By Yair Rosenberg
Wednesday, February 04, 2026
At the close of 2025, just a few months after Charlie
Kirk was assassinated, thousands of his followers came together in Phoenix for
AmericaFest, the annual convention of Turning Point USA. A casual observer
might have expected this gathering to serve as an opportunity for conservatives
to regroup, celebrate Kirk’s legacy, and recommit to his fight against the
left. Instead, one by one, MAGA’s leading lights took the stage and began
shivving one another in public.
“Today, the conservative movement is in serious danger,” warned Ben
Shapiro, a co-founder of The Daily Wire. He lambasted right-wing
“charlatans” who “traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty.” And he named names.
Shapiro slammed Tucker Carlson, perhaps the most popular conservative
commentator in America, for mainstreaming
pro-Nazi sentiment, and dubbed the former Trump strategist Steve Bannon “a
PR flack for Jeffrey Epstein,” the convicted sex criminal (fact-check: mostly
true).
“These people are frauds, and they are grifters, and they do not deserve your
time,” Shapiro said. Awkwardly, several of those people were scheduled to speak
after him.
“Ben Shapiro is like a cancer, and that cancer spreads,” retorted Bannon
the next day from the same podium. “I just got here, and I feel like I missed
the first part of the program,” quipped Carlson,
who went on to accuse Shapiro and his allies of practicing “the style of debate
where you prevent the other side from talking or being heard,” conflating the
latter’s criticism of his conduct with censorship.
When Kirk was killed, conservatives believed that his
death would galvanize his cause. “Millions of Charlie Kirks were created
today,” declared
Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado. But as it turned out, Kirk’s
assassin didn’t kill just one man; he destabilized the entire Trump coalition
by removing a pivotal person who had been holding it together. In doing so, the
killer helped unshackle dark forces—chief among them anti-Semitism—that now
threaten to overtake the conservative movement.
***
Before his life was ended by an assassin’s bullet,
Charlie Kirk was trying to save the conservative coalition from turning on
itself. To liberals, the late activist was known for debating left-wing
students on college campuses. But on the right, Kirk was waging another battle,
against people on his own side.
For years, Kirk was dogged by the overtly racist
followers of the young white-nationalist influencer Nick
Fuentes. An avowed admirer of Adolf Hitler, Fuentes sought to subordinate
racial, religious, and sexual minorities to white Christians. “The problem is
that Jews run America,” he said in a representative livestream. “And the only
reason we have Muslims here is because Jews are letting them in.” His
supporters, known as “Groypers,” badgered Kirk with anti-Semitic and other
bigoted questions at Turning Point events. “Charlie Kirk is a fake patriot, a
fake Christian, and he hates his people, he’s anti-white,” Fuentes told his
online audience.
Kirk recognized that this crude conspiracism was
poisonous to his project of popularizing the conservative cause. When a caller
to The Charlie Kirk Show asked why he wouldn’t debate Fuentes and his
faction, Kirk responded:
“We succeed—we win; they blame the Jews.” But Kirk also saw that Fuentes had
real appeal, especially among disaffected
youth, and so he tried to split the difference, repeatedly rebuking the Groypers
themselves while partially co-opting some of their talking points. “If you are
blaming less than 0.2 percent of the world’s population for all of your
problems, that is not going to be good for your soul,” Kirk said shortly
before his death. “Any young person that goes into this hyper-online brain rot,
you are serving yourself over to your own demise.” Before he was killed, he
drafted a now-best-selling
book about the benefits of observing the Jewish Sabbath. But Kirk also blamed
“Jewish donors” for being “the No. 1 funding mechanism of radical, open-border,
neoliberal, quasi-Marxist policies, cultural institutions, and nonprofits.”
An exchange during one of Kirk’s final campus tours
illustrates the tenuous nature of this balancing act. At Illinois State
University last April, a man confronted Kirk to claim that
the U.S. government had been “infiltrated by the Jews.” He proceeded to blame
pornography, “the transgender movement and the LGBT community,” and the 9/11
attacks on Jewish culprits. For 16 minutes, Kirk deconstructed these and other
conspiracy theories, patiently demystifying complex aspects of Judaism such as
the Talmud and the biblical Noahide Laws before
attempting to explain his fundamental disagreement. “I actually think the
people who control our government are secular leftist Marxists in the deep
state,” he said. “The people actually controlling our country are not ‘the
Jews’”—at this he made a mocking gesture with his hand. “It’s a combination of
people that want to see the United States of America cripple and fall.” But
before Kirk could finish the sentence, his questioner emphatically interjected,
“The Jews.”
