Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian on Thursday testily denied that China is spreading disinformation about the assassination of American conservative Charlie Kirk, even though Chinese, Russian, and Iranian state media have been caught doing exactly that.
“I have already made clear China’s position. China condemns all illegal violent behaviors,” Lin insisted on Thursday.
“We are also firmly opposed to some institutions and people in the U.S. directing the issue at China and firmly opposed to spreading disinformation to smear and tarnish China,” he added.
Lin was referring to a New York Times (NYT) article on Wednesday headlined “Russia, China, and Iran Use Kirk’s Murder to Stoke Conspiracy Theories and Division.”
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The article noted that state media in those three hostile authoritarian countries have mentioned Kirk’s murder thousands of times over the past week, offering a grab bag of conspiracy theories about who really killed Kirk and why.
Most of those conspiracy theories were simply lifted from American legacy media and social media sources, as state media for the authoritarian regimes trawled through online feeds in search of anything that might make the situation more painful for Americans to deal with.
Russian state media had a penchant for linking Kirk’s assassination to Ukraine, while Iran preferred to blame the murder on Israel. As Breitbart News reported last week, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev quickly blamed Kirk’s murder on “a variety of left-wing liberal scum who support Banderite Kyiv.” Banderite is a Russian shorthand term for asserting the Ukrainian government is controlled by Nazis.
As Breitbart News reported this week, Chinese state media latched onto U.S. left-wing fever-swap theories that Kirk was killed by ultra-conservatives, rather than the disturbed left-winger who actually pulled the trigger.
“The suspect involved in the killing of Kirk has been identified as Tyler Robinson who comes from a MAGA family. According to CNN, one of Robinson’s former classmates said that several years ago in high school, Robinson — like his family — was politically conservative, and Robinson’s neighbors said that his parents are registered Republicans,” China’s state-run Global Times wrote on Tuesday, while studiously avoiding any mention of the American left at all.
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The Chinese editorialists were surfing on a wave of left-wing media articles and chatter on platforms like Bluesky, which became obsessed with the idea that Robinson was not a member of the left at all, but some sort of disaffected conservative.
The Global Times probably did not realize this lunacy was about to blow up into a huge national story when it was amplified and boosted by former late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel, who told his audience as a matter of fact –not a joke or satire – that Robinson was a member of the “MAGA gang.”
The NYT quoted Gov. Spencer Cox (R) of Utah, the state where Kirk was assassinated, remarking that “our adversaries want violence.”
“There is a tremendous amount of disinformation we are tracking,” Cox said last Friday. “We have bots from Russia, China, all over the world that are trying to instill disinformation and encourage violence.”
“I would encourage you to ignore those, to turn off those streams and spend more time with our families. We desperately need some healing,” he said, offering some advice that Jimmy Kimmel would have done well to heed.
Read the full article here