Now that the suspect in Charlie Kirk’s assassination is in custody and that suspect’s private communications are in the hands of investigators, a clearer picture of the tragedy and its motivation is emerging. The culprit does not appear to be a rivalrous fellow conservative, an agent of a “false flag” crime, a mentally unstable and therefore apolitical shooter, or someone whose politics centered on Israel- or Jewish-related topics.
That last fact is causing some trouble for a small but influential faction of right-wing ghouls. They can only care about such a horrendous tragedy if it is useful politically for them. So they have taken it upon themselves to shoehorn Israel into the picture and hijack the grief of Kirk’s family and friends.
The ghoulish influencers involved here—Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson and their hangers-on—have been joined by far-left conspiracy theorists in insisting that Kirk’s public support of Israel was a façade because shadowy Jewish figures had scared him into toeing that line. Right-wing Jew-baiters push this slop because it’s self-aggrandizing and good for their business. Left-wingers push this story because it paints Jews as global puppeteers as described by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and thus, they might believe, vindicates their dedication to keeping alive Soviet anti-Semitism.
But they don’t care whether Kirk agreed with them on Israel. The right-wingers do. So we must ask: Why does it bother right-wing anti-Zionists so much that Charlie Kirk disagreed with them on Israel?
Without getting lost in the weeds, there is one recent Kirk-organized confab that puts this question into focus. This has come to light mostly because Owens accused Bill Ackman, the pro-Israel founder of Pershing Square Capital Management, of contributing to a pressure campaign designed to intimidate Kirk.
Israel was not the main subject at the meeting, attended by a few dozen conservative personalities, and Ackman had no conflict with Kirk over it, as private messages proved. According to another participant, there was an exchange in which Kirk instructed a more stridently pro-Israel attendee to steer away from emotional arguments and focus on cold hard facts. This way, the pro-Israel position—which Kirk shared—would have more purchase with the group of Israel-skeptics on the right. “The conversations with Charlie were less about WHAT to believe—it was about how we express it if we want to truly make an impact,” according to Kirk’s friend Xaviaer DuRousseau, who was in the room.
DuRousseau and Ackman are among a half-dozen attendees who have posted detailed statements fully debunking the accusations coming from the Owens-Carlson wing of the fever swamps. Today, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene weighed in with an attempt to buttress Tucker that was, even by Greene’s standards, intellectually feeble and desperate. (Apparently sensing how ridiculous she sounded, she closed her message with a bit of overt anti-Semitism.)
Why the desperation? Why does the fact that Charlie Kirk supported Israel and detested anti-Semitism bother the swamp things of the right?
The answer is simple. Kirk proved that his model of political organizing was superior to every other attempt on the right to replicate it—and Kirk’s model was pro-Israel and opposed to anti-Semitism.
On Sunday night, members of Congress and of the Trump administration spoke at a packed-to-the-brim vigil for Kirk at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt talked about Kirk’s support for her congressional campaign in New Hampshire three years ago. Anna Paulina Luna, a Republican congresswoman from Florida, told a story about how, 24 hours before leaving for medical school several years ago, she got a call from Kirk offering her the job of Turning Point USA’s national Hispanic outreach director. She took the job. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the administration’s health secretary, credited Kirk with bringing him into the Trump fold during the 2024 presidential election, which Kennedy had begun as a candidate against Trump.
While there is no doubting Tucker Carlson’s influence among Republicans, he cannot hold a candle to a guy whose political operation is credited with members of Congress, the White House press secretary, a Cabinet member and who knows how many others comprising the inner circle of the president of the United States. Whatever Kirk did, it worked. He’d cracked the code of political influence and organizing. On these terms, Kirk’s model had no equal on the right (or, arguably, the left).
And what was that model? It featured support for Israel right to the end, and it had Kirk touring the country warning of the dangers of anti-Semitism. Kirk’s model of organizing exposed the Tucker/Owens Jew-baiting game for what it is: a gratuitous, third-rate embrace of permanent political inferiority.
