Following the Sept. 10, 2025, shooting death of Turning Point USA CEO and co-founder Charlie Kirk, social media users shared a quote allegedly from the conservative pundit about the October 2022 attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of former Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. According to numerous posts, Kirk allegedly called for an "amazing patriot" to post bail for the attacker.
A meme with text reading "When Nancy Pelosi's husband was beaten with a hammer, Charlie Kirk encouraged his audience to post bail for the attacker" spread on X, along with a video clip of Kirk purportedly calling (archived) for someone to bail out Paul Pelosi's attacker.
(X user @EntireGoat)
Snopes readers wrote in to ask us to determine whether Kirk had truly encouraged his listeners to gather money to bail out the attacker.
Kirk did call on an "amazing patriot" to post bail for Pelosi's attacker during an Oct. 31, 2022, episode of "The Charlie Kirk Show." As a result, we've rated the quote correctly attributed. However, in the same episode, Kirk condemned the attack, saying it was "awful." He also asked why the attacker was held without bail, claiming that in Chicago someone can "commit murder and be out the next day."
In October 2022, a man wielding a hammer attacked Pelosi in his home in San Francisco. The man, David Wayne DePape, was arrested and charged with crimes including assault, attempted murder and attempted kidnapping. A San Francisco investigator testified that DePape said there was "evil in Washington" and he wanted to harm Nancy Pelosi because she was second in line for the presidency. In October 2024, a federal judge sentenced DePape to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Kirk's remarks begin around the 52:50 mark of his podcast episode titled "The Naked Smear of MAGA," the full version of which is hosted on Rumble. A shorter clip from that show also circulated on X:
During his comments, Kirk said the attack was "awful" and decried those who blamed Republicans for the assault on Pelosi. We reproduced his full remarks below (emphasis ours):
Politico says, "Top Republicans reject any link between GOP rhetoric and Paul Pelosi assault." Of course, you should reject any link! Why is the Republican Party — why is the conservative movement to blame for gay schizophrenic nudists that are hemp jewelry makers, breaking into somebody's home or maybe not breaking into somebody's home? Why are we to blame for that, exactly?
And why is he still in jail? Why has he not been bailed out? By the way, if some amazing patriot out there in San Francisco or the Bay Area wants to really be a midterm hero, someone should go and bail this guy out. I bet his bail's like 30 or 40,000 bucks. Bail him out, and then go ask him some questions. I wonder what his bail is? They're going after him with attempted murder, political assassination, all this sort of stuff.
I'm not qualifying it. I think it's awful. It's not right. But why is it that in Chicago you're able to commit murder and be out the next day? Why is it that you're able to trespass, second-degree murder, arson, threaten a public official, cashless bail — this happens all over San Francisco. But if you go after the Pelosis, oh, you're let out immediately. Got it.
And, by the way, why is it that the media hasn't mentioned that they're all these, allegedly, far-right websites that popped up attributed to him and then they were taken down a few days later? Who's to blame for that, exactly? By the way, as soon as I read those far-right websites that were supposedly attributed to him, I told my team, this is so fake. This is written as if it's a leftist trying to make it seem as if it was somebody on the right. It just seems so artificial.
Kirk was sarcastically criticizing how DePape was held without bail after beating up Pelosi, claiming that other crimes were treated less seriously in Chicago.
For further reading, Snopes also investigated whether Kirk truly said "it's worth it" to have some gun deaths in order to have the Second Amendment and called empathy a "made-up, new age term." We also looked into a claim about his last words before the fatal shooting.