On a cool evening in October, six weeks after Charlie Kirk was assassinated in full view of thousands at Utah Valley University, I joined a sea of young people lining up outside the auditorium on Indiana University’s sprawling Bloomington campus for an event sponsored by Kirk’s organization, Turning Point USA. Kirk himself had been scheduled to headline the event, one stop on a planned tour of colleges across the country. Instead we would hear from Tucker Carlson, once the star of Fox News and now a wildly popular podcast host. The choice was a pointed one given Carlson’s willingness to buck Republican orthodoxy, particularly on matters of foreign policy. He has vehemently denounced American military involvement abroad, including attacks on Iran, support for Ukraine, and most controversially, the U.S.-backed war in Gaza.
The political and religious cast of the crowd in Bloomington was signaled by the street vendors, who were doing brisk business offering red, white, and black make america great again hats, along with caps proclaiming jesus won and sweatshirts emblazoned with freedom and Kirk’s signature. In the center of the plaza outside the venue, hand-lettered signs proclaimed christian values? israel massacres innocents and would jesus ignore this? will you? Pointing to the signs, I asked Dane, a young self-described Christian who declined to give his last name, whether he agreed with their message. “We’ve heard for a few years how the left feels about it,” he told me. “But you’re starting to see a little bit of a change in the right. They’ve spent many, many years trying to get a common consensus belief that Israel is one of our very best allies, and that belief is starting to change. It’s not just a niche thing anymore. I would be quite concerned if I was a politician.”
Jayden Lopez, a student at Indiana University’s campus in Indianapolis, had driven an hour and a half to the event. Sporting a MAGA cap, he, too, expressed exhaustion with Israel’s war in Gaza. “Christian values,” he said, “are ‘all lives matter.’ We shouldn’t be killing anybody. It’s got to stop. Enough is enough.” Like most people I spoke with at the event, Lopez gets his news from X and TikTok: “Some of the stuff is horrific, but at least you’re getting raw footage—like, this is what’s going on now.” In none of my conversations did I come across any wholehearted supporters of Israel. Jack Henning, the energetic vice president of the local Turning Point chapter and leader of Indiana University’s College Republicans, explained the absence. “I feel like a lot of Gen Z is typically more anti-Israel now, but there are still pro-Israel people out there,” he told me; they had stayed away from the evening’s event because of Carlson’s views. “We had some students, even their parents, questioning, ‘Why are you having Tucker here now? He is bitterly anti-Israel, and he’s anti-Semitic.’ And I think that’s ridiculous—he’s not anti-Semitic. I think we should be encouraged to listen to both sides.”
Carlson did not disappoint. When his turn came—following remarks by the promoter of a business marketing “bailouts” for student-loan defaulters, the Republican governor of Indiana, and a distinctly unfunny comedian—Carlson forswore a traditional speech in favor of responding to questions from the audience. With his two English springer spaniels patrolling the stage (“My wife left for the week to visit our children, and I had the dogs”), he delivered courteous and fluent responses to audience members, many of whom were selected on the expectation that they would be critical. This was an approach favored by Kirk in his day, such critics typically being ill-equipped to out-argue skilled debaters like himself or Carlson. Carlson articulated his core positions emphatically. “MAGA is America First, which means Americans should put no country before America,” he said. “No pointless wars, period.” This comment drew loud and hearty applause from the three-thousand-strong crowd, as did a later observation that “what’s happening in Gaza is disgusting.”
I felt that what I was hearing from the crowd was MAGA youth’s revulsion for America’s disastrous twenty-first-century wars, a seismic shift brought to a head by Gaza. “It’s very obvious to me that the Republican coalition is fracturing over foreign policy,” Carlson said at one point, “specifically Israel.”
