It happens every time. Quote some detestable thing that Charlie Kirk once said, and a MAGA will respond, “Now now, you librulz are just taking him out of context.” Quite often, conservatives give the impression that they believe “context” is a get-out-of-jail card for bigotry. Well hey, let’s examine that defense, shall we? After all, sometimes context does indeed make all the difference in the world.

MAGA cultists have often quoted Hillary Clinton as saying “Who cares?” during the lengthy hearings about the terrorist attack in Benghazi (hearings they staged just because they could, and because they have an insatiable appetite for cheap political points). But she wasn’t referring to the attack itself. She was referring to the question of whether that attack was inspired by a video. Oh yes, and she didn’t say “Who cares?”. She said, “What difference at this point does it make?”. They altered not only the context of her words, but her actual words.

They also love to quote Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous adage about judging people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin, and suggest it’s proof that he was “colorblind” — and even that he wasn’t really supportive of campaigns for racial equality. But putting that kind of twist on that one line requires not only ignoring but contradicting the rest of the speech it was taken from, and indeed King’s entire life work.

Another of their favorite quotes on the matter of race is from Margaret Sanger:

We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population

This is often cited as “proof” that she had genocidal dreams, and therefore so do all advocates for reproductive freedom, and therefore so do all on the Left.

But it’s only the first part of a sentence that she actually uttered. The next part is:

and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.

The context makes it clear her intent was actually the opposite of what the fragment suggests. Or does the fragment really suggest such a thing? When you really think about it, “We do not want the word to go out”, even without “context”, does not automatically suggest that what follows is reality. It’s just the presumption some people chose to push.

So what about Saint Charlie? How do his verbal gems stack up when they are aided and abetted by context? The short answer is, not very well at all. Context does little if anything to alter his meaning; if anything, it actually makes his remarks overall sound worse.

One possible exception — and we really must emphasize possible — is the claim that he declared gay people should be stoned to death. Stephen King caught a great deal of flak for repeating that one, and he issued an apology. (Note to right-wingers: an apology is an expression of regret for something you did or said.) What Charlie actually said was that a passage in the Bible said gays should be stoned; and he brought that up in response to someone quoting a biblical passage suggesting we should love gays, because he wanted to illustrate that one can cherry pick “scripture” to support whatever one chooses to believe. (Excellent point, Charlie. Did you ever tell that to fundamentalists?) So he really didn’t believe in stoning gays.

Or did he?

If we’re going to talk context, we must note that in the same breath he refers to the stoning edict as “God’s perfect law”, which he says the passage “affirms”. Doesn’t that sound suspiciously like an endorsement?

Another one that gets picked over a lot is the claim that Kirk said black women

do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.

This wasn’t really racist, his defenders say, because he didn’t actually say “black women”; he specifically named Joy Reid, Michelle Obama, the late Sheila Jackson Lee, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Okay, fine. But what do all of these individuals have in common? Well, they are all highly accomplished professionals who overcame tremendous obstacles to get where they did. Oh yes, and they’re also all black women. So what exactly do you suppose was his basis for saying that they did not have “brain processing power”, and “had to steal a white person’s slot”? The very notion of a white person having a “slot” is itself pretty telling.

On a related note, his fans also make quite an effort to spin away this one:

If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified.’

And why exactly would he suspect that a black pilot would not be qualified? If anything, he should suspect that a black pilot would be superbly qualified, given that he/ she would have had to surmount all kinds of obstacles and handicaps to get into the cockpit. But in the myth promoted by people like Charlie Kirk, “DEI hires” are people who are given a job only because of their ethnicity or other minority demographic rather than because of skill and expertise. They believe, in other words, that in order to engage minority employees, employers must lower their standards. And why exactly would anyone promote such a pernicious myth? Say it with me: racism. And no amount of “context” can change that.

And then there is perhaps the most deservedly notorious snippet of them all:

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.

His gracious inclusion of “unfortunately” does not alter, unfortunately, the unequivocal meaning of his comment: he believed that gun deaths were “worth it” to have nonexistent “Second Amendment rights” and the protection against a tyrannical government, a protection that exists exclusively in Cloud Cuckoo Land . In “context”, he trotted out the hoary false equivalence of automobile deaths, and acknowledged that we should try to reduce gun fatalities — but provided rather naive suggestions for how to do so. And after all of this, the bottom line is this: given a choice between guns and protecting children, he chose the guns. It’s ironic but fitting that ultimately guns chose him.

There are also many other vile things he said that cannot be “contexted” away. He said the passage of the Civil Rights Act was a mistake. He said women should submit to their husbands. He said Paul Pelosi’s attacker should be bailed out by some “patriot”. And he did say, “America’s largest city was attacked by radical Islam 24 years ago, and now a similar form of that pernicious force is poised to capture city hall”, in reference to a Muslim candidate for mayor. And many, many other stupid and hateful things.

Nor was his loathsomeness limited to quotable lines of verbiage. He also promoted the white supremacist Great Replacement Theory, spread baseless claims about COVID and vaccines, repeated antisemitic tropes, promoted lies about the 2020 election, assisted in busing insurrectionists to the Capitol, spread religious bigotry, and disparaged George Floyd shortly after his murder, among many other things. One of his very last conversations on earth involved giving legs to the lie that transgenders are disproportionately violent.

In fact, if you really want to understand the intent of Charlie Kirk’s words, the best context of all is the entirety of his own life. And that context is not pretty. (Update: there is now a website collecting vile Charlie Kirk statements.)