The world right now is dark and weird and we all have to keep pretending like it is fine. And the latest head scratching news comes in the form of author Stephen King. You know, the guy who wrote The Shining.
King paraphrased/summarized grandly something that Charlie Kirk once said online. Kirk was talking about the Bible verse that insinuates man shall not lay with man because if he does, he will be stoned to death. The context of what Kirk was saying was in response to Ms. Rachel, who argued that we should use the idea of “love thy neighbor” to be more inclusive. Basically, Kirk was “cherry-picking,” as King eventually wrote, a Bible verse to use to prove something.
The interaction between Ms. Rachel and Kirk happened in 2024. Ms. Rachel said the “love thy neighbor” verse in the Leviticus 18 scripture was about everyone, including the gay community. Kirk went on to say “By the way, Ms. Rachel, you might want to crack open that Bible of yours. In a lesser reference, part of the same part of scripture, is in Leviticus 18, is that ‘thou shall lay with another man shall be stoned to death.’ Just saying.”
“I apologize for saying Charlie Kirk advocated stoning gays. What he actually demonstrated was how some people cherry-pick Biblical passages,” King wrote on X. He deleted his original tweet. But many are still going after King, including one claiming that King should never criticize President Donald Trump’s health after seeing a video of King walking. Famously, Stephen King was hit by a van in 1999 where he suffered many injuries and had to learn how to walk again.
While King’s original tweet was labeled as “lying” by people like Senator Ted Cruz, he has since taken it back.
Imagine trying to cancel Stephen King in 2025…
Now here is where this gets funny: All of the outrage makes it very clear that not a single one of these people cared about King or have read his work. In fact, the party that bemoans Cancel Culture has really been leaning hard into it the last few days. But where King is concerned, the fascinating part of it is that he has stuff in his novels that is far from okay by modern standards. We just view it through King in the 70s and 80s and his struggle with substance abuse.
He has always been complicated. In reading The Running Man recently, I found myself wondering why aspects of Ben Richards’ are racist for no reason. Why some of his work is questionable at best and why there’s that one scene in IT that no one ever wants to talking about. All this to say that trying to cancel this man in 2025 is arguably hilarious given….well, everything.
Tensions are high and we are seeing in real time how the free speech party doesn’t actually care about free speech. They care about control. At the end of the day, most of the people angry have never read a Stephen King book to begin with but trying to cancel a man like King is hilarious.
(featured image: Mathew Tsang/Getty Images)
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