a video in which she cited Bible scripture to explain why she had wished a “Happy Pride” that month to people in the LGBTQ+ community.

“My faith is really important to me, and it’s also one reason why I love every neighbor,” she said in her video. “In Matthew 22, a religious teacher asked Jesus, what’s the most important commandment? And Jesus says, to love God and to ‘love your neighbor as yourself.’” “It doesn’t say love every neighbor except,” she went on to say.

In his reply, Kirk said Accurso left out something else the Bible says. “She’s not totally wrong,” Kirk said. “The first part is Deuteronomy 6:3–5. The second part is Leviticus 19. 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.”

He continued: “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 from Kirk supporters, the author Stephen King, who had posted on X on Sept. 11 that Kirk had “advocated stoning gays to death,” retracted his claim and apologized. King said, “What [Kirk] actually demonstrated was how some people cherry-pick Biblical passages.”

Second Amendment

Finally, the graphic says, “He said the 2nd amendment is worth the cost of ‘some gun deaths.’”

Kirk did say that at a TPUSA Faith event in Utah on April 5, 2023. The event was held days after three children and three adults were killed in a school shooting in Nashville.

Video from the event shows Kirk being asked by an audience member how to make the point that protecting the Second Amendment is important. Kirk responded that the amendment “is there, God forbid, so that you can defend yourself against a tyrannical government.” But “having an armed citizenry comes with a price, and that is part of liberty,” he said.

“You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won’t have a single gun death,” Kirk later said. “That is nonsense. It’s drivel. But I am — I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational. Nobody talks like this. They live in a complete alternate universe.”

Paul Pelosi Attack

Another reader asked, presumably based on other online posts, “When Nancy Pelosi’s husband was attacked with a hammer, did Kirk encourage his audience to contribute to bail out [the] attacker?”

Yes, he did. In the Oct. 31, 2022, episode of his show (at around 53:00 in the video), Kirk said the attack on Paul Pelosi was “awful” and “not right,” but he said that someone should bail out the assailer, David DePape, because cashless bail policies in certain cities allowed other people to commit crimes and be released from custody pending trial.

“And why is he still in jail? Why has he not been bailed out?” Kirk asked. “By the way, if some amazing patriot out there in San Francisco or the Bay Area wants to really be a midterm hero, someone should go and bail this guy out. I bet his bail’s like 30[,000] or 40,000 bucks. Bail him out, and then go ask him some questions.”

“I’m not qualifying it. I think it’s awful. It’s not right,” Kirk said about the attack on Pelosi, who suffered a skull fracture after being hit in the head with a hammer. “But why is it that in Chicago you’re able to commit murder and be out the next day? Why is it that you’re able to trespass, second-degree murder, arson, threaten a public official, cashless bail. This happens all over San Francisco. But if you go after the Pelosis, oh, you’re [not] let out immediately. Got it.”

After the attack on Oct. 28, 2022, DePape was arrested and placed on a federal hold. He was later convicted on assault- and kidnapping-related charges in separate federal and state trials, and was sentenced to 30 years in prison by a federal judge and life in prison without parole by a state judge. DePape told officers he intended to apprehend then Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was not at her San Francisco home when DePape broke in.

As for cashless bail in Chicago, we’ve written that an Illinois law that went into effect in September 2023 eliminated cash bail for all offenses, but still allows judges to detain a person because of the nature of the crime, or because the person is considered a flight risk or poses a threat to “any other person or the community.”

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