False claims and conspiracy theories
According to Forbes, Kirk was known for "his repudiation of liberal college education and embrace of pro-Trump conspiracy theories". He promoted the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory, and called universities "islands of totalitarianism". In a 2015 speech at the Liberty Forum of Silicon Valley, Kirk said he had applied for nomination to the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York, and was not accepted. He said that "the slot he considered his went to 'a far less-qualified candidate of a different gender and a different persuasion'" whose test scores he claimed he knew. In 2017 he told The New Yorker that he was being sarcastic when he said it. In 2018 he told the Chicago Tribune that "he was just repeating something he'd been told", and in October 2019 at a New Hampshire Turning Point event featuring Rand Paul he claimed he never said it.
Following the murder of George Floyd and subsequent protests, Kirk referred to him as a "scumbag", citing his criminal history, and referred to the city of Minneapolis (where he was killed) as "not the town it used to be". Kirk promoted debunked claims about George Floyd, such as that he was "illegally counterfeiting currency" and had once "put a gun to a pregnant woman's stomach". On Facebook, YouTube, and Rumble, Kirk repeatedly promoted the false claim that the medical examiner who performed the autopsy declared Floyd had died of an overdose. After a fact check by Agence France-Presse that noted the doctor stood by the classification of Floyd's death as a homicide, corrections were added to Kirk's posts on social media.
In July 2018, Kirk falsely claimed on social media that U.S. Justice Department statistics showed an increase in human trafficking arrests from 1,952 in 2016 to 6,087 in the first half of 2018. He deleted the tweet without explanation the next day, after a fact-checker had pointed out that the false 2018 number had originated on the conspiracy site 8chan. In December 2018, Kirk falsely claimed that protesters in the French yellow vests movement chanted "We want Trump". Trump later repeated these false claims.
Ahead of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Kirk spread falsehoods about voter fraud and, immediately after Trump lost the 2020 election, Kirk promoted false and disproven claims of fraud in the election. On November 5, 2020, he led a Stop the Steal protest at the Maricopa Tabulation Center in Phoenix. Kirk was considered a "big name" social influencer in Rudy Giuliani's communications plan to overturn the 2020 election. In August 2025, Kirk called for the elimination of Jasmine Crockett's congressional district as a part of the 2025 Texas redistricting, justifying the erasure of her district by claiming she was a part of an "attempt to eliminate the white population in this country".
Shortly before his death, Kirk suggested that Jeffrey Epstein had been a Mossad agent, with claims of him being "a creation of either Mossad, Israeli intelligence, American intelligence, Saudi intelligence, or maybe he was just a hired gun...". In response, many Israeli government officials, including former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, denied Epstein's involvement with them.
In 2020, Kirk spread false information and conspiracy theories about COVID-19 on social media. He sharply criticized Democrats' criticism of Trump's withdrawal of WHO funding and called COVID-19 the "China virus", which Trump retweeted. Kirk alleged that the WHO covered up information about the COVID-19 pandemic. He was briefly banned from Twitter after falsely claiming that hydroxychloroquine had proved to be "100% effective in treating the virus." He alleged that Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic governor of Michigan, threatened doctors who tried to use the medication. Rudy Giuliani retweeted these falsehoods, and Twitter also suspended his account.
In defending the Trump administration's response to the pandemic, Kirk falsely stated that during the 2009 swine flu pandemic it "took President Barack Obama 'millions infected and over 1,000 deaths'" to declare a public health emergency, with the meme shared by Kirk confusing the point at which Trump declared a public health emergency and the point at which Obama issued a national emergency. When the Obama administration acknowledged the WHO's declaration of a public health emergency on April 26, 2009, there were fewer than 280 cases of H1N1 infection reported in the U.S., and the first confirmed death (of a Mexican toddler on vacation) occurred the next day, April 27. The WHO projected 1,000,000+ U.S. cases on June 25, after declaring a pandemic on June 11. A spokesman for Turning Point USA acknowledged that its "social media team confused the two different types of emergency declarations", and Trump had not yet issued a national emergency.
Kirk described the public health measure of social distancing prohibitions in churches as a Democratic plot against Christianity and made the unfounded assertion that authorities in Wuhan, China, were burning patients. In 2020, he said he refused to abide by mask requirements because "the science around masks is very questionable".
In July 2021, Kirk promoted misleading claims about the efficacy and safety of COVID-19 vaccines. On the Fox News show hosted by Tucker Carlson, Kirk called mandatory requirements for students to take the COVID-19 vaccine "medical apartheid". He called for parents to protest at school board meetings, urging them to push back against mask-wearing.
