Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:The five quotes cited as proof of Charlie Kirk’s racism (Guardian, 9/11/2025) are real but taken out of context. Each, from The Charlie Kirk Show, targets progressive policies like DEI and affirmative action, not Black people inherently. Kirk consistently used data or events to argue these policies foster division and undermine merit. Here’s the context:
1. Black pilot quote (1/23/2024): Discussing a Boeing incident, Kirk criticized airline DEI quotas (e.g., United’s 50% diversity goal), saying they create doubts about qualifications, not that Black pilots are unfit. He opposed Biden’s diversity mandates, advocating colorblind hiring.
2. WNBA quote (12/8/2022): Kirk contrasted Brittney Griner’s prisoner swap with a Marine’s detention, slamming media and Biden for prioritizing “woke” identities. It’s a jab at liberal hypocrisy, not Black lesbians as a group.
3. Referencing a viral NYC Citi Bike dispute, Kirk cited FBI crime stats and blamed “soft-on-crime” Democratic policies for enabling interracial incidents, not generalizing all Black people.
4. Customer service quote (1/3/2024): In a Heather Mac Donald interview, Kirk said affirmative action breeds resentment by making people question hires’ merits. He and Mac Donald (citing NAEP gaps) pushed for meritocracy, not racial inferiority.
5. Affirmative action picks quote (7/13/2023): Reacting to Joy Reid and others admitting affirmative action benefits post-Supreme Court ruling, Kirk called it discriminatory “theft” of opportunities, supporting the Court’s colorblind stance.
1.
Black pilots don't get hired because they are black. They are hired because they pass required certifications. The GOP view, of course, is that if, say, a university aerospace program made a point ot visiting a majority-black high school to encourage students to consider flying as a career, that would be unlawful DEI and they would be investigated by DHHS with threats to their funding.
2. The prisoner exchange was controversial, and the controversy was not entirely on the right. According to Wikipedia, the Russians considered Whelan a spy and wanted a Russian assassin released in exchange for him, where Griner and the arms dealer were only considered criminals. I would also consider that Griner ws a civilian and Whelan did have military background. He had also been court martialed for larceny and given a bad conduct discharge, while also making loans to an FSB friend (which the Russians said was payment for intelligence).
3. The transcript where he is talking about the bike incident is not about soft on crime policies, he is talking about people being conditioned to assume in an interracial confrontation the white person is terrorizing the black person. Although in the same program he refers to blacks "prowling" looking for white people to target. So he's doing the same kind of conditioning in reverse (fwiw let's say there are people who are prowling around who have criminal intent and also happen to be black; the idea that they are "targeting white people" as Kirk says in the transcript is suspect in my view. Then thre's this: Do you know that more than six hundred, is that, is that stat real Blake? C’mon, is it real? I don’t know if that stat is real. Okay, I'm going to say it. More than six hundred white women a year are murdered by Black men. Six hundred white women a year. Did you know that? By Blacks. So six hundred white women are murdered by Blacks a year.
--he freely admits he doesn't know if this is a fact but
" I don’t know if that stat is real. Okay, I'm going to say it." I just happened to check the FBI crime states. They show in 2018 (the most recent year for the data I could find) 1921 female homicide victims, and of those the perpetrator for 745 were black. But they DON'T say how many victims were white. They do say that of 3315 white homicide victims, the offender was black in 514, which is very close to the percentage of the population that is black. So we have 514 white victims of homicides committed by black offenders--how may of them are women? It doesn't say, but given the overall ratio of women killed compared to men, applying that same ratio to 514 victims would yield 150. Did Kirk care about accuracy? No. He wanted to "sociall condition" worries about prowling blacks targeting white women.
4. 1/3/2024: “If I'm dealing with somebody in customer service who's a moronic Black woman, I don't — I wonder, is she there because of her excellence, or is she there because affirmative action? It almost creates thought patterns that are not necessarily wholesome. It creates resentment, doesn't it? This is not a way to design society.” It takes a certain kind of animus to assume that a customer service rep who isn't doing what you want them to do is an affirmative action hire, or. . . just a hire (and I have a suspicion he probably was not very nice to customer service reps). Anyway, customer service is often a high turnover, low rung job and definitely not the kind of job somebody would hit up to get extra credit as an affirmative action hire. If I actually thought about it, I might consider the possibility she's in that job because other opportunities were less available to her than to a white woman with the same education.
5. The affirmative action comments are particularly contemptible. Is this what he thinks about Clarence Thomas? We don't know if Thomas actually was an affirmative action hire, but we do know that Yale had a 10% quota to admit black law students at the time. We also know he was picked for his nomination because it was a "black seat" on the Supreme Court. More to the point, there is no basis to assume that people who DID get their job or their college admission through affirmative action (when it existed) are therefore deficient and "stealing" a spot from a white person. What about Ben Carson? "Still, Carson says he knew his minority background was valuable, saying "most of the top colleges were scrambling to enroll blacks."
"The school reps flocked around me because of my high academic achievements, and because I had done exceptionally well on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), ranking somewhere in the low ninetieth percentile — again, unheard of from a student in the inner city of Detroit," he wrote."--this is from politifact. Not sure what was typical for Yale back in 1969, but low 90s is not that impressive.
You are straining to sugarcoat this.