Kirk similarly tried to walk a tightrope when it came to
Israel. Despite pushback from Zionist members of and donors to his own
organization, including prominent evangelical Christians and conservative Jews,
he hosted debates about the merits
of American political and military support for Israel at Turning Point events.
And he continued to invite Carlson to participate in them, even after the
former Fox News host began airing Hitler
apologetics alongside his critiques of the Israeli state. Toward the end of
his life, Kirk himself became more critical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu’s leadership; he publicly opposed
U.S. strikes on Iran and, according
to his podcast producer, wanted the Gaza war to end. In this way, Kirk sought
to decouple criticism of Israeli policy from anti-Semitic conspiracism, and to
contain conflicts over Jews and their state within the conservative tent,
rather than allow those arguments to collapse it.
But when Kirk died, so did the hope of a brokered MAGA
consensus on this and other incendiary issues, because no one else had the
credibility or charisma to sustain one. A frantic scramble for control of the
Trump coalition commenced—and all of the tensions that Kirk had tried to tame
were unleashed. Bit by bit, the conservative kingmaker’s former friends began
dismantling his life’s political work.
Candace Owens, a popular far-right podcaster whom Kirk
once hired and raised from obscurity, began claiming that he had been murdered
not by Tyler Robinson, the man detained by authorities, but by an Israeli
conspiracy that included Kirk’s own
lieutenants in Turning Point USA—and possibly his wife, Erika Kirk, now the
organization’s CEO. “Candace Owens Honors Charlie Kirk’s Legacy by Doing
Everything in Her Power to Destroy It,” cracked
The Babylon Bee, a satirical conservative publication.
In his speech at Kirk’s funeral, Carlson blamed Jews—sorry,
people “eating hummus”—for killing Jesus, and insinuated that a similar cabal
killed Kirk. Days later, Carlson began releasing The 9/11 Files, a
five-part video series that suggests Israel had foreknowledge of the al-Qaeda
attacks but withheld the information from the United States. “‘Israel did 9/11’
is a rather anti-Semitic thing to say,” Kirk had told the
questioner who had suggested as much at Illinois State.
Carlson put the final nail in Kirk’s coffin seven weeks
after his death by inviting Fuentes, the activist’s nemesis, onto his
show—perhaps the most popular podcast on the American right—for a cordial
conversation. Over the course of 138 minutes, Fuentes praised Joseph Stalin and
railed against “organized Jewry,” all while his host largely failed to
challenge his Nazi-adjacent views.
Carlson’s interview with Fuentes was not only a betrayal
of Kirk’s memory—it precipitated the very MAGA meltdown that Kirk had worked so
hard to avert. Conservative institutions quickly came under pressure to condemn
Carlson for his softball sit-down with the David Duke of the digital age. This
proved too difficult for Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage
Foundation, the most influential right-wing think tank in Donald Trump’s
Washington. In a video posted online, Roberts denounced Carlson’s
critics as a “venomous coalition” and defended Fuentes’s right to free
speech—without using his own to substantively criticize anything that either
man had said.
The reaction to the video was seismic. “No to the
groypers,” Shapiro declared
on X. “No to cowards like Tucker Carlson, who normalize their trash.” Shapiro
released a special 41-minute
episode of his podcast detailing Fuentes’s career of calumnies against
Black people, Indian Americans, Jews, and women—and called out Carlson’s
refusal to confront the young white supremacist about any of it. “If this is
the Republican Party, or this is what the Republican Party becomes, then I’m
not part of it,” Ace of Spades, a pseudonymous pugilist who once won the
Conservative Political Action Conference’s Blogger of the Year award, wrote. “I did not sign up for
this bullshit. I will not become a Nazi to ‘own the libs.’”
“In the last six months, I’ve seen more anti-Semitism on
the right than I have at any time in my life,” Senator Ted Cruz told the
Federalist Society’s National Lawyers Convention in November. “It is growing.
