admin
Nikole Hannah-Jones used The New York Times this week to lecture the country about who may and may not be mourned after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, calling the public outpouring “unsettling” and painting his record as beyond redemption. Her column attempted to recast grief for a fallen conservative as “veneration” of extremism, a tone-deaf decision by a once-notable journalist that reads more like political propaganda than reporting.
Worse, Hannah-Jones slipped into her piece a quote that pushed a hateful caricature of Kirk — the kind of viral, simplistic smear that gets replayed on social media and then treated as fact. Conservative outlets and observers flagged that the claim portraying Kirk as saying Black women “do not have the brain processing power” was being presented in a way that misleads readers and trades on racial outrage rather than careful context.
Reporters and columnists who rush to moralize from the safety of elite bylines owe their readers better than cheap insinuations. When the facts are sharp enough to cut both ways, the duty of a journalist is to present them clearly, not to back-door a viral falsehood into a supposedly serious essay and then pretend the outrage is merely an innocent observation. Hannah-Jones’s response to critics — insisting she “listed the specific women he discussed” while allowing the broader, more inflammatory interpretation to circulate — only underscored the bad faith.
Even the respectable Financial Times was forced to correct a related misquote that had been used to inflame the story, clarifying that the oft-repeated phrasing was not an accurate representation of what Kirk actually said. That correction is an inconvenient truth for the New York Times columnists and left-leaning pundits who treated the viral line as gospel instead of checking the source material. Facts still matter, even when a preferred narrative would be handier.
Megyn Kelly and other honest commentators rightly called this out — not as an exercise in grievance-mongering but as a necessary defense of truth and of decency after a man was murdered. Kelly’s on-air fact-checks and moral outrage were a refreshing reminder that conservative voices will not quietly accept the weaponization of race and death to score political points. This was not sympathy for a political rival; it was a demand that the media stop turning tragedy into a tool for character assassination.
The broader lesson for patriotic Americans is plain: the coastal media elite will use imprecise quotations and moral preening to dismiss and dehumanize conservative leaders the moment it suits their agenda. That pattern didn’t start with Hannah-Jones and it won’t end with her column, which is why bold, principled pushback from independent journalists and commentators is essential. Megyn Kelly and others did exactly what needed to be done — they held the powerful to account when the powerful tried to rewrite reality.
The New York Times and Hannah-Jones should issue a correction, clarify the record, and explain why they thought it appropriate to float such a damaging portrayal in the immediate aftermath of an assassination. If major media institutions want to retain any credibility with ordinary Americans — the hard-working patriots who fund their operations with subscriptions and attention — they must stop treating grief as an opportunity and start treating facts as sacred.
In the end, Charlie Kirk’s family and supporters deserve honest coverage, not bloodless editorializing or opportunistic smears. Conservatives will mourn him and honor his work, and we will also continue to fight for a media culture that values truth over triumphalism. That fight starts with calling out falsehoods when they appear in big newspapers and with standing shoulder to shoulder with voices like Megyn Kelly who refuse to let the record be stolen by the usual suspects.