Less than three hours after Kirk’s death on September 10, Benjamin Netanyahu took to X to declare him “a lion-hearted friend of Israel” who “fought the lies and stood tall for Judeo-Christian civilization.” The following day, he posted again: “Charlie Kirk was a defender of our common Judeo-Christian civilization,” he wrote, alongside a video clip of Kirk expressing unbridled support and admiration for the Jewish state. He also appeared on Fox News, declaring himself heartbroken. That afternoon, prompted by the Newsmax host Greta Van Susteren, Netanyahu denounced suggestions spreading on the internet that Israel had killed Kirk as “insane,” insisting that he and Kirk had been fighting together on the “battlefield of ideas.” He continued to assert Kirk’s support for Israel in the following days, and again emphasized, this time in a video statement on his official prime-ministerial X account, that Israel was not responsible for Kirk’s murder, calling the accusation a “monstrous big lie.”
Netanyahu’s flurry of protestations had an unspoken context: Kirk, the face of conservative youth and a powerful force in Republican politics who enjoyed potent connections to the Trump Administration, had shown clear signs that he was changing sides on that battlefield of ideas—at least when it came to ideas about Israel. This made him dangerous. Prior to the October 7 attacks, Kirk had a record of loyal adherence to Israel. “I’m very pro-Israel, I’m an evangelical Christian, I’m a conservative, I’m a Trump supporter, I’m a Republican, and my whole life I have defended Israel,” he said on a 2019 trip to Jerusalem, expressing appreciation, too, for the state’s kindly treatment of Arabs. But within days of October 7, Kirk began exhibiting a tendency to change his mind. Raising the possibility that Netanyahu had allowed Hamas’s attack to go forward as a way of resolving his political difficulties at home, he asked rhetorically, “Was there a stand-down order?” As any critic of Israel knows full well, deviation from the official narrative draws swift rebuke and, often, accusations of anti-Semitism, which were forthcoming on that occasion from the right-wing journalist Ben Domenech, who posted on X, “If Charlie Kirk remains the head of TPUSA, the right has an anti-Semite problem.” This tactic has deep roots: as early as 1982, Nathan Perlmutter, the national director of the pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League (ADL), wrote that “sniping at American defense budgets” should be deemed anti-Semitic.
For decades, Zionist political organizations like AIPAC and a media industry concentrated in a few reliably sympathetic hands protected the narrative that Israel is the sole democracy in the Middle East, permanently imperiled by genocidal foes, from serious challenge—even as Israel populated the occupied West Bank with illegal settlements and kept the fenced-off population of Gaza in a state of near malnutrition with a total military blockade starting in 2007. But over the past two years, Israel has thrown the doors to debate wide open with its actions in Gaza: killing civilians by the tens of thousands, burying many alive under the rubble of their homes, destroying hospitals, sniping children with drones, and starving young and old alike. And the world has watched it happen. Predictably, traditional media outlets such as the New York Times and CNN have offered sanitized reports on the slaughter. But thanks to social media, it has become impossible to control the flow of information. By 2025, according to a Pew Research Center survey, one in five Americans was getting their news from TikTok, where a stream of powerful images from Gaza depicted what was really happening there. The figure rose to 43 percent among those under thirty.
This was a dire turn of events for Israel’s American supporters. Early in the war, Jonathan Greenblatt, current head of the ADL, noted the effects of the images from Gaza. “We have a major, major, major generational problem,” Greenblatt can be heard lamenting in a leaked recording of a November 2023 call. “All the polling I’ve seen,” he says, “suggests this is not a left–right gap, folks . . . it’s young and old. . . . We really have a TikTok problem, a Gen Z problem.”
He was right about the polls. Israel’s standing with the American public, according to numerous surveys, has been plummeting across the board. A New York Times/Siena College poll in September revealed that more Americans supported the Palestinians than Israel, and 40 percent believed that Israel was deliberately killing civilians. But the gap is most pronounced among young people. A Pew survey published in April revealed that the portion of young Democrats with an unfavorable view of Israel increased from 62 percent in 2022 to 71 percent in 2025. More alarmingly for the Trump Administration, among Republicans under the age of fifty, a demographic that includes Kirk’s followers, disaffection with Israel jumped from 35 percent to 50 percent. Public polls revealing the country’s shrinking popularity among conservatives have been confirmed by internal Republican research. “The GOP was concerned about it,” a well-connected Republican lobbyist told me.
