> anyone who came to the stage to dispute him would receive death threats Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. > Read the audience. He knew wh

> anyone who came to the stage to dispute him would receive death threats Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. > Read the audience. He knew what he was doing. The footage I have seen universally depicts a cheering, entertained crowd that expresses nothing I could interpret as hateful towards anyone. > Kirk repeatedly promoted the false claim that the medical examiner who performed the autopsy declared Floyd had died of an overdose. Two autopsies were performed, and both involved at least one medical examiner. One of them found that fentanyl and/or methamphetamine may have been a complicating factor. But this is understating the case. Floyd is known to have taken a very high dose of fentanyl (https://www.kare11.com/article/news/local/george-floyd/evidence-details-fentanyl-levels-george-floyds-body/89-70cf8552-1810-4462-a726-077b897e7378 https://www.kare11.com/article/news/local/george-floyd/evide...), which is commonly understood to be a very dangerous drug. The other autopsy, commissioned by Floyd's legal team, did not include a toxicology report. > ... voter fraud ... This is, of course, hotly contested. People on the other side of the aisle, from what I can tell, sincerely believe that the people "disproving" these claims are fabricating their evidence and/or ignoring supporting evidence. Regardless, believing a falsehood to be true is not the same thing as lying. > Kirk called the public health measure of social distancing prohibitions in churches a "Democratic plot against Christianity". In the 2020s, Kirk was a Christian nationalist who called the separation of Church and state in the United States a "fabrication". Appearing at a Trump campaign rally in 2024, he said: "This is a Christian state. I'd like to see it stay that way." This is the same thing repeated three times, and it is an opinion, not a claim. He was not saying anything about what the law or Constitution provides. He was describing what he considers to be the general order of the society around him. Many political thinkers across the spectrum have disputed that the US implements real separation of church and state, irrespective of what the laws and Constitution say. There are many simple ways to make this argument. For example, giving preferential tax treatment or legal recognition to married couples is a clear mingling of church and state; government didn't come up with the concept, existing religious traditions (including paganism; I am not agreeing with Kirk's opinion on Christianity here) did. For another example, from the Constitution: > We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights... It's hard to fathom, given the identities of the people involved, that "Creator" here refers to something other than the Christian God. > There are innumerable more. Again, the reliability of "fact-checking" institutions is in question. I have personally encountered examples of sites like Snopes and Politifact giving significantly different truth ratings to the same claim when it was made by different politicians. There are other sites out there dedicated to cataloguing such examples.