After the fatal shooting of Turning Point USA co-founder and CEO Charlie Kirk, a conservative commentator and ally to U.S. President Donald Trump, a rumor spread that he had once said Black women like television presenter Joy Reid; former first lady Michelle Obama; former Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a Democrat from Texas; and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson did "not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously."
For example, a Sept. 11, 2025, post on X included a video clip of Kirk saying, "You have to go steal a white person's slot" (archived):
This post had 8.2 million views and 55,000 likes as of this writing. The same clip appeared in several Instagram posts. Further, Snopes readers searched the site and emailed seeking to confirm the rumor.
The claim was true and the video clip of Kirk saying this was authentic. Snopes identified an episode of "The Charlie Kirk Show" (archived) from July 13, 2023, in which Kirk named these four Black women and said these words, adding that the admission that they had benefited from affirmative action amounted to a confession that they were not bright enough to reach prominence on their merits (the segment begins at 53:45):
If we would have said three weeks ago […] that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative-action picks, we would have been called racist. But now they're coming out and they're saying it for us! They're coming out and they're saying, "I'm only here because of affirmative action."
Yeah, we know. You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person's slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.
Kirk then played a clip of Jackson Lee speaking in Congress, saying she had been admitted to educational institutions on affirmative action. Kirk then went on to make his point again:
We know. We know. It's very obvious to us you are not smart enough to be able to get it on your own. "I could not make it on my own, so I needed to take opportunities from someone more deserving."
Snopes also has confirmed Kirk said the Second Amendment was "worth" having some gun deaths and called empathy a "made-up, new age term." We also looked into a claim that he'd said Jewish money had ruined U.S. culture. Here are six claims about Kirk we've investigated.