This is the thing with Charlie Kirk. So many of the things he said had a shock value element and he has so many thousands of hours of tape that it's not hard to figure out how he had such a polarizing impact. Half the country thinks even his follow up, full context explanation is pure racism, and half the country can't see how any reasonable person would disagree with it.
Here's him explaining the original statement when a student asked him about it at one of his on-campus things. He usually brought up something like the NBA in these types of debates. He'd say something like, "the NBA is x% black (I don't know the %, but it's obviously disproportionate to the overall population). Should they make a rule where teams have to draft more white players?" In my opinion, this type of argument is silly when you try to compare necessary skills/talent for professional sports to corporate jobs or jobs that really just need on-the-job experience/training. But this would usually rattle the student at the microphone and he would win the point.
Anyway, here is his explanation:
"Let me tell you exactly what I said, ok. So this was in response, first and foremost, to United Airlines saying that half of their new pilots that they're going to hire are going to be women or people of color. Currently, they're 15%. So they wanna go from 15% to 50%. A conversation then ensued about how every time Affirmative Action is employed, standards have to be lowered. There is not a single instance where that does not occur. So then I said, boy, if I see a black pilot, I'm now going to wonder if that individual is qualified or were they selected because of their race, comma...but that is not who I am, but this makes me think this way and I stand completely by that statement. Secondly, DEI and Affirmative Action... what it does, is it lowers the merit, it lowers the threshold of standards and increases things that do not matter such as skin color and ethnic background. Now the important question to ask me is, Charlie, do you believe that black pilots can be qualified? Of course! Any individual can be qualified. I want a hiring quota and program that only cares about qualification, not skin color, and thirdly, why does United Airlines care so much about the color of the pilots that are flying them. Shouldn't they just want the best pilots? When you guys are flying from Vegas to Dallas or Vegas to Chicago, are you gonna feel safer or more comfortable when you hit turbulence if you have a diverse pilot or if you have a cockpit of the most qualified people that are there that have proven they know how to fly and land planes."
The student then followed up and asked how he felt about legacies since they seem to have a leg up on getting into certain institutions. Kirk said "Legacies are somewhat against merit, to be consistent. but i will say that a study of legacies has been done because their parents are smart, they're usually pretty smart, and so the moving average is that legacies aren't nearly as unqualified as some affirmative action people, but there are plenty of unqualified legacies that get into Ivy League institutions, to be consistent."
I just don't think his full context quote is that bad. I don't necessarily 100% agree with him in general on his point that Affirmative Action ALWAYS lowers standards, but in this instance I can understand the underlying point that going from 15% to 50% is so drastic an increase that it does make you wonder if you're getting the most qualified person flying the plane. I do wonder why he skipped over the "women" part. He went right to black people.
