Antisemites are trying to hijack Charlie Kirk’s legacy
Claims that the activist was turning on Israel and conspiracy theories about his death are part of a battle to legitimize Jew-hatred, not defend free speech.
By Jonathan S. Tobin
JNS
Sep 22, 2025
It turns out that Charlie Kirk was one of those seminal figures in our culture and politics whose impact will be greater in death than in life. In the two weeks since his assassination at Utah Valley University, the magnitude of the reaction to his passing likely surprised many of his political opponents as well as some of his admirers.
The enormous outpouring of emotion on the political right in response to his shocking murder was matched only by the vitriol hurled at his memory coming from some on the left.
That, in turn, fueled a backlash on the left that has cost some people, such as Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah, their jobs. It also put a hold on ABC late-night comedy show host Jimmy Kimmel, who was taken off the air for a week. These two individuals, along with many others, were guilty not only of insensitivity but of using their prominent perches to spread misinformation about Kirk and the assassination. Their fate and the way others who posted their contempt for Kirk on social media have been singled out for opprobrium has created a second backlash—this time coming from the left, complaining about the way that the wave of grief for Kirk has called into question the free speech rights of his opponents.
Tolerance for antisemitism
Even as the battle for Kirk’s legacy has become the centerpiece of a renewed and even more bitter edition of the same culture war that has been dividing right and left in the last decade, one aspect of this controversy seems to be exacerbating another ongoing crisis. The debate about what Kirk thought and who killed him—and why—has also become a new inflection point in the surge of antisemitism that has been spreading across the United States since the Hamas-led Palestinian attacks on Israeli communities on Oct. 7, 2023.
Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson pivoted immediately after the murder to claim that Kirk, a steadfast friend and defender of Israel, was souring on the Jewish state, as well as on the brink of joining him and other antisemites in their opposition to the war on Hamas. As other extremists on the internet were floating conspiracy theories about Israel being behind Kirk’s murder, the even more extreme Jew-hater Candace Owens has been spreading claims that prominent Jews were seeking to “blackmail” the activist over his alleged anti-Israel tendencies.
Carlson, who has become increasingly open about his hatred for Israel and the Jews—platforming anyone who will attack both it and Holocaust denial—was given a prominent speaking slot, alongside Kirk’s widow, Erika, President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance and other members of the administration at the massive memorial service for Kirk at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Ariz. That he was there at all, let alone using his time to vaguely invoke deicide charges against Jews, was disturbing. But it also spoke volumes about the troubling fact that Carlson has managed to maintain his status as a legitimate conservative thought leader, as well as the way tolerance for his antisemitism may become part of the complicated legacy of Kirk’s free-speech absolutism.
The furor over ABC’s suspension of the “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” show has been a remarkable, yet illuminating, example of the hypocritical nature of most discussions about free speech.
Kimmel was guilty of a gobsmacking example of misinformation when he declared during an opening monologue on Sept. 15 that Kirk’s killer was a fellow MAGA conservative activist. By then, it was already clear that the assassin was someone on the political left who was likely influenced by Kirk’s opposition to gender ideology, in addition to the activist’s criticism of the transgender movement’s political and social impact on society.
That appalling comment sparked anger from a broad range of Americans and threats from affiliates to drop the Kimmel show from their ABC stations. ABC acted quickly to shut his show down rather than be forced to defend Kimmel and lose revenue when local stations refused to air it.
Comments from Trump and Brendan Carr, chair of the Federal Communications Commission, in which they seemed to be demanding that Kimmel be fired, led some to the not entirely unreasonable conclusion that what was happening was the result of government pressure to censor views the administration opposed.
Kimmel’s fate was an example of what happens when an entertainer creates a political mess that his employers want no part of. But thanks to Trump and Carr, he instead became, along with fellow late-night comedy show host Stephen Colbert, whose show was canceled by CBS due to chronically bad ratings and epic financial losses, a martyr to free speech.
Late-night politics
This is as absurd as it is hypocritical.
For the last decade or more, all of the broadcast networks’ late-night comedy shows have hewed to a consistently partisan line in which the genre’s former nonpartisan approach to humor was replaced by rigid adherence to liberal ideology. For years, all of them—even the less political NBC show hosted by Jimmy Fallon, who was shamed and forced to subsequently apologize for having hosted Trump and giving him the usual softball treatment accorded Democrats during the 2016 presidential campaign—have become daily in-kind contributions to the Democratic Party.
The result is that they have become consistently unfunny, coupled with declining viewership ratings. As a result, these shows have become dead weight to the networks, something that has been amply illustrated by the fact that the conservative alternative to them—the “Gutfeld!” show on the Fox News Channel—has been consistently beating all of them, despite having a potentially smaller audience since it is a cable rather than broadcast network.
That doesn’t excuse efforts by the administration to intimidate its critics. But you don’t have to be a Republican or a fan of Greg Gutfeld’s brand of humor to recognize that the rationale for ABC, NBC and CBS to drop the left-wing ideology and get back into the comedy business hasn’t much to do with anything Trump might say. Instead, it is a function of the fact that they are all businesses that are supposedly interested in appealing to all Americans, rather than just the less than 50% of them who vote for the Democrats and/or hate Trump or Charlie Kirk.
More than that, the same people who are whining about the fate of Kimmel or even Colbert had no sympathy when politics derailed the careers of entertainers who ran afoul of left-wing sensibilities.
In 2018, comedian Roseanne Barr—a onetime ardent leftist who had migrated to what seemed at times to be the political right—was fired from the successful reboot of her eponymous situation comedy for a tweet in which she attacked Obama administration figure Valerie Jarrett, a key figure behind its appeasement of Iran, with what many considered to be racist imagery.