In the days after Kirk’s killing, that concern spilled into public view, as attempts by Netanyahu and prominent supporters of Israel to canonize the Turning Point founder as a Zionist to the end were refuted by Kirk’s close associates, many of whom are major players in the MAGA movement. The battle over this aspect of Kirk’s legacy illuminated a potentially significant rift in the president’s base. It was this, and not merely Trump’s much-bruited thirst for the Nobel Peace Prize, that drove the administration’s push for a ceasefire in Gaza in the face of obdurate resistance from Netanyahu. When it comes to Israel, there is no doubt that the Republican Party is facing a revolt spearheaded by its young supporters, a shift that has been long in the making.
Trump won election, twice, on a slogan of “America First,” which, as he proclaimed in an April 2016 speech, would be “the major and overriding theme of my administration.” In that same speech, he was careful to pay tribute to Israel, “our great friend and the one true democracy in the Middle East,” and to excoriate Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. Since then, he has remained true to his theme of promoting American primacy, customarily couched in transactional terms: America’s allies are always “ripping us off.” By the time Trump had assumed the presidency for a second time, the notion was spreading that among those freeloading on American largesse was Israel—the recipient of billions of dollars in military aid.
Over the summer, that disconnect found vocal expression among certain Republican members of Congress, notably Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene. Greene, so adamant in her MAGA enthusiasm that she had dressed in red for Joe Biden’s final State of the Union address, took to making overt references to the genocide in Gaza and introduced an amendment to a House appropriations bill that would have stripped $500 million in military aid from Israel. Her effort found minimal support in Congress, but she was confident that her voters felt the same way. As Greene told the New York Times, “This is the Bible Belt—Deep South conservative Christians. They said, ‘Marjorie, we agree with you that it’s a genocide.’ ”
Carlson’s mass appeal among the MAGA faithful, especially the young, has made him another powerful voice for this position. Before his death, Kirk had made it clear that he was prepared to air Carlson’s unequivocal views on U.S. support for Israel. On the weekend of July 11, Kirk had gathered five thousand young followers in Tampa, Florida, for a “Student Action Summit.” Accorded a prime speaking slot, Carlson told the crowd that Jeffrey Epstein had been an Israeli agent (“every single person in Washington, D.C., thinks that . . . but no one feels they can say that”), and declared that any American who served in the Israel Defense Forces should “lose their citizenship immediately.” To an audience member who asked why he could burn an American flag with impunity but would get “a mark by my name” if he burned an Israeli one, Carlson replied, “That’s an entirely fair question.”
The Tampa gathering also featured a debate, moderated by Kirk, between Dave Smith, a popular comedian with unabashed libertarian views who had assailed Trump for bombing Iran, and Josh Hammer, a fervently pro-Israel commentator. The topic was Israel’s influence on American politics. Kirk gave Smith free rein to assert that “the level of Israeli control over our politics is, frankly, pretty undeniable,” and to declare that “if you support what Israel’s doing in Gaza right now, my advice to you guys is just know that you never have a leg to stand on claiming to be pro-life.” Such talk, which provoked frequent and loud applause from the packed audience, was extraordinary to hear in any conservative venue, let alone one presided over by someone as influential as Kirk.
