When Charlie Kirk was killed at a Turning Point USA event in Utah on September 10, 2025, many conservatives—including myself—pointed to the extreme left’s decade-long campaign to demonize the MAGA movement. But what followed is more troubling: Kirk’s own organization has since veered toward the very antisemitic and anti-Israel currents he—however cautiously—once resisted.
The evidence is in plain sight—at Turning Point USA rallies, in JD Vance’s own words, and in hard polling showing young Christian voters drifting from Jews and Israel. This is not fringe noise. It is a deliberate geostrategic recalibration dressed up as “moral Christianity.”
Kirk himself lit the fuse. On Patrick Bet-David’s podcast on October 12, 2023, he warned that the Israeli government would exploit the October 7 Hamas massacre—after 1,200 Israelis were murdered and 251 taken hostage—to pursue what he called the “ethnic cleansing” of Gaza and the removal of its 2.3 million residents. He echoed similar cautions in his final campus appearances days before his death.
Those remarks handed the online Christian nationalist network—led by self-proclaimed “racist” Nick Fuentes—a clear entry point. They now frame Israel as inherently hostile to Christians while staying largely silent on Islamist persecution of Christian communities across the Middle East and Africa. The safer target, after all, is a democratic ally rather than movements that answer criticism with violence.
The shift is visible on the ground. At Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in Phoenix in late 2025, open conflict erupted. Ben Shapiro blasted Tucker Carlson for platforming Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes as “moral imbecility”; an antisemitic vendor booth required staff intervention to remove displays attacking Shapiro.
Meanwhile, Candace Owens floated conspiracy theories linking Kirk’s murder to Jewish donors. Vance offered only vague calls for a “big tent that loves America.” Fuentes has openly urged followers to infiltrate Turning Point USA chapters from within. Rallies that once featured Israeli flags now echo with chants of “genocide” and questions lifted directly from Kirk’s final interviews.
Vance’s performance at a Turning Point USA college event in Athens, Georgia, on April 14, 2026, crystallized the shift. Hecklers accused Israel of genocide in Gaza and shouted that “Jesus Christ does not support genocide.” Vance replied: “I agree. Jesus Christ certainly does not support genocide… whoever yelled that out from the dark,” before pivoting to praise the administration’s Gaza ceasefire and blame the previous president.
The message landed: Christian morality now requires equating Israel’s defensive campaign with moral failure.
The numbers confirm the audience. Support for Israel among white evangelicals aged 18 to 34 has fallen to 32%—over 30 points below older evangelicals, according to 2026 data. Sympathy among young evangelical Republicans dropped from 69% in 2018 to 33.6% by 2021; post-Gaza surveys suggest it has fallen further among Generation Z Republicans. Republicans under 45 now register 57% unfavorable views of Israel.
Turning Point USA, built to mobilize these exact young “Make America Great Again” voters, has recalibrated accordingly: endless foreign wars serve no American interest, and Israel drags the United States into them—the same narrative long pushed by the extreme left and the modern ‘Axis of Evil’ (China, Russia, North Korea, Turkey, Qatar, Iran and Tehran’s Proxies).
The geostrategic logic runs deeper. American Vice-President JD Vance has voted against 2 separate emergency Israel aid packages totaling $14.3 billion since October 7, 2023. The self-proclaimed “Israel hawk”, flew to Tel Aviv on October 21, 2025, to “support” Israel—then on October 23, 2025 (right before boarding the Presidential plane) hypocritically labeled Jerusalem’s symbolic West Bank annexation resolution as a “stupid stunt,” exposing his double standard against America’s strongest ally. In March 2026, he sharply criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for “overselling” the Iran war as an easy path to regime change, calling the assessment “too optimistic.” In other words, it is very obvious where and with whom Mr. Vance stands.
The administration’s reluctance to pursue full Iranian regime collapse—paired with indirect talks—reflects a broader reordering. Iran’s 3.2 million barrels of daily oil output make containment more attractive than upheaval, stabilizing global prices in the $70–80 range. That stability benefits American consumers and opens doors to pragmatic energy coordination with Russia and Turkey, both central to regional energy and transit dynamics.
Washington now prioritizes countering China through transactional alignments rather than deeper entanglement in Middle Eastern conflicts that inflame domestic divisions and alienate the very Christian base Turning Point USA courts.
In a hypothetical future Vance presidency, Israel would likely remain a partner—but a transactional one at best.
Charlie Kirk built Turning Point USA as a firewall for conservative principles. Today, it hosts forces that equate Jewish self-defense with Christian sin.
Vance’s rhetoric and record show this realignment is not accidental. It is engineered to capture a demographic whose views on Israel have shifted 30 to 40 points in under a decade.
The data, the rallies, the quotes—none of it leaves room for ambiguity. Turning Point USA has not merely adjusted tone; it has crossed a line. This is not rhetorical drift; again, it is a strategic realignment.
What emerges is more revealing still: convergence. The far right, the far left, and Islamists, long cast as opposites, now echo each other with striking precision—on foreign policy, on institutions, on the West itself. They are no longer adversaries, but mirrors.
And that exposes an uncomfortable truth. While traditional conservatives remain anchored in coherent principles, the fringes have found common cause—not despite their differences, but because of them. United less by ideology than by instinct, they target the same institutions—and in doing so, advance a de facto common agenda against the Jews and the State of Israel.
Jose Lev is an American-Israeli scholar focused on Middle Eastern security doctrine.
A multilingual veteran of both the Israel Defense Forces’ special forces and the U.S. Army, he holds a B.S. in Neuroscience with a minor in Israel Studies from American University in Washington, D.C., three master’s degrees in international geopolitics, applied economics, and security and intelligence studies, as well as a medical degree. He is currently completing a Ph.D. in Intelligence and Global Security in the Washington, D.C. area.
Alongside blogging for The Times of Israel, he is a writing fellow at the U.S.-based think tank, the Middle East Forum; regularly appears on Latin American television networks to provide geopolitical and security analysis; and is a member of the Association for Israel Studies.