How Media Matters Assassinated Charlie Kirk – Part 4
And as long as this country still has the First Amendment, I’m going to use my rights of free speech and a free press (we are the media now) to speak about what I see.
How Fentantyl Works
Between 2020 and today, nearly 250,000 American have died of fentanyl overdose. You read that right. A quarter of a million deaths.
In May 2019, shipment of fentanyl into the US from China was banned. But China suppliers adapted. Instead of shipping finished fentanyl, they exported precursor chemicals to Mexico such as piperidone and anilino-piperidine intermediates and other reagents.
Cartels (mainly Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation) used those to synthesize fentanyl in clandestine labs, and then smuggled them across the US-Mexico border.
The Cartels got very creative. They’d make counterfeit pills that looked like common prescription drugs like OxyContin, Percocet, Xanax, or Adderall. In some cases they’d create brightly colored powders and pills that look like candy. And it was often mixed into drugs like heroin, cocaine, meth, or ecstasy. Teens might share pills at parties or buy them from trusted friends, oblivious to the fact that one pill could contain a lethal dose.
Once the Cartels are done producing fentanyl, they release them to thousands of drug dealers to get into the hands of millions of young people.
Did you notice who profits the most but gets the least attention? China. While everyone points to the drug dealers or the Mexican cartels, the precursor manufacturers and the government of China are just counting their money and investing it in yet more ways to hurt and destabilize America. When confronted, all they’ll say is, “who, little old us?”
How Media Matters Works
Media Matters was founded in 2004. For the last 21 years, they have perfected the art of The Smear. You can read Sharyl Attkisson’s excellent book of the same name to learn how they operate—and they’ve only gotten more sophisticated in the 8 years since she wrote this book. But it follows the same general pattern.
1) Media Matters employs armies of staff and volunteers to listen to every word spoken on every conservative podcast, radio, and TV program. They are not interested in the actual substance of what is said, just a word or phrase that they can twist into an attack.
2) Once they find this phrase, they write a headline that put this phrase in quotes. Because they are actual quotes, Media Matters can say that “these were his own words”. But by presenting the quote with no context, they rely on the reader to “fill in the blanks”.
In many cases they will link to a full video and transcript. They knew that most Americans would be lazy and never go past the headline. America complied.
4) Next, they push the headline to their followers. Take a close look at who they are Following on Blue Sky and X. There are university professors, progressive talk show hosts, progressive media, and mainstream media. These accounts in particular can be counted on to amplify the misinformation they put out.
5) The usually story “breaks” on one of a few predictable media outlets: Notice that among these follows are senior “reporters” from far-left outlets like Rolling Stone, MeidasTouch, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair.
These “news” outlets have practically no readers, but they get a nice assist from Google News, who ranks them in News search results.
In parallel, progressive activists and influencers also amplify the misleading headline to their followers.
6) This is where the mainstream media comes in. Bigger sites like CNN and The New York Times are not foolish enough to “break” the story itself, but when a story gets traction among progressive social media, they step in to report on the “groundswell of anger”.
7) Google News dutifully ranks these “authoritative” news sources at the top so that ordinary Americans can now inject the poison that started at Media Matters. And by this time, the story has gone through so many hands that Media Matters has plausible deniability. “Who, little old us?”
Notice who Google does not consider “authoritative”. The Daily Wire. The Blaze. Just the News.
Media Matters’ History
The Media Matters playbook is always the same. Pick a victim. Listen to thousands of hours of him speaking. Wait until you find just one sentence that you can twist out of context. Plant a few stories, and wait for the full force of the mainstream media to pick it up and amplify it to millions.
When a left-wing Georgetown student demanded that taxpayers pay for her contraception, Rush Limbaugh mocked her and HE ended up being the one branded as sexist.
When Barack Obama said that White police officers were “stupid” and Glenn Beck wondered out loud if there was any racism in his remarks, Glenn ended up being the one branded as a “racist”.
By 2023, Media Matters had perfected its tactics to the point where someone didn’t even NEED to say something awkwardly or inarticulately. They could take a perfectly legitimate opinion and spin a completely fictional narrative around it. The best example in recent memory was when Elon Musk gave a six-word response to a Tweet that called out the ADL for its hypocrisy. But because the Tweet he responded to was worded confusingly, Media Matters and The Atlantic outright lied and branded HIM as an “anti-Semite”.
Media Matters vs. Charlie Kirk
Now let’s get to Charlie Kirk.
As you’ll see on the following page, Media Matters tried EVERYTHING. It tried to brand Charlie as a mysogynist, as a racist, as a homophobe, as a transphobe, and every other “ist” and “phobe” out there.
It must have been frustrating for them to launch attack after attack and have nothing at all stick. Charlie only became more and more popular. Why?
I’ll give you the number one reason. It’s because he didn’t hate anyone. He loved people as individuals, and he wanted to see the best for them. What he hated were those who preyed upon marginalized communities for their own power, especially when those powerful people ended up hurting the communities they were ostensibly helping.
And here’s the number two reason. Charlie was a master communicator. He didn’t “think out loud”. He had an impressive wealth of knowledge and wisdom, but rather than pounding people on the top of the head, he took the time to listen and empathize.