Among the crowd in Tampa was Silas Pearson, vice president of the largest Turning Point chapter in the country, at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, ground zero for evangelical higher education. He is also helping set up a local branch of Young Americans for Liberty, an organization born of the 2008 presidential campaign of the former congressman and staunch libertarian Ron Paul, much of whose career was devoted to ending America’s foreign entanglements, including its support for Israel. Growing up as a committed Christian in a small town in northern Vermont, Pearson felt “very much a pariah” among his liberal classmates. Politically, he told me, he considers himself a “Christian conservative” who would “always vote Republican,” but his views would cause much disquiet for the likes of Greenblatt. As he made clear to me, he believes in Israel’s right to exist, but questions how far U.S. support should go: “Do I believe that we should be funneling over as much money as we do for things that may or may not be good? You know, maybe not.” He has noticed similar doubts among his conservative peers. “It has been a very interesting shift in the political spectrum, because I’ve now seen very far-right people not necessarily supporting Palestine but being very anti-Israel,” he told me. “I think it’s just that people don’t trust what they’re being told, and the common denominator being, ‘If I can’t trust these sources, I’m just not going to trust Israel at all.’ ” As an example, he cited his own shifting opinion of Ted Cruz, who says his unreserved support for Israel is biblically enjoined. “Many people, myself included,” Pearson said, had been “big fans” of the Texas senator, finding him to be a “very trustworthy person.” But, he said, “Due to his very close relationship with Israel, that opinion has shifted. A lot of people no longer trust him, no longer trust Israel.”
Kirk, who had always lent an attentive ear to what his followers were saying and thinking, was well aware of sentiments like Pearson’s. As Carlson told me, “Charlie was both leading and following. His positions matched his principles, but they also reflected the views of the people he was talking to. I mean, he was on college campuses. How many college students support Israel? None. Just the shills.”
Kirk’s choice of speakers in Tampa triggered a rapid counterattack. Hours after the gathering ended, Laura Loomer, the rabid right-wing commentator with considerable influence in the Oval Office, denounced his featuring of Smith in a post on X: “I don’t ever want to hear @charliekirk11 claim he is pro-Trump ever again. After this weekend, I’d say he has revealed himself as [a] political opportunist.” More troublingly for the leader of Turning Point, which by 2025 had an $81 million operating budget, his funding was under threat from major donors whose generosity was pegged to his support for Israel.
Three weeks after Tampa, Kirk journeyed to the Hamptons for a meeting arranged by Bill Ackman. The hedge-fund billionaire had demonstrated his considerable power in January 2024 by successfully pushing for the resignation of Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, over her purported indulgence of anti-Semitism on campus. For the meeting in the Hamptons, Ackman had assembled a group largely composed of individuals who used their social-media followings to amplify messaging supportive of Israel. (This can be a lucrative pursuit: according to foreign-registration filings unearthed by the online magazine Responsible Statecraft, at least some pro-Israel influencers have likely been paid $7,000 per post by a company under contract with the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.)
At first, Ackman had little to say about the meeting. According to a tribute he posted in the immediate wake of Kirk’s murder, he and Kirk had lately “shared a meal.” Others told a more complicated story. Drawing on sources who were present, the journalist Max Blumenthal reported on his website The Grayzone that, in fact, Kirk had been hectored for giving a platform to the likes of Carlson and Smith, and faced the demand that he redeem himself by dropping Carlson from the list of speakers at AmericaFest 2025, a major Turning Point event slated for December in Phoenix. Kirk was not pleased, as he later made clear in an interview with Megyn Kelly, the former Fox and NBC anchor who now hosts a popular podcast. “The behavior by a lot [of people], both privately and publicly, [is] pushing people like you and me away,” he said angrily, referring to unnamed pro-Israel figures. “I have text messages, Megyn, calling me an anti-Semite.”
