Stephen King is a talented writer and master of his genre. He is also a typical knee-jerk New England Democrat whose political and social commentary has exactly as much value as Cliff’s at Cheers after four or five beers. He really stepped into the metaphorical “it” with the tweet above, for which he was roundly pummeled on social media and had to grovel an apology after Ted Cruz launched a particularly harsh attack, called the author a “horrible, evil, twisted liar” in his response.
King’s slur was in reference to comments Kirk made on his podcast in 2024, in which Kirk criticized children’s YouTube star Ms. Rachel for citing God’s wish for Christians to “love thy neighbor” in Leviticus, and added that the exhortation should include gay people. Kirk pointed out that citing scripture as authority had obvious drawbacks, noting, “By the way, Ms. Rachel, you might want to crack open that Bible of yours. In a lesser reference, part of the same part of scripture, in Leviticus 18, is that ‘thou shall lay with another man shall be stoned to death.’ Just saying.”
He did not, obviously, advocate stoning gays to death.
Caught, King tried to lie his way out of his own unmasking. “The horrible, evil, twisted liar apologizes. This is what I get for reading something on Twitter [without] fact-checking. Won’t happen again,” King wrote after deleting the tweet. “I apologize for saying Charlie Kirk advocated stoning gays. What he actually demonstrated was how some people cherry-pick Biblical passages,” the 77-year-old author wrote.
But King already knew what Kirk meant, and has issued the lie anyway. How do we know that? We know because he mocked Kirk’s “just saying,” which means King knew what Kirk had said, and misrepresented it anyway as part of the Left’s desperate efforts to spin away the significance of Kerk’s assassination.
Boy, are they terrified of a tipping point! Good. They should be. Watching fish struggle when hooked is repulsive: it’s why I never could stand fishing. Watching the Axis thrash around now? Wonderful.
King and the rest, are showing the nation who they are.
Ethics Alarms 
The left, collectively, are tainted by the shocking number of ghouls in their ranks.
No, not every left-leaning person is a ghoul, but what’s gobsmacking to me is how few of them are taking their crazies to task. Instead, they are lamenting a conservative “cancel culture,” which this manifestly is not.
Getting someone fired for a 20-year old tweet is “cancel culture.” Getting someone fired because they believe transgender people are mentally infirm is “cancel culture.” In other words, getting people fired because of a debatable opinion is “cancel culture.”
Getting someone fired for dancing on the grave of a person unlawfully killed in front of his family while speaking to a group of college students is not “cancel culture.” It is justified societal opprobrium for awful, unethical behavior that casts significant doubt on their possession of important qualities of caring, fairness, respect and humanity that are absolutely required for a society to function even at a basic level. Even if one could rationally argue that world is a better place without Kirk in it, celebrating murder has been a societal taboo for most of human history, and certainly since the founding of this country.
On top of all that, no one I have seen on the left finds it the least bit troubling that a man fired a shot into an area where many innocents stood, not just Kirk. What if the shooter had killed a bystander (who would’ve been just a college student, most likely), like Corey Comperatore, a firefighter and father, was when a leftist tried to kill Trump?
How is it possible that leftist politics have left so many people without any discernible feelings for anyone other than those who agree with them? Their souls seem to be as dead as their ethics alarms.
Very elegant comment, Glenn. As I’ve been reduced to asking, “What is wrong with these people?”
Thanks.
Outstanding thoughts, Glenn. I especially appreciated your thoughts on those around Kirk and the link back to Butler.
Thanks.
It looks like Glenn is going to acquire an Oak Leaf Cluster for his earlier COTD.
Well done, Glenn.
Thanks!
I don’t think it matters what extreme political side they are on or what side is to “blame”. Both sides need to tamp down on their crazies. This school shooting happened at almost the same time as the assassination. The political left and right are not allowed to “take the high road”. It’s not about what side did what this time. There’s a social sickness in the political arena that needs addressed by everyone. https://coloradosun.com/2025/09/12/evergreen-high-school-shooting-suspect-social-media/
Demeter
I read the link and wondered how the Sheriffs department had what looked like a mug shot without the height register when they say they had never any contact with him given that he killed himself after the shooting. I suppose it could be a personal photo but who takes photos against a blank wall except for passport photos. His parents should be charged with the class 4 felony the article mentions.
It looks like a cropped photo to me. Perhaps part of a group picture. I don’t think he had that gun very long and I am not convinced it was owned by his parents. I’m sure we will know soon about that. As a parent of a teen boy myself it’s definitely a concern with personal autonomy and oversight.
