NEW YORK, USA – Moments earlier than he was killed at a Utah college on September 10, Charlie Kirk was taking a query about transgender folks and mass shootings.
“Are you aware what number of transgender People have been mass shooters during the last 10 years?” the occasion attendee requested.
“Too many,” Kirk replied.
Knowledge reveals trans folks conduct a really small proportion of mass shootings, in keeping with the fact-checking web site PolitiFact. However the reply was classic stuff for the conservative activist and provocateur who turned a MAGA celeb over the previous decade and is credited with inspiring a technology of faculty college students to change into politically energetic and end up for President Donald Trump.
In debates throughout the nation, on school campuses, podcasts and on X, Kirk appeared to relish confrontation, casting himself as a champion of free speech and the open change of concepts.
“Charlie believed within the energy of argument and good-faith debate to seek out the reality and information folks in direction of, if not settlement, then no less than mutual understanding,” stated a press release posted on the web site of his activist group Turning Level USA. The group didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
Kirk’s rhetoric, which frequently concerned anti-LGBTQ and anti-immigrant feedback, engendered robust emotions.
Whereas lots of his views on trans rights and LGBTQ rights, abortion, immigration, affirmative motion and gun management mirrored right this moment’s mainstream Republican Celebration, others have been extra aligned with the occasion’s far-right faction, reminiscent of blaming Black folks for crime and claiming the left is utilizing Islam to destroy America.
He sometimes struck conciliatory notes, telling conservative media determine Tucker Carlson in a July interview: “How can we truly de-radicalize the nation within the subsequent couple of years? That’s my obsession.”
“Charlie Kirk was adored by of us who shared his imaginative and prescient of America, wherein white folks have been very victimized by efforts to create extra variety and fairness. He was despised, feared by of us who have been targets of these views,” stated Kyle Spencer, who documented the rise of Kirk’s motion in her guide “Elevating Them Proper.”
“So there have been two worlds.”
The day pop star Taylor Swift introduced her engagement to NFL participant Travis Kelce, Kirk instructed the 14-time Grammy winner whose latest tour grossed over $2 billion, “you’re not in cost,” urging her to “reject feminism” and “undergo your husband.”
Requested in 2024 if he had a 10-year-old daughter who had been raped, would he have needed her to hold the infant to time period, he stated, “The reply is sure, the infant can be delivered.”
Kirk dismissed affirmative motion and variety, fairness and inclusion applications and folks he perceived as having benefited from them. He known as the nation’s passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 “an enormous mistake.”
On a July 2023 episode of his present, he stated TV persona Pleasure Reid, former First Woman Michelle Obama, the late Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee and Supreme Courtroom Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson didn’t have the intelligence to attain what they did with out affirmative motion. “You needed to go steal a white individual’s slot to be taken considerably severely,” he stated.
Kirk additionally espoused the tenets of the “Nice Substitute” conspiracy idea – which fosters the idea that non-white immigrants will change white residents – and claimed Islam is “not suitable with Western civilization.”
Following Wednesday’s capturing, organizations representing minority teams condemned Kirk’s homicide and different latest examples of political violence and didn’t blame the tragedy on any sort of expression of his views.
“At this time’s deadly assault on Charlie Kirk is a horrific and appalling marker of escalating violence within the public sphere,” the NAACP Authorized Protection Fund stated in a press release Wednesday, condemning Kirk’s killing “and political violence within the strongest attainable phrases.”
Rallied anti-LGBTQ sentiment
Kirk opposed transgender rights and his group sponsored rallies in opposition to transgender medical care. In April 2024, he likened medical doctors who carry out gender-affirming care to Nazis committing atrocities.
“One problem I feel that’s so in opposition to our senses, so in opposition to the pure regulation and dare I say a throbbing center finger to God, is the transgender factor occurring in America proper now,” he stated throughout a speech posted in 2023 by Proper Wing Watch.
In the identical speech, he cited a Bible verse saying {that a} lady who places on males’s garments or a person who places on a lady’s garment is an “abomination.”
Throughout his present in April 2022, he argued that homosexual {couples} “should not blissful simply having marriage. As a substitute, they now wish to corrupt your youngsters.”
In a press release Thursday, a spokesperson for GLAAD, one of many nation’s main LGBTQ advocacy teams, condemned political violence as unacceptable and gun violence as an “epidemic” that wants pressing motion.
“It is usually a demonstrable proven fact that Charlie Kirk unfold infinite quantities of disinformation about LGBTQ folks,“ the spokesperson stated. “Lies and vitriol about transgender folks have been a frequent a part of his rhetoric and occasions.”
Meteoric rise in MAGA motion
The son of a counselor at a psychological well being clinic and an architect, Kirk grew up in an prosperous neighborhood exterior Chicago. He launched his pupil motion, the non-profit group Turning Level USA, when he was 18.
He began working for Trump’s eldest son, Donald Jr. and was launched to Trump at his personal membership Mar-a-Lago in 2017.
After January 6, 2021, when many Republicans thought Trump’s political profession was over, Kirk embraced the Cease the Steal motion claiming the 2020 election was stolen by Democrats, and was later credited with turning out the campus vote for Trump in 2024.
At this time, Turning Level USA says it has chapters in 3,500 excessive faculties and school campuses, 250,000 college students as members, and an annual price range of round $80 million.
Its web site hosts a “Professor Watchlist” instrument that enables college students to report academics and management for having “radical left” views.
Stacey Patton, a Black professor at Morgan State College, a traditionally Black college, described what it was wish to be added to the listing. ”For weeks my inbox and voicemail have been deluged. Principally white males spat venom by way of the cellphone,” utilizing racial slurs and obscenities, she wrote in her weblog on Substack on Thursday, September 11. “They threatened all manners of violence.” – Rappler.com
