When The New York Times and the New York Yankees are dealing with the assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, one would have hoped the newspaper would come out ahead. That, alas, was too much to hope for.
In a display of callousness sadly not out of line with what the rest of the left was saying, the Gray Lady made sure to note that the conservative activist, killed Wednesday at Utah Valley University by a shooter during an event, wasn’t uncontroversial — at least to them.
In their obituary for the 31-year-old father of two, The New York Times gave Kirk credit for “training, network and organizing,” as well as being “adept at packaging his public appearances with slick backdrops and high-value productions.”
If those sounded like backhanded, loaded compliments, at least they were complimentary. Even when dealing with assassination, apparently The New York Times felt that Kirk needed to be chastised by the media:
Mr. Kirk rose even further into the conservative stratosphere during the early days of the pandemic, when he was quick to attack the World Health Organization — which, in his typical fashion, he called the “Wuhan Health Organization” — accusing it of hiding the source of the Covid virus and claiming that it had emerged from a Chinese lab in the city of Wuhan. He later rallied opposition to school lockdowns and mask mandates.
He was so vocal in his willingness to spread unsupported claims and outright lies — he said that the drug hydroxychloroquine was “100 percent effective” in treating the virus, which it is not — that Twitter temporarily barred him in early March 2020. But that move only added to his notoriety and seemed to support his claim that he was being muzzled by a liberal elite.
You do not hate the New York Times enough
— Julia Steinberg (@julialsteinberg) September 10, 2025
Meanwhile, the New York Yankees — playing the Detroit Tigers on Wednesday — somehow managed to pull off a memorial to Kirk without implying he was a slick charlatan or a spreader of “unsupported claims and outright lies.”
“Kirk founded the youth activist group ‘Turning Point USA’ and had become a fixture on college campuses. Charlie Kirk, a husband and father of two children, was 31 years old,” the team said on its social media account.
Before tonight’s game we held a moment of silence in memoriam of Charlie Kirk.
Kirk founded the youth activist group “Turning Point USA” and had become a fixture on college campuses. Charlie Kirk, a husband and father of two children, was 31 years old. pic.twitter.com/Fz5xPlmdu0
— New York Yankees (@Yankees) September 10, 2025
RIP: The Yankees honored Charlie Kirk with a moment of silence tonight. The world will never forget you, Charlie. pic.twitter.com/A2xHd1dnbz
— @amuse (@amuse) September 10, 2025
How is it that a baseball team can observe more decorum than the paper of record in America’s most populous city? Why would an institution, previously distinguished, join the crowd of cretins saying something like, “yes, it’s terrible, but…”
Let’s be honest — the reporters in The New York Times’ newsroom were thrilled with Charlie’s assassination today. They hated him and they hate us. This proved it.
Wednesday was a test for a peaceable democracy — a test that The New York Times failed. When a sports franchise can succeed where a media outlet can’t, it proves why Americans don’t and won’t trust them ever again.
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