Erika Kirk slammed journalists and the political left after a gunman was charged with trying to assassinate President Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
“There is a serious epidemic of dehumanization plaguing this country,” Kirk said in a video posted to social media.
Kirk attended the annual gathering of political figures, journalists and celebrities in Washington, D.C., when gunshots rang out on April 25.
An armed man stormed through a checkpoint outside the dinner and was stopped by law enforcement. Secret Service agents whisked the president off stage in a chaotic scene.
California teacher Cole Tomas Allen, 31, was charged with attempting to assassinate the president, among other alleged crimes.
Kirk described what she saw and slammed the political “far left” in a video filmed from “The Charlie Kirk Show” podcast studio.
People are also reading…
“While we may have big problems with illegal immigration in this country, I have to tell you, we have an even bigger problem when it comes to the systemic indoctrination and radicalization of our own citizens,” Kirk said. “This is what got my husband killed. This is what has led to three legitimate attempts on President Trump's life.”
The jarring incident at the Washington Hilton was personal for Kirk, the chair and CEO of the Phoenix-based Turning Point USA. Her husband, the conservative activist Charlie Kirk, was assassinated in September in Utah.
CEO of Turning Point USA Erika Kirk, seen here at a Turning Point USA event earlier this month in Phoenix, put out a video in which she slams the media, critics and the political left after a gunman was charged with trying to assassinate President Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
Kirk said her late husband started Turning Point USA because “he didn’t trust the radicalized liberal teachers.”
“This past Saturday, it was a school teacher, of all people, a school teacher that attempted to change our history for the worse, with bullets,” Erika Kirk said. “He's so unhinged that he is able to teach children by day and then attempt to murder the president of the United States by night.”
Kirk has been mocked online for attending the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. In a widely shared clip, Kirk could be seen crying and saying she just wanted to go home as she fled the ballroom.
She criticized reporters for having a different reaction to the attack, accusing them of breaking a journalism rule and making the incident about themselves. Many journalists rushed to capture the event with their smartphones and reported from the scene.
“During an act of shooting, these journalists are using their phones to find moments to capture for clips. They were so concerned about getting a video in a room with an active shooter that they could have accidentally and quite literally filmed themselves being shot,” Erika Kirk said. “Many of those people have become so desensitized that fight-or-flight became secondary to the opportunity of putting themselves into the story, which ironically breaks the number one rule of journalism.”
Erika Kirk responded to Candace Owens and Druski
Kirk tied the latest attack on Trump to her husband’s assassination. Charlie Kirk was shot and killed while debating college students at a Turning Point event on the Utah Valley University campus in September. Utah man Tyler Robinson was charged with Charlie Kirk’s murder.
In the months since her husband was killed, Kirk has been the subject of online attacks, including from the right-wing podcaster Candace Owens.
A former friend of Charlie Kirk's, Owens has relied on anonymous sources and scant evidence to promote conspiracy theories that Kirk, other Turning Point leaders and the Israeli government may have been involved in Charlie Kirk’s murder.
“Every morning I wake up to a new headline lying about me. I have comedians dressing up in White face. I have people saying I'm not fit to be CEO. And I have Candace Owens claiming I murdered my husband,” Kirk said, making a reference to the comedian Druski dressing up in prosthetics to look like Kirk for a recent skit.
Owens responded in a social media post by critiquing Kirk’s delivery and denying that she claimed the widow murdered her husband.
“Very uncomfortable to watch. Painful prompter read. A speech CLEARLY written by someone else. Objectively terrible so they will now pay for people to tell us otherwise,” Owens said. “Also, of everything I’ve said about Erika she chooses to respond to something I never said. They always lie.”
Why did Erika Kirk go to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner?
Kirk said she had attended the White House Correspondents’ Dinner to face the journalists who she said have tried to “dehumanize” her in the wake of her husband’s murder.
“Why have a conversation about me when you can have a conversation with me?” Kirk said.
During the festivities, Kirk said she spoke with a Daily Mail journalist who told her she looked beautiful and expressed that she was sorry for Kirk’s loss. Turning Point leaders have clashed with the Mail over the outlet’s coverage of the Charlie Kirk murder trial.
Kirk said she told the journalist, “It is so nice to put a name to the face, especially with all the slander, the lies, accusations that are out there surrounding my husband's murder and myself.” She said they also discussed that for an evening, people on opposing sides of the political spectrum put their differences aside to mingle at parties surrounding the event. Kirk found the dynamic “fascinating,” especially since things would return to being “an absolute bloodbath” by the following Monday morning.
Kirk said she noticed that tables for competing news outlets such as Fox News, Politico and the Washington Post were side-by-side in the ballroom, and said the event was even more of a spectacle because “every single 10-person table had 10 bottles of wine.”
Kirk praised CBS News correspondent Weijia Jiang, the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, for giving the event a celebratory, Americana feel until the attack derailed the event.
Kirk said she was disturbed by the way people on the left have reacted to the latest attempt to take the GOP president’s life. A number of American presidents have been assassinated or survived assassination attempts throughout history.
“There has never been a president who has faced this many assassination attempts in America's entire history, and after each one, the reaction from the far left has been at best, a shrug and in some cases a sick disappointment that the shooter was unsuccessful,” Kirk said.
Kirk also renewed her feud with late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, knocking him for making a joke about First Lady Melania Trump. “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” was briefly suspended in September after Kimmel faced criticism from the Trump administration and Turning Point for comments he made after Charlie Kirk was killed.
“Our country has become unrecognizable. These people have perverted the truth to the point that they motivated the murder of my husband. They've continuously tried to assassinate the president, and anyone who stands in their way is labeled, hateful, racist, fascist, and every other trigger word that is grossly dishonest,” Erika Kirk said. “We want the best for our country. They don't.”
