Charlie Kirk told thousands of students on Thursday that Breitbart News was the first media outlet to give his voice a platform, by allowing him to expose left-wing bias and falsehoods that he had discovered in his textbooks while he was in high school.
Kirk joined the Tribute to Andrew Breitbart Panel at Turning Point USA’s annual Student Action Summit in West Palm Beach to talk about Andrew Breitbart’s legacy, alongside Breitbart Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow and Nigel Farage.
“It was actually Breitbart.com that gave me the first opportunity to get in the fight [for conservative values],” said Kirk during the tribute panel on Thursday.
“I was a senior in high school, and I was flipping through my AP economic textbook,” continued Kirk, adding that he had discovered a “flat-out falsehood” in his textbook, claiming that the “tax cuts put forth by Reagan did not accelerate economic growth.”
“And it’s just adverse to history and data,” said Kirk, “and so I kind of wrote up a response to this, and I started circulating it around.”
That’s when Breitbart News offered him a platform to write his first article for the outlet.
“And Breitbart was the only website that took it seriously,” said Kirk, “and it went totally viral — it got re-written all over the internet.”
Kirk added that his Breitbart article had also spurred his very first appearance on Fox News, which led the then-high school student to believe that “maybe there is something that can be started from nothing.”
Six years later, Kirk is now hosting his fourth annual Student Action Summit in West Palm Beach, Florida, where thousands of students are in attendance.
“Breitbart gave me that opportunity to get involved and get engaged in the culture war,” he said. “The left hates Andrew Breitbart so much, that they cannot get rid of him. Andrew Breitbart is still destroying the Left even though he’s not with us any longer.”
“And a lot of [Breitbart’s] tactics, of going straight into the liberal mob and confronting them is something I love to do.”
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