A day later the Times issued a correction: “An earlier version of this article described incorrectly an antisemitic statement that Charlie Kirk had made on an episode of his podcast. He was quoting a statement from a post on social media and went on to critique it. It was not his own statement.”
Six Times employees worked on the story—two named in the byline, four more mentioned as contributors at the end. None, evidently, bothered to wonder how such a person as they described could also be a ferocious proponent of the Jewish state and the Jewish people. The thought process seems to have been: Kirk was a right-winger, right-wingers by definition hold retrograde opinions, so an antisemite Kirk surely was. Progressive commentators insisting, days after his assassination, that his killer was a Republican—the indefatigably mistaken Laurence Tribe is one—leaned on a similar sort of syllogism.
A columnist at the Washington Post, meanwhile, was let go this week after (among other things) posting a quotation of Kirk, the sentence slightly rewritten to make it look as if he were claiming black women generally aren’t as smart as whites. Kirk expressed his views abrasively, but common sense and love of country should have told the columnist that the exponent of such a view wouldn’t attract a mass following in 21st-century America. I choose to think she didn’t doctor the line deliberately.