This strikes me as a false equivalence. There are extremists on the right, but what has traction in mainstream conservative circles is in no way extreme, no matter what the NYT tells you, and what’s extreme (like the ideology of racist mass shooters like Evergreen, Charleston, or Buffalo) does not get support from conservatives. You won’t find conservative public officials, teachers, or prominent professionals openly supporting these ideas on social media under their real names. Conversely, we do see celebrities, public school teachers, university administrators, journalists and others on the left publicly celebrating political assassinations (and this isn’t the first, nor even the first this year) under their real names. They’re shocked to feel a backlash over it. They don’t know they’re extremists, and that’s because the mainstream left has become so extreme itself.
Well done, Dave. A false equivalent indeed. Thanks for treating the subject so concisely and pointedly.
Glenn’s comment shows how important it is to think before we go off half cocked and give the opposition something they consider evidence of authoritarian behavior of the right. I just finished explaining to a friend that demanding prosecutions for those persons who yell we are Nazis and Trump is Hitler. Glenn shows in his writing that you can make your points better by focusing on the issues and not vengeance. Anger in the face of this killing is appropriate but that anger must be turned into legitimate consequential action. I would recommend that we might consider eliminating the malice requirement in civil actions and replace it with something that does not create liability for errors but holds people accountable for continuing to use libelous or slanderous statements as fact based opinions. Pejorative terms have no place in the mainstream press.
So much idiocy this week. USA Today made a Democratic Party Talking Points article about how the MAGA narrative is wrong because Tyler the Murderer comes from a Republican family.
So, are they seriously arguing that, if you come from a Republican family, you’re one, too?
Don’t tell my sister that.
If I bump into your sister, I’m going to tell her that.
“Watching fish struggle when hooked is repulsive: it’s why I never could stand fishing. Watching the Axis thrash around now? Wonderful.”
The is a saying that fish rots from the head down. The head in this case are the top representatives of the Democrat party. What we need and are missing is for these leaders to have a Sister Souljah moment after the assassination, and all the crazy responses by the left.
During the primaries phase of the presidential campaign of 1992 Governor Clinton needed to distance himself from another contender for the nomination, Jesse Jackson. Sister Souljah had made some really hateful remarks against whites after the Rodney King riots in LA. Jesse Jackson invited both Bill Clinton and Sister Souljah to speak for a conference of the Rainbow Coalition, and Bill Clinton used that opportunity to criticize her words with “If you took the words ‘white’ and ‘black,’ and you reversed them, you might think David Duke was giving that speech”.
The Democrats do not have the leadership to shame and shut down the crazies. Instead you see too many Democrat representatives and senators adding fuel to the fire.
Maybe this is the wrong week to look forward to the midterms, but do they deserve an obliterating defeat of the Democrats.
Not to forget, there are elections in November. The campaign ads for the Republicans write themselves:
And they wrote themselves before Kirk’s assassination and the Axis reaction.
“Boy, are they terrified of a tipping point!”
Indeed. The Resistance (TM) has been wailing and gnashing its teeth since the assassination, depicting itself as the incipient innocent victim of extremist right-wing “backlash,” with tales of high anxiety and lost sleep. The projection is off the charts.
I’m glad the Democrats don’t have anyone to perform a Sister Souljah moment. Too many independents might take it at face value and vote for the Democrats. But the Democrats have made it clear that their party cannot be trusted with power.
Except for local and maybe a few state-level offices where they can be held accountable by voters, I want the Democrats in the wilderness for a generation or more–as long as it takes to purge the “progressive” brownshirts, the totalitarian globalists, and the Pfizer fascists from the party’s ranks.
Speaking as a former Democrat.
I have now seen more than a dozen articles about people getting suspended or fired or just chewed out for making social media posts praising the assassination of Charlie Kirk. This is the flood of firings five years ago for something as simple as raising your right hand come full circle. I don’t think I’m wrong if I say that probably a lot of the people getting fired now because they said openly that Charlie Kirk deserved to die or whatever are the same people who were pressing for the firing and personal destruction of people in 2020 who dared to say anything other than the party line then.
I don’t know if JK Rowling is the one who originated this statement, but it is correct that if you are someone who simply won’t listen to other viewpoints you are illiberal, if you are someone who believes no viewpoint other than yours has any value you are a fundamentalist, if you are someone who wants to use the force of government to silence those whose opinions differ from yours, you are a totalitarian, and if you are someone who believes that those who have differing viewpoints from yours should be killed, you are a terrorist.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk was no different than an IRA sniper shooting a Protestant dead as he leaves the pub on Saturday night or the UDL taking a Catholic on his last ride later that night to even up the score. It was no different than Nazi stormtroopers beating someone senseless in the street because he would not give the Nazi salute. It was also no different than 19 radicalized young men flying airlines into buildings to kill those they hated. If you are cheering on this kind of behavior, or if you think that is the way to handle political disagreements or to deal with those you dislike I think you need to look in the mirror. I also think you need to look ahead and consider what might follow an action like this.
