Stephen King’s horrifying smearing of Charlie Kirk

American horror author Stephen King appears to have been letting his leftish, anti-Trump prejudices get in the way of his judgement recently.

When conservative influencer and free-speech activist Charlie Kirk was publicly assassinated, King’s first reaction was not to express condolences or speak up for free speech. It was to try to dampen down (justified) speculation about a possible link to trans ideology. ‘The motivation of the man who shot Charlie Kirk isn’t clear (although he’s probably mentally unstable – duh)’, he tweeted on the day of the shooting. ‘What is clear is that it was another example of American gun violence.’

King responded similarly following the murder of two children by a trans-identifying shooter at the Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis. ‘Trans is not the problem’, he wrote, pushing his proverbial glasses up his nose with a self-righteous sniff. ‘He had a gun. That’s the problem.’

Of course, by this logic, the issue with the Ku Klux Klan was not that they were white supremacists, but that they had access to rope. It appears that when King can’t square a killer’s identity or motive with his own ideological framework, the weapon fires of its own volition. Which could be the plot of a Stephen King novel.

The fact that King felt the need to dismiss the trans link to Kirk’s killing, and instead to frame it in terms of his own anti-gun agenda, prompted widespread outrage and unease. ‘Why are you like this?’, commented one X user. ‘I am begging you… just shut up’, pleaded another. ‘Offer a moment of condolence or kindness.’

Responding to his critics, King then said something genuinely horrifying. In a now-deleted tweet, he said of Kirk: ‘He advocated stoning gays to death. Just sayin.’

This statement not only had the unmistakable air of ‘I’m not saying he deserved to die, but…’ – it was also entirely false. Kirk never called for gay people to be stoned to death. This was a straight-up smear, against a man who could no longer defend himself. The smear has also been repeated by The Rest is Politics host Alastair Campbell and TV presenter Terry Christian.

This widely shared misquote is based on a clip of Kirk referencing Leviticus 18, which says those who ‘lay with another man shall be stoned to death’. This chapter, Kirk says, ‘affirms God’s perfect law when it comes to sexual matters’. Yet heard in its full context, Kirk is actually drawing attention to the problem of selectively quoting scripture. He is not advocating for the murder of gay people. Moreover, as many social-media users proceeded to show King, there are many clips illustrating Kirk’s support for gay rights.

Unwittingly, King demonstrated the modern left’s moral rot. So convinced are its members of their own virtue, they are only too willing to believe the absolute worst of their opponents. And so King blithely swallowed and shared out-of-context clips that were being used to justify the assassination of a man who debated college kids for a living. A killing that left two infant children bereft of their dad.

King deserves credit for apologising for the smear. Still, his reaction did unwittingly what many of his great novels once sought to – hold up a mirror to the era, and expose the horrors it would rather not confront. The terrible tragedy of Charlie Kirk really has brought the intolerance of liberal America to the surface.

Georgina Mumford is a spiked intern.