Blumenthal’s report was buttressed by Candace Owens, a voice so influential in the world of right-wing social media that, according to a poll commissioned by the Washington Free Beacon, one in five young conservatives gets their news about Israel from her. She had struck out on her own in March 2024 after parting ways with the conservative outlet The Daily Wire following tension between her and the website’s co-founder, Ben Shapiro, over her criticism of Israel and promotion of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories—one controversy in a career marked by many, including claims that French president Emmanuel Macron obtained his office through the CIA’s MK-Ultra mind-control program and that his wife, Brigitte, was born a man (the Macrons have filed a defamation suit against Owens). She and Kirk had been friends for years, united in their disdain for Black Lives Matter and COVID-19 vaccines. Owens had also served as Turning Point’s communications director from 2017 to 2019. “Charlie’s feelings toward Israel were changing,” she told me in a long phone call in early October. She said that he “was very clear about his concern about the direction that Israel was going.” On the Monday following Kirk’s assassination, Owens reported that when Kirk was in the Hamptons, “an intervention was staged by Bill Ackman because Charlie’s thoughts, Charlie’s rational thoughts about Israel, were a no-no: ‘This is not the route that you should be going on . . . ’ Bill Ackman was very upset and threats were made.” She further claimed that Kirk had been offered “a ton of money” by Netanyahu to change his tune, an offer he had refused. Ackman quickly denied this version of events, insisting he had “receipts” to prove his case. (While he didn’t hand them over to Blumenthal, Ackman eventually posted a screenshot of a friendly WhatsApp exchange he’d had with Kirk after the alleged intervention took place.)
Owens’s assertions drew angry rebuttals from other attendees of the Hamptons meeting—including Hammer and Natasha Hausdorff of U.K. Lawyers for Israel—who maintained that the gathering had been entirely amicable and that Kirk’s loyalty to Israel remained undiminished. In support of this contention, Ackman pointed to a seven-page letter Kirk had apparently written to Netanyahu in early May, stating that “one of my greatest joys as a Christian is advocating for Israel and forming alliances with Jews in the fight to protect Judeo-Christian civilization,” and offering suggestions for ways that Israel could revamp its “information warfare strategy.” This was intended to refute the reports from Owens and others that Kirk’s views had been changing. But Owens was biding her time. Days later, she released a screenshot of text messages sent by Kirk to a group chat with close associates shortly before his death, the authenticity of which was confirmed by Andrew Kolvet, a Turning Point spokesperson:
Just lost another huge Jewish donor. $2 million a year because we won’t cancel Tucker . . . I’m thinking of inviting Candace . . . Jewish donors play into all the stereotypes. I cannot and will not be bullied like this. Leaving me no choice but to leave the pro-Israel cause.
Owens told me that it had been “hard” to withhold the text messages while under attack for supposedly distorting Kirk’s views. “They wanted to establish his legacy, which is a false legacy. So, yeah,” she said, “they definitely fell for it.”
The “huge Jewish donor” who had angrily pulled funding from Kirk’s organization appears to be the billionaire Robert Shillman, who reportedly withdrew a $2 million pledge to Turning Point two days before Kirk was shot. He has devoted much of his philanthropy not only to Zionist causes but also to far-right figures such as Loomer, the racist English demagogue Tommy Robinson, and the Dutch Islamophobe Geert Wilders. He also bankrolled a figure who played an important role in the rise of Kirk and other members of Trump’s inner circle: David Horowitz.
Horowitz, once upon a time a Marxist firebrand and co-editor of the radical magazine Ramparts, took an extreme right turn in the mid-Eighties, championing a vehemently Islamophobic agenda and targeting what he deemed “political correctness” as promoted by leftist university faculties. His message, which included the admonition that “fear is a much stronger and more compelling emotion” than hope, resonated with Stephen Miller, who was still an angry high school student when the two first connected in 2002. When Horowitz died this past April, Miller, who now drives Trump’s immigration crackdown as the White House deputy chief of staff, paid him tribute for having “inspired generations of bold conservative leaders, building a lasting legacy.” Kirk had been another eager acolyte. He eulogized Horowitz as his “friend and mentor,” recalling that he met more than “90% of [Turning Point’s] earliest major donors” at events hosted by Horowitz. Among those present at the annual David Horowitz Freedom Center retreat in 2017 was a young Candace Owens, then striving to make her mark as a black conservative gadfly on social media. Kirk “hired [her] on the spot,” she told me.
