The Second Death of Charlie Kirk
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.
[Yair Rosenberg: The anti-Semitic revolution on the American right]
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.
[Judith Shulevitz: There were two Charlie Kirks]
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.
[Ali Breland: The firewall against Nick Fuentes is crumbling]
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.
Illustration Sources: Chip Somodevilla / Getty; Raquel Natalicchio / Houston Chronicle via Getty; Rich Graessle / Icon Sportswire / Getty; Oliver Touron / Getty; Heather Diehl / Getty; Andrew Harnik / Getty.