The fight over Charlie Kirk’s legacy quickly turned into a fight over the future of Israel’s place in conservative politics, underscored by the bizarre obsessions of the “woke right” influencers. Some of those who seek claim to Kirk’s mantle really don’t like Israel and are suspicious of American Jews. Kirk was the opposite.
Kirk’s support for Israel has most recently come out in a letter he wrote before his death to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In it, Kirk seeks to offer guidance on rebuilding Israel’s image abroad. He took time on Easter to write the letter because he was so bothered by those trying to drive a wedge between Jews and Christians. Kirk clearly considered defending Israel to be one of his more honorable obligations as a citizen of the West.
The right-wing influencers who tried to claim Kirk was souring on Israel and even feared retribution for his supposed apostasy were left looking very silly when Kirk’s letter was released yesterday. They had been lying about Kirk and were now exposed.
But there’s a funny reason it matters so much to them. This isn’t merely about Kirk’s opinion of Israel. The letter undermines the false picture they have painted of the discourse over Israel in American politics and on which their own patina of victimhood is constructed.
It comes down to this: The influencers portray Israel as policing U.S. media and therefore acting as a censor. Those defending Israel routinely get accused of being paid to do so. Israel, according to this theory, either buys or threatens its way to media hegemony in the U.S. It’s all part of the epic “hasbara” machine, you see.
And it’s all bunk. Israel’s hasbara colossus is a figment of anti-Zionists’ imagination. Charlie Kirk wrote a letter to Bibi Netanyahu precisely because Israel exerts so little influence over social media and campus debates that he worried the Israelis were practically abandoning the playing field.
The vaunted Hasbara Golem of the Zionist Entity? If only! It exists solely in the campfire tales that Tucker Carlson and Glenn Greenwald tell each other and the recurring nightmares that keep Candace Owens from getting a good night’s sleep.
Israeli hasbara exists, of course. The government engages in viewpoint promotion as does everyone else. But the idea that there is some kind of grand puppeteer pulling the strings of an army of media plants is the type of thing you can read in the Protocols of the Posters of Zion.
It’s reminiscent of when Gordon Thomas suggested that perhaps as many as one in every 13 Jews worldwide was ready to be activated by the Mossad, and Marty Peretz responded that if that were true, he was deeply offended to have never been recruited.
Tucker Carlson says hummus-eaters in Jerusalem killed Kirk because he dared speak the truth, but I think Carlson has seen You Don’t Mess with the Zohan too many times.
The truth is, there’s nothing dangerous at all about criticizing Israel. There’s nothing brave about it. There’s no personal sacrifice in parroting the political utterances of every pop star or actor, nothing countercultural about blaming the Jews for your problems. The woke right wants to be edgy, so it… echoes liberal late-night hosts and the New York Times and European soccer players?
There is, however, money and prestige in it. And that, in the end, is what the influencers won’t admit they’re after. And they don’t want you to realize that they have exhausted whatever honest talent they might have had once upon a time and now are reduced to lowest-common-denominator grifting. There’s no shame in wanting to be wealthy, of course. But there is—or should be—a metric ton of shame in getting it by whining incessantly about the Jews.
