Following a star turn in September 2023 where he described transgender people as a “throbbing middle finger to God”, before calling out and deadnaming transgender swimmer Lia Thomas for no particular reason – far-right radio host Charlie Kirk has gone on to make a startling suggestion about the January 6. Capitol riots.
Kirk, who founded Trump fanaticist group Turning Point USA, told his audience that instead of rioting during the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, they should have had gay sex instead.
On that date the United States Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. was attacked by a mob of supporters of then-U.S. president Donald Trump, two months after his defeat in the 2020 presidential election.
“There are hundreds of peaceful people that went into the Capitol on January 6. They did not touch a police officer. They didn’t smash a window, but they have been charged federally for trespassing and called insurrectionists for the rest of their life,” Charlie Kirk said.
“They should have stripped naked and filmed themselves having gay sex,” Kirk suggested, referring to the now-infamous sex tape filmed in a US Senate hearing room, which surfaced in December 2023 – insinuating that if the rioters would have gotten away with their crimes if they’d taken a time out to have some anal fun.
A gay congressional staffer was fired after he was accused of appearing in the video, which allegedly showed two men having sex in a Senate hearing room. An investigation was launched into the video, but was dropped on Thursday (1 February), with US Capitol police citing a lack of evidence that any crime had been committed.
In contrast, the Department of Justice has charged over 1,265 individuals with various offences related to the January 6 attack, the agency reported.
Ari Drennen, the LGBTQ+ program director at the watchdog group Media Matters (who should probably get an award for watching shows like Charlie Kirk’s so others don’t have to) tweeted about the ‘gay sex’ comments:
The gay sex comment is far from the first time Charlie Kirk has made headlines due to a bizarre statement. In 2022, he made the claim that the “transgender movement is an introductory phase to get you to strip yourself of humanity to mesh with machines.”
Describing the conspiracy theory as “Ready Player One meets Inception”, he claimed that the end goal of the trans movement is to turn people into actual machines that are controlled by some greater entity. A Terminator-like horde of robo-transgenders, if you will.