Kirk stayed true to Horowitz’s causes, including his public denigration of Islam and abuse of “woke” culture. But his Zionism was formed in other quarters. He first visited Israel in 2018 to attend the opening of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, where evangelical pastor Robert Jeffress delivered an opening prayer. The embassy’s move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem had been celebrated by Christian Zionists, who believe that the return of Jews to their scriptural homeland is a necessary precondition for the Second Coming of Christ. Kirk often spoke of Israel in these terms, saying it was there that he “came into contact with a living God that walked on water.”
The Israeli government has taken care to court this constituency. Starting in 2016, Brandt Burleson worked for the Israeli Consulate in Houston for eight years as strategic outreach director to evangelical churches across the Southwest, a job he took as a welcome alternative to his previous employment in a pizza parlor. He recalled to me how he would explain to the diplomats he worked with that “the reason these people support Israel is because they see Israel as a vehicle to bring about the Second Coming of Jesus, and they want the world to end.” On one occasion, after he had thus briefed the deputy consul on the way to a meeting at which Ted Cruz would also speak, Burleson remembers the diplomat remarking, “These people give me the fucking creeps. What happens when they go back to thinking their God doesn’t like us?”
In their 2007 book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, the political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt concluded that Christian Zionists were of lesser importance than Jews in maintaining U.S. support for Israel because they lacked “the financial power of the major pro-Israel Jewish groups”—and their clout in the media. But Trump forged a closer alliance with this community than any preceding Republican president. In June 2016, nine hundred evangelical pastors from across the United States gathered at the Marriott Hotel in New York’s Times Square to hear the prospective Republican nominee speak. Beforehand, as one attendee told me, the mood regarding Trump was distinctly downbeat, with much grumbling over his record as a philanderer and his multiple divorces. But the Reverend Franklin Graham, a towering eminence in that community, made a stirring introductory speech. He stressed that the only perfect being ever had been Jesus Christ and detailed the sundry imperfections of assorted Old Testament heroes, such as Moses and King David. Now God, concluded Graham, had sent another imperfect man to do his work: Donald Trump. With that, the attendee recalled, the room erupted in cries of “hallelujah—everyone was waving their arms. The room had turned one hundred eighty degrees.” It was a vitally important victory for Trump, enabling him to acquire and retain the support of this key constituency in the face of ensuing insalubrious revelations, such as the Access Hollywood tape.
Kirk hitched himself firmly to the Trumpian wagon, fully embracing a fusion of religion and politics. Caleb Campbell, an evangelical pastor in Phoenix—where Kirk was based—remembers that Kirk brought Trump to speak at a Turning Point rally in the city in the summer of 2020. “The reason I remember is because we were all shut down for COVID stuff, but the church claimed that they had air filters that filtered out COVID,” he said. Campbell had lost most of his own congregation after 2016, apparently because they rejected his traditional Christian attitudes toward the unfortunate, such as immigrants, in favor of more conservative values. He recalls Kirk talking like a “run-of-the-mill preacher” at another Turning Point event the following year, quoting fluently from Scripture, which he interpreted as providing divine injunctions to vote for Trump-aligned candidates at forthcoming school-board elections.
Given his profile within the evangelical movement, posthumous reports of Kirk’s shifting position on Israel generated protest among their ranks. Rob McCoy—the pastor emeritus of California’s Godspeak Calvary Chapel megachurch, who billed himself as Kirk’s “personal pastor” and whose son Mikey served as Kirk’s chief of staff—was quick to denounce Owens’s suspicions that Israel had a role in the murder. Kirk, McCoy said, was a “Christian martyr” who believed that “Jews are God’s chosen people. . . . He believed that Jews had an ancestral right to the land.” For young evangelicals, however, Christian Zionism is losing its appeal: according to research conducted by the University of Maryland’s Shibley Telhami, only 32 percent of evangelicals between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four sympathize with Israel over the Palestinians.
Netanyahu is anxious to reverse this trend. On his visit to Washington in February 2025, he met first not with Jewish leaders but with the leading lights of the Christian Zionist community, including Franklin Graham and John Hagee, the founder and chairman of Christians United for Israel. The Israeli leader, according to one of the pastors present at the meeting, expressed alarm at the loss of unquestioning support for Israel among younger Christian Americans, and even suggested that his own website might host Bible classes to reinforce divine endorsement of the Jewish state.
