Maine author Stephen King is facing backlash from high-profile conservatives on social media over comments he made about the death of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.

In a now-deleted post he made Thursday on the social media platform X, King shared comments that praised Kirk but added his own note above it: “He advocated stoning gays to death. Just sayin’.”

King later deleted that post and said in a message posted Friday morning, “I was wrong, and I have apologized. I have deleted the post.” In another post, he apologized again but said Kirk “demonstrated how some people cherry-pick Biblical passages.”

In a brief email to the Press Herald on Friday, King said he “screwed up by not looking for attribution.”

“I was wrong and I apologized,” he wrote. “That, and deleting the post, is the correct thing to do.”

The 31-year-old Kirk was assassinated this week while speaking to a crowd at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah. Authorities announced Friday that a suspect has been arrested after allegedly confessing to a family member.

Kirk frequently drew liberal criticism for his controversial views on hot-button cultural issues like immigration, gun control and gender identity. Immediately before he was shot at the college event Wednesday, Kirk was responding to questions about the number of mass shooters who were transgender, according to reports from the scene.

After King posted about Kirk on X, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas responded by calling King “a horrible, evil, twisted liar.”

“Your party — which you shamelessly shilled for — sent $100 billion to the Ayatollah … who does routinely murder homosexuals,” Cruz continued. “Why are you so dishonest & filled with hate?”

In response to the post from Cruz, King wrote on X, “The horrible, evil, twisted liar apologizes. This is what I get for reading something on Twitter w/o fact checking. Won’t happen again.”

Sebastian Gorka, a deputy assistant to President Donald Trump, called King a “decrepit liar.” King responded to Gorka’s post by saying, “I have apologized.”

Dave Rubin, a conservative political commentator and host of BlazeTV’s “The Rubin Report,” called King “more monstrous than any of the characters you ever came up with.”

Kirk, the leader of Turning Point USA and a close ally of Trump, had amassed a huge following among conservative Christians — especially among younger voters — through social media and his “prove me wrong” debates.

King, meanwhile, has publicly supported Democratic candidates and long been an outspoken critic of Trump.