Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk announced Thursday his return to Twitter after Elon Musk vowed to foster free speech on the platform.
Twitter suspended Kirk in March for referring to President Joe Biden’s Assistant Health Secretary Rachel Levine, a biological male who identifies as transgender, as a “he” and stating that Levine lived as a man for 54 years. The platform deemed the post “hateful conduct.”
Kirk then left Twitter in protest of the suspension, but returned this week after Elon Musk bought the platform for $43.4 billion.
Due to New Management, I’m back on Twitter.
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) April 28, 2022
“I’m just thrilled about it,” he said during Thursday’s episode of “Fox & Friends.” “It’s interesting, a couple weeks ago, I tweeted a tweet about Levine and so did the Babylon Bee. And then Tucker Carlson tweeted about our tweets being suspended. And right during that time, all of a sudden Elon Musk started to get very vocal about buying Twitter, so not taking credit for anything but we were definitely part of kind of the straw that broke the camel’s back. And what a difference a month makes.”
“And so we engaged in this protest where we decided we were not going to delete the tweet under the prior administration regime and our protest worked. We’re going to go back to the platform now that it’s under new management and new promises for free speech protections,” he added.
Kirk responded to the tweet which led to his suspension saying it was “factual” and possibly “overly politically correct.” (It’s About Silencing Dissent’: Charlie Kirk Slams Twitter For Suspension Over Rachel Levine Tweet)
“I wanted to try to see where the line was and obviously the line is that you’re not even allowed to mention someone under their prior name. It was a violation of policy called ‘dead naming.’ This kind of unequal application of the rules of suspension on Twitter is precisely why Elon Musk put $44 billion forward to buy the platform.”
Prior to his suspension, Kirk responded to the suspension of the satirical news site, the Babylon Bee, which the platform locked for naming Levine the Bee’s “Man of the Year.” The Babylon Bee’s CEO Seth Dillon told Fox News and Daily Caller co-founder Tucker Carlson that they refuse to delete the tweet since “facts are not hate speech.”
“We don’t believe that facts are hate speech, that speaking truth is hate speech,” the CEO said. “At some point, people need to stick by this, Tucker. People have to be willing to say ‘listen, if they want us to deny the truth in order to stay on this platform, we speak the truth. Make them kick you off. Make them boot you.”
The platform then temporarily suspended Carlson for posting screenshots of the Babylon Bee and Kirk’s tweets, leading him to leave the platform before returning Monday.