Promotion of falsehoods and conspiracy theories
Kirk promotes the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory, and has described universities as "islands of totalitarianism".[4][39][40]
In a 2015 speech at the Liberty Forum of Silicon Valley, Kirk stated that he had applied to the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York, and was not accepted.[41] He said that "the slot he considered his went to 'a far less-qualified candidate of a different gender and a different persuasion'" whose test scores he claimed he knew.[42] He told The New Yorker in 2017 that he was being sarcastic when he said it.[42] He told the Chicago Tribune in 2018 that "he was just repeating something he'd been told,"[9][43] while at a New Hampshire Turning Point event featuring Rand Paul in October 2019 he claimed that he never said it.[43]
On July 7, 2018, Kirk falsely claimed on social media that Justice Department statistics showed an increase in human trafficking arrests from 1,952 in the year 2016 to 6,087 in the first half of 2018. He deleted the tweet without an explanation the next day, after a fact-checker had pointed out that the false 2018 number had originated on conspiracy site 8chan.[44][45]
In December 2018, Kirk falsely claimed that protesters in the French yellow vests movement chanted "We want Trump." These false claims were later repeated by President Trump himself.[46]
In defending the Trump administration's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Kirk falsely stated that during the H1N1 swine flu pandemic it "took President Barack Obama 'millions infected and over 1,000 deaths'" to declare a public health emergency.[47][48]
Kirk has spread falsehoods about voter fraud[49][50] and the COVID-19 pandemic.[51] According to Forbes, Kirk is known for "his repudiation of liberal college education and embrace of pro-Trump conspiracy theories."[51]
Racial issues
Charlie Kirk in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, November 3, 2022
Kirk has said that the concept of white privilege is a myth and a "racist lie".[52][53][54] Kirk served on President Donald Trump's 1776 Commission, a response to the 1619 Project."[55] During a September 2021 episode of The Charlie Kirk Show, he called for Texas to create a "citizen force" and have them deport Haitians.[56] Assuming "more hard-right positions", he said that Democratic immigration policies were aimed at "diminishing and decreasing white demographics in America".[32][56] In October 2021, Kirk began the "Exposing Critical Racism Tour" of a number of campuses and off-campus venues to "fight racist theories on America's college campuses!!"[57][58] On the Minnesota leg of the tour on October 5, 2021, Kirk called George Floyd a "scumbag" and appeared to refer to the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol when he said that "if you dare walk into the U.S. Capitol building and take a selfie, they'll put you in solitary confinement."[59]
In November 2021 Fox News article, Kirk wrote that state power should be used to stop teachers from indoctrinating children with critical race theory: "directly confronting the left, and promising to fight their illiberal ideology with state power when necessary, is the key to winning everyday Americans."[60][61]
Kirk used to praise Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. prior to December 2023, variously calling him a "hero" and a "civil rights icon"; by December 2023 however, he began to have a negative assessment of King, using a speech at that year's AmericaFest to describe him as "awful [...] not a good person" and as someone who is admired only because he "said one thing he didn't actually believe". The speech also saw Kirk condemn the Civil Rights Act of 1964, calling its passage a "huge mistake" and alleging that it had created a "permanent DEI-type bureaucracy"; he also spoke of the Act as being something that "really weak" federal courts "just yield to [...] as if it's the actual American Constitution" and as having the supposed ultimate aim of "re-found[ing] the [United States] [...] get[ting] rid of the First Amendment".[61] In January 2024, Kirk said that a "myth" had been created around King which had "grown totally out of control" and that King was currently "the most honored, worshipped, even deified person of the 20th century" despite "most people" supposedly disliking him during his life. Responding to accusations by Malcolm Kenyatta that he was working to undermine King and the Voting Rights Act, Kirk called this claim "a lie" and "fear-mongering", and added that telling the "truth" about King "should not be trampling sacred ground" since he was "just a man [...] a very flawed one at that" and a "mythological anti-racist creation of the 1960s". Kirk later claimed to have "found the sacred cow of modern America" in criticizing King.[62]