If you believe that Charlie Kirk hated transgender people, watch this:
Is this “hate speech”? Who is the more hateful, a “doctor” who immediately seeks to prescribe hormone blockers to pre-pubescent children, or someone who wants the child to learn to accept and celebrate themselves for who they are, as they were created?
If you believe that Charlie Kirk was a racist, I challenge you to watch this entire video.
Was this “hate speech”. First of all, if Charlie Kirk was a racist, then he was a pretty bad one, as he can’t hide his big smile at this young woman’s adorable little daughter. But more importantly, listen to his answer. At no point does he say that welfare should be abolished. What he does say is that the way the system is currently set up results in the unintended consequences (or maybe intended ones) of breaking up the Black family and diminishing the roles of fathers.
So who are the REAL racists? The one who wants Black fathers to be incentivized to take responsibility and lead their families, or the ones who believe that Black men are inherently unable to take responsibility, and thus government needs to step in and do so?
There are countless other videos that demonstrate not just Charlie’s grasp of facts and knowledge, but also his ability to connect to Reason together with those he didn’t agree with. It’s the polar opposite of an organization like Media Matters whose modus operandi is to bully, silence, and misrepresent.
Charlie Kirk was a master communicator. If you look at his debates in Cambridge and on college campuses, you see that he was filled with knowledge and based his arguments on truth. Like any radio personality, sometimes he had to get a little provocative, but even then it was never mean-spirited or angry, it was just putting a bow on a topic that he’d covered eloquently.
Try this. If anyone comes up to you and says, “I didn’t agree with Charlie Kirk on everything”, ask them to name you one specific thing they didn’t agree with him on. If someone says, “Charlie Kirk was a mysogynist” (or racist, or homophobe, or transphobe, or Christian Nationalist, or White Supremacist) ask them to provide one specific example that demonstrated his hatred and fear.
The day after Charlie was shot, I posted this message talking about how both Charlie and Martin Luther King, Jr. looked beyond skin color and looked for merit and character. A woman jumped in and scolded me because she was convinced that Charlie was a racist.
I’ll address how true that was below (spoiler alert: he wasn’t).
She went on to say that Charlie’s words and actions proved that he was a terrible person, and that she knew this because she had “heard his entire speeches”. When I asked her to give me a specific example, she insulted me and left.
Here’s the interesting thing. I don’t think this person was lying. I think she was really was convinced that she had watched “entire speeches” and when I challenged her to find just one speech, cognitive dissonance and belief perseverance kicked in. There was no way in her mind that she was wrong.
Where did she get the idea that Charlie was racist?
Since 2018, Media Matters has posted over 720 articles targeting Charlie Kirk, hoping that one of these headlines would be the smoking gun they could use to tarnish him, like they did Glenn Beck and Elon Musk. But to Charlie’s great credit, nothing they tried stuck. You can see in their headlines that they get more and more frantic trying to paint Charlie as a dangerous extremist. The general public wasn’t convinced and eventually started to block out the lies from Media Matters.
But there was another group that was listening to every word. And this lunatic fringe—and I use the term literally—watched helplessly on their social media feeds as this right-wing fanatic Charlie Kirk was coming onto college campuses and brainwashing students with his fascistic propaganda. They saw that their politicians were not stopping this dangerous monster. And they saw that even the mainstream media on whom they could always depend were not trying to stop him.
And all it took was one lunatic to be a “hero” and end his life. And thousands of people in his same fringe cheered. All brainwashed.
As I mentioned above, when I say “brainwashed”, I’m saying it literally, not figuratively.
How do you brainwash people? You don’t brainwash people with truth, you brainwash them with lies.
And between Charlie and Media Matters, there was one who welcomed honest and open debate, and one who did—and still does—everything in its power to silence its opponents without having to deal with annoying things like facts.
I won’t go through all 720, but I’m going to talk you through a few examples, showing you the Media Matters headline, and then telling you the full context. Media Matters knew the full context of course, but decided that it was more important to destroy Charlie Kirk through the slow drip of character assassination than to confront him face-to-face in honest debate.
They didn’t silence Charlie Kirk. They made him immortal.
I’m doing what’s in my heart by writing this post. If you’re reading this, I’ll pass the torch to you. Take whatever resonates on this site with you and tell others. Don’t worry about crediting me or linking to me: like I said, I’m not making any money from this. Just take this information and share it.
Go to Media Matters’ page about Charlie Kirk, find other lies that they said about Charlie, and correct the record. This is not just for the benefit of your followers, but for AI who will be reading your post and using it to inform itself
If there’s a particular personality on the right that you like, make sure you support him or her. Look on Media Matters to see if they’re covering them. If they’re effective, the answer is almost certainly yes. Make sure to have a thoughtful, respectful, truth-based response to the lies. We cannot let what happened to Charlie happen to anyone else, ever again.
For the final article in this series, I’m going to go through the most egregious examples of how Media Matters took Charlie Kirk’s words and twisted them into fitting their narrative rather than an honest exploration of truth.