It is metastasizing. There are about a half-dozen vocal apostles, and it is in
particular finding purchase with the young.” Soon after, the Princeton
professor Robert George, once dubbed “the
reigning brain of the Christian right,” resigned
from the Heritage Foundation’s board. Dozens of staffers reportedly left
the organization. One month later, Turning Point’s flagship conference
descended into recriminations over the very controversies and conspiracies that
its founder had endeavored so assiduously to suppress.
***
On one level, this conflict is about Jews and Israel. But
on another, this debate is downstream from something much bigger: a power
struggle over who will define and control the MAGA movement once Trump is gone.
By painting rivals as tools of the Jews, hard-right influencers such as Carlson
and Bannon hope to delegitimize the competition not by besting their ideas, but
by slurring their loyalties and identity.
For years, Carlson has assailed Shapiro, the country’s
most prominent Jewish conservative, casting him as a foreign subversive opposed
to the national interest and “hostile toward White, Christian men”—even as
Carlson himself has whitewashed
anti-American authoritarians such as Russian President Vladimir Putin on his
show. “I can’t imagine how someone like that could get an audience of people
who claim to care about America,” Carlson said of
Shapiro in 2023, “because he doesn’t, obviously.” Carlson also recently
insinuated that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is controlled by Netanyahu.
Bannon, similarly, regularly labels his
critics as “Israel-first”—including in disputes that have nothing to do
with Israel.
Kirk sought to construct a conservative populism that did
not get mired in the morass of anti-Jewish conspiracism. He did not succeed.
But many of those who have rushed to assume his mantle have no desire to try.
They see anti-Semitism not as a weakness to be avoided but a weapon to be
wielded against ideological opponents—including the president.
These far-right actors hold no love for Trump and see his
iron grip on the Republican base as an impediment to their ambitions. Indeed,
Carlson has privately called the president “a
total piece of shit” and a “demonic
force.” Bannon repeatedly
derided
the president in text messages to Epstein. Fuentes refused
to endorse Trump in 2024. Implying that Trump is controlled by Israel or his
Jewish donors is a convenient way to drive a wedge between him and his
supporters. “Pushing that anti-Semitic button in far-right Republican politics
is a way for some MAGA-aligned figures to try to create a version of MAGA that
Trump doesn’t control,” the historian Walter Russell Mead told
a Tablet magazine podcast. For Carlson and company, anti-Semitism is a
means to an end, and Jews are simply collateral damage.
Men like Bannon, Carlson, and Fuentes represent a small,
internally divided faction that cannot itself win national elections and repels
many of the voters needed to do so. But they are able to extort the broader
conservative coalition by threatening to sabotage or leave it. Politicians such
as Vice President Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and any other
contenders for the 2028 presidential nomination, will have to decide whether to
accommodate or anathematize the coalition’s anti-Semites.
Some of those pushing anti-Jewish invective on the right
are opportunists. Others are true believers. But the outcome is the same: a
conservative politics that is more fractious and more overtly anti-Semitic, in
which the place of Jewish people in American public life is openly up for
debate.
Charlie Kirk tried to avoid exactly this. He aspired to
forge a broad conservative coalition that could outlive Trump and bridge the
traditional Reaganite GOP with the rising new right. As Kyle Spencer, the
author of Raising Them Right, a book about Turning Point’s ascent, put
it: “Charlie Kirk arrived on the scene as a kid who just graduated from
high school in 2012, saying, ‘I have a vision. It is possible. This party is
stodgy. It’s outdated, it’s old white men. We need to attract young people,
Black people, Latinos.’” In 2024, when Kirk quarterbacked
the Trump campaign’s ground game, it looked like he had finally pulled that
off: The former president made major gains among nonwhite and low-propensity
voters, and he finally won the popular vote.
Today, the president’s hold on his MAGA base remains
ironclad, but Kirk’s dream of a broader coalition is slipping away. Last
month, polling released by The New York Times found
that “the major demographic shifts of the last election have snapped back.” In
fact, the paper continued, “young and nonwhite voters are even likelier to
disapprove of Mr. Trump than they were then, while he retains most of his
support among older and white voters.” That same month, Carlson welcomed his
show’s first guest of 2026, a conspiracy theorist named Ian Carroll who, after
Kirk was killed, told his 1.3 million X followers that “Israel just shot
themselves.” The real plot against Kirk’s legacy and work—perpetrated in part
by the two men in the studio—went undiscussed.
No comments:
Post a Comment