You probably thought it was perfectly okay what happened in 2020 when 58 people were killed and billions of dollars worth of property was destroyed because of the unjust killing of one man. Have you considered what might happen now because of this unjust killing? Going by your logic, it would be perfectly okay now if the same treatment was visited on you. It’s unlikely to be, because the political right is not generally given to mob violence. However, there are people on the extreme right who will resort to violent tactics. Don’t be surprised if the rest of us look the other way on or won’t prevent that kind of behavior. Also don’t be surprised if law enforcement and the system throws the proverbial book at tactics it looked the other way on previously. If you’re just being fired or suspended for being a terrorist enabler, I’d say you’re getting off damned easy.
Grateful to UO football coach Dan Lanning for what he said yesterday about Charlie Kirk, who was a big Ducks fan (I am also a Duck). The march in Kirk’s memory today ended at UO’s Hayward Field and was estimated at a thousand people. Here’s an excerpt from Lanning:
“I think the US could learn a lot from our locker room. I think the people of this world could learn a lot from our locker room. You walk into that locker room and you’ve got guys of different races, guys of different backgrounds, different religions, and you’ve got a team that loves each other. Like tons of differences. Where they come from, what they deal with and ultimately you have a team that loves each other. I think we’re missing some of that in our country.
…”Every day it seems like we deal with some sort of violence in our country, whether it’s school kids in Colorado, or kids in Minnesota churches. Life matters. I think we’ve lost sight of that…
“At some point, we need to go look at sports because what our football team has is people on both sides of the fence. There’s fans that love our team that have a lot of different opinions, and the truth is there’s a lot of things Charlie said that I do not agree with at all. There’s a lot of things that I did agree with. But what’s disappointing is that I can respect those differences and somebody else couldn’t, and they thought that they deserved to be God in that moment, and they didn’t. Nobody should have to experience that. I’ve got a lot of disappointment. We had a bible study with our team. We talked about it with our team. I think our team feels the same way. Regardless of views, I don’t think they feel anybody deserves to experience what some people in our country are experiencing right now. It’s super disappointing.”
Something else that give me hope re the often sickening reactions to Charlie Kirk’s death — I just watched a TikTok of Dean Withers (liberal known for debating conservatives, so actually kind of a Kirk figure on the other side of the political divide) weeping as he talks about his grief at Kirk’s death. Apparently he was streaming the video when he learned the news (I think?)
“I’m sorry that you guys have to see me like this. You know, I see a handful of people saying, “Maybe you should take a second” in the stream. I kind of want you guys to see this. I want you to see how I feel because there are so many people in here right now and I want to, if I can, set the tone for what the public’s response to this is,” Withers said.
“Even though, of course I didn’t like the guy I still talked to him multiple times. I sat down with him. That was somebody that I sat across the table from.”
“Gun violence is sickening and wrong. If you celebrate this, if you don’t condemn it, if you’re happy… than there is a clear line between me and you and you are not a fan. I do not support you and I do not want you to support me. If you claim to be an individual who wants to end gun violence then you are contradicting your values to their core, if you celebrate it. And if you see anyone celebrating it, happy with it, okay with it… please call them out.”
And, actually, I DO see some people calling out some of their FB friends on social media who are saying some version of “oh he didn’t support gun control (or something) so he got what he deserved….” That also gives me hope…
The sheer amount of vile reactions to Charlie Kirk’s death is astounding, and shows us how many people think the death of someone they disagree with is good. There is a TikTok video out there of people out on the street in Seattle protesting a Charlie Kirk vigil who told an interviewer that they would have no problem with shooting Charlie Kirk himself.
The many soul dead reactions raises the concern of how many more potential assassins are walking around. Will there be more assassinations by the hard left in the near future? More school shootings by transgender activists?
There is at least one such vile tweet from somebody working at the Secret Service. This raises questions about the inept handling in Butler PA during the first assassination attempt at Trump: was this failure due to somebody at the Secret Service wanting Trump dead?
Given the prayer vigils for Charlie Kirk I am not concerned at all from violent counterreactions of MAGA conservatives, as they believe in law and order. We did not see burning cars and boarded up shopwindows as after the death of George Floyd. We will have to see what the Trump administration is going to do, and I hope that it will be very effective.
I have seen a number of YouTube videos that if political violence by the left is matched with counterviolence by the right the violence may metastasize and escalate creating the conditions of a civil war. My gut feeling is that we should not panic about this, given the restrained reactions of conservatives.
How does a smart man as Stephen King spout such stupid things? He lives isolated in a cabin deep in the forests of Maine, having contact with the outside world mostly online. My impression is that radicalization of people is related to loneliness and social isolation, social media algorithms that automatically create your echo chambers with extreme content getting the most clicks, Reddit boards and other internet communities dominated by the edgiest shit lords, reduced person to person contact, and loss of religion; there are most likely a whole lot more reasons.