Did the late Charlie Kirk say "Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously" as social media posts claim? No, that's not a precise quote: Attacking affirmative action, Kirk slammed by name four prominent liberal Black women . On his podcast, he specifically criticized Rep. Shirley Jackson Lee, D-Texas, TV host Joy Reid, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and attorney and former First Lady Michelle Obama.
The claim that he said this of all Black women circulated on social media, including a September 10, 2025 Bluesky post (archived here) where it was published by the karenattiah account with no comment or explanation.
Here's what that post looked like at the time this fact check was written:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of post at karenattiah.bsky.)
What Kirk said, starting about 53 minutes into his July 13, 2023 show (archived here), was this, two weeks after the Supreme Court ended affirmative action in college and university admissions:
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 comin' out and they're saying it for us! They're comin' 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 followed that with video of Rep. Shirley Jackson Lee, D-Texas saying:
I rise today as a clear recipient of affirmative action, particularly in higher education. I may have been admitted on affirmative action, both in terms of being a woman and a woman of color, but I can declare that I did not graduate on affirmative action.
Kirk commented on Lee's pronunciation and on her argument in favor of affirmative action and then played a cut of TV host Joy Reid discussing concerns about racism on Twitter in which she said Threads was gaining on Twitter:
Twitter now is useless to me. If people like me are leaving, I don't know how Twitter survives.
Kirk mocked Reid's argument, saying "If people like me that are where we are because of affirmative action, how could they survive? ... This is how arrogant Joy Reid and Ketanji Brown Jackson and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee are. They're so narcissistic they think this is persuasive."
The person quoting Kirk in the post that is the subject of this fact check was Karen Attiah, a former columnist at The Washington Post. Attiah was fired by the Post after she published a series of posts to Bluesky about gun violence and political violence. Included among them was her post that altered the Kirk quote. Attiah wrote about her firing in her Substack column entitled: "The Washington Post Fired Me -- But My Voice Will Not Be Silenced". In that column, (archived here) she wrote that her only direct reference to Kirk in her series about violence was "his own words on the record."
Here's how that section of her Substack column appeared at the time this fact check was written:
(Source image: Lead Stories screenshot of September 15 post on Karen Attiah's "Golden Hour" substack page.)
Here, is the New York Times rule on quotation marks:
Readers should be able to assume that every word between quotation marks is what the speaker or writer said.
Similarly, the AP Style Book (not precisely linked to here because it's behind a paywall) declares a reporter should never alter a person's words when they are placed between quotation marks, even to correct minor grammatical errors.