In 2021, former mixed martial arts athlete turned actress Gina Carano was fired from the “Star Wars” series where she had starred because she questioned the 2020 presidential election results, and then compared the Biden administration and internet moguls’ silencing of conservative voices to Nazi persecutions of the Jews.
In both cases, nobody currently screaming about the end of free speech was defending the right of Barr or Carano to say controversial, insensitive or even deeply offensive things without losing their livelihoods. Instead, the liberal late-night comedy show hosts, as well as liberal opinion, joined the gang tackle of these figures and thought it entirely appropriate that they should be canceled, shunned and run out of the public square.
This time, it’s certain conservatives who are playing the “free speech for me but not for thee” card.
In death, Kirk’s appeal seems to have transcended the world of conservative activism in which he played a key role in the right’s pushback against woke ideology and helped re-elect Trump in 2024. His murder has focused a broad swath of the public on the admirable example he offered the country of someone who was equally committed to conservative ideas, while also being deeply religious and dedicated to promoting dialogue across the partisan divide. The fact that he was shot and killed while engaging in open political dialogue underneath his trademark “Prove Me Wrong” sign has only burnished his memory in the minds of more than just those who supported his Turning Point USA group.
Hijacking a legacy
That’s why the attempt on the part of Israel-haters to hijack his legacy is so troubling and has the potential to legitimize antisemitic tropes into mainstream conservative thinking.
Carlson clearly understands the stakes involved in controlling how the public thinks about Kirk.
Kirk was the embodiment of the pendulum of public opinion that is swinging back to an embrace of traditional values, faith and belief in Western civilization from the excesses of the woke leftism that seemed to have an unshakable grip on society after the Black Lives Matter summer of 2020.
His distaste for the cancel culture of the left was heartfelt and popular. Yet opposition to the silencing of traditional conservatives and others who dissented from leftist orthodoxies about race, Trump, illegal immigration, gender ideology and abortion ought not to obligate one to support the platforming of every opinion.
For Carlson, Owens and their acolytes, their embrace of anti-Israel and antisemitic tropes in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks caused them to align themselves in sympathy with the red-green alliance of leftists and Islamists who seek to target Jews on campuses. The way extremists on the left and right come together on antisemitism is nothing new. But it put them in the uncomfortable position of conservatives opposing the Trump administration’s pro-Israel foreign policy, as well as its laudable campaign to rid college campuses of the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion that is the engine of 21st-century Jew-hatred.
That is why it’s so important for them to tie Kirk to their campaign to legitimize the mainstreaming of post-Oct. 7 antisemitism.
Should we believe the claims made in a Carlson podcast—in which Carlson assembled a lineup of antisemitic figures like “Dilbert” cartoonist Scott Adams, Greek Orthodox priest Father Josiah Trenham, left-wing commentator Cenk Uygur and podcaster Megyn Kelly, a recent convert to Israel-bashing—the week after the assassination about Kirk undergoing a change of heart about Israel or that he hated Netanyahu?
There’s no reason to trust anything that he or his cronies say about Israel, especially their claims of pro-Israel donors trying to bribe or blackmail Kirk to back Israel and distance himself from Carlson. As legal columnist and podcaster Josh Hammer—a stalwart defender of Israel—has said, he was on the phone with Kirk discussing their mutual support for the Jewish state the night before the assassination on Sept. 10.
We do know that Carlson benefited from Kirk’s instinctive opposition to deplatforming anyone. Although he disagreed with Carlson’s stands on Israel and Holocaust denial, Kirk still gave him the opportunity to speak at his influential TPUSA conferences.
Most on the right understand that their support for Israel and its just war against Hamas in Gaza is inextricably linked to their backing for traditional values, Western civilization and faith. Aligning themselves with the leftists and Islamists who hate the Jews is antithetical to those beliefs.
By allowing Carlson to keep his foot in the door, Turning Point USA is giving credence to pro-Hamas talking points about “genocide” and antisemitic tropes about the Jews using money to manipulate American foreign policy.
Opposing letting these ideas be considered debatable, rather than despicable notions that should be confined to the fever swamps of the far right and left, is not a matter of banning free speech. It’s just common sense. Conservatives should not be willing to treat such toxic ideas as legitimate any more than they should accept woke myths about race, intersectionality or settler-colonialism that they know to be both false and damaging to American society.
Yet that is the position that Carlson is claiming is now both mainstream conservatism and part of a Kirk legacy that should be defended.
Planting a seed of Jew-hatred
His presence on the podium at the Kirk memorial in Arizona, alongside administration leaders, was appalling in and of itself. But the fact that he used that bully pulpit to invoke the ideas that guys who eat hummus (aka Jews) plotted Jesus’s death the way the contemporary left plotted to silence Charlie planted an insidious seed of Jew-hatred in an otherwise moving tribute to the activist’s life and work.
It isn’t cancel culture to seek to rid the public square of this kind of hate any more than it is wrong to seek to reclaim academia for Western values by expelling woke DEI commissars and mobs of pro-Hamas hate-mongers. Doing so is a defense of the values of the American republic that Charlie Kirk believed in and for which he gave his life.
Defending the antisemitism of Carlson and Owens—and all of their friends and allies on the far right and the far left that agree with them—is not consistent with Kirk’s lifework. Nor is it necessarily a natural corollary to his efforts to end the silencing of conservatives in mainstream culture and society.
Anyone who cares about honoring the 31-year-old husband, father and activist—and his beliefs—should be outraged at the way Tucker Carlson is trying to hijack his legacy. If he succeeds, it will be more than a boost for pro-Hamas thugs and antisemites on both the left and the right. It will also set back any hopes that the efforts to win back America for Kirk’s conservative faith will ultimately succeed.
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