Stephen King apologizes for falsely claiming Charlie Kirk ‘advocated stoning gays to death’

King, the author of many horror novels, took to X in the hours after Kirk's death, and wrote that the commentator "advocated stoning gays to death" in a since-deleted post. After posting the comment, he was railed by others online for the false statements and eventually made an apology about the post.

"I apologize for saying Charlie Kirk advocated stoning gays. What he actually demonstrated was how some people cherry-pick Biblical passages," King wrote.

In the initial post, King had been responding to Jesse Watters, who wrote online that Kirk "was not a 'controversial' or 'polarizing' man. Charlie was a PATRIOT."

Many, including gay Republicans, railed against the post, calling on him to take it down. Dave Rubin, who is a married gay man, wrote in a post in response, "Hey Stephen King, you are more monstrous than any of the characters you ever came up with. Charlie was never anything but kind to me and my husband. We broke bread many times, and he never treated us with anything other than respect. He even came to our house not too long ago and plot twist, didn’t throw rocks at us. Write about that sometime, you hack."

After apologizing, King made sure to quote a number of other posts to clarify that he had apologized and was wrong.

Other false information about Kirk was spread online in light of his killing by left-wing accounts, including clips of the commentator taken out of context. One was that Kirk did not believe in empathy, because the commentator had said that “I can’t stand the word empathy, I think empathy is a made up new age term and it does a lot of damage.”

The quote was taken out of context of what he said afterwards, which was that “Sympathy is a better word, because empathy means you are actually feeling what another person felt, and nobody can feel what another person feels.”

People have also claimed that Kirk was in support of his killing, citing a quote from the commentator that read, "It’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the 2nd Amendment intact."

At the time, the full passage of what Kirk had made a comparison to the deaths we have from driving, "Having an armed citizenry comes with a price, and that is part of liberty. Driving comes with a price. 50,000 people die on the road every year. That's a price. You get rid of driving, you'd have 50,000 less auto fatalities. But we have decided that the benefit of driving — speed, accessibility, mobility, having products, services — is worth the cost of 50,000 people dying on the road. So we need to be very clear that you're not going to get gun deaths to zero. It will not happen.

"You could significantly reduce them through having more fathers in the home, by having more armed guards in front of schools. We should have a honest and clear reductionist view of gun violence, but we should not have a utopian one. You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won't have a single gun death. That is nonsense. It's drivel. But I think it's worth it. I think it's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational. Nobody talks like this. They live in a complete alternate universe," Kirk added at the time.