Netanyahu’s efforts to bolster his message and lure defectors back to the pro-Israel cause extend beyond Bible study. In September, following a defiant address to a near-empty U.N. General Assembly chamber in New York City, he met with a group of social-media influencers at the Israeli Consulate to discuss what could be done to counter what he derided as the “Woke Reich.” “We’re going to have to use the tools of battle . . . and the most important ones are on social media,” he said. Luckily, in his view, one of the most important tools—“TikTok, number one”—was within his grasp. The platform, so influential in conveying images of suffering in Gaza to the young people I had met in Bloomington, was being wrested from Chinese control and could soon pass into the safer hands of pro-Israel oligarchs, including Larry Ellison (the largest individual donor to Friends of the IDF), Marc Andreessen, and Ben Horowitz, son of the late David Horowitz. “I hope [the sale] goes through, because it will be consequential,” said Netanyahu, who also urged his audience to “talk to Elon,” controller of that other “most important” tool, X.
I asked Owens, surely prominent in Netanyahu’s conception of the “Woke Reich,” whether the social-media clampdown he so eagerly anticipated caused her worry. She dismissed the notion as the product of old-school thinking, out of touch with current realities. “These are boomer solutions,” she responded scornfully. “You think, if you tell teenagers, ‘Don’t do it,’ that they’re not going to do the opposite? You’re coupling [this with] the fact that it’s actually the most immoral position that you are trying to force them to have. . . . It’s only catalyzing generational awakening to how much control this little country in the Middle East has.”
That “awakening” can of course bleed into genuine anti-Semitism, as expressed by the likes of the influential white nationalist Nick Fuentes. In a remarkably amicable interview with Carlson in October, Fuentes expressed the belief that “organized Jewry” presents the principal obstacle to keeping America together. Eager to use Fuentes’s example to discredit all criticism of Israel on the right, Republican stalwarts such as Ted Cruz, Mitch McConnell, and Lindsey Graham attacked Carlson for giving him a platform, assaults that might once have ended a career. But Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, immediately sprang to Carlson’s defense, denouncing the “venomous coalition” criticizing him. This in turn elicited angry pushback from Heritage staffers, donors, and partners, including the Zionist Organization of America, which threatened to cut ties—a further indication of how deeply the Republican consensus over foreign policy has fractured.
Perhaps the Trump-orchestrated ceasefire will stem the decline in Israel’s standing despite the country’s serial violations of the agreement. But the rot may have spread too far. At a Turning Point event in late October, J. D. Vance was asked by a student why “we have to support this multi-hundred-billion-dollar foreign-aid package to Israel, to cover this, to quote Charlie Kirk, ‘ethnic cleansing in Gaza.’ ” The vice president, determined to court the MAGA base, was careful in response: “Israel, sometimes they have similar interests to the United States, and we’re going to work with them in that case. Sometimes they don’t have similar interests to the United States.” He then praised Trump for “actually being willing to apply leverage to the state of Israel.”
While Trump may be attentive to signals from his base, the Democratic establishment has ignored overwhelming outrage over its support for Israel among its own voters, even as election returns indicate that this support cost it crucial votes in 2024 and perhaps even the presidency. But there are signs that the winds may be shifting. Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, who has habitually voted for U.S. arms packages enabling Israel’s campaign since October 7, announced that he will no longer accept money from AIPAC, a move he apparently felt necessary in his race against the liberal senator Ed Markey. Three other Democrats previously in receipt of copious donations have similarly forsworn further AIPAC funding. New York City, for so long a bastion of pro-Israel power, has elected a champion of equal rights for Palestinians as its next mayor. Charlie Kirk did not, of course, originate the shift in sentiment now playing out across the political spectrum—Israel itself did that. He merely acknowledged its potency. But it may well be an enduring part of his legacy.