When Charlie Kirk was killed at a Turning Point USA event in Utah on September 10, 2025, many conservatives\u2014including myself\u2014pointed to the extreme left\u2019s decade-long campaign to demonize the MAGA movement. But what followed is more troubling: Kirk\u2019s own organization has since veered toward the very antisemitic and anti-Israel currents he\u2014however cautiously\u2014once resisted.\n<\/p>\n
The evidence is in plain sight\u2014at Turning Point USA rallies, in JD Vance\u2019s 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 \u201cmoral Christianity.\u201d\n<\/p>\n
Kirk himself lit the fuse. On Patrick Bet-David\u2019s podcast on October 12, 2023, he warned that the Israeli government would exploit the October 7 Hamas massacre\u2014after 1,200 Israelis were murdered and 251 taken hostage\u2014to pursue what he called the \u201cethnic cleansing\u201d of Gaza and the removal of its 2.3 million residents. He echoed similar cautions in his final campus appearances days before his death.\n<\/p>\n
Those remarks handed the online Christian nationalist network\u2014led by self-proclaimed \u201cracist\u201d Nick Fuentes\u2014a 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.\n<\/p>\n
The shift is visible on the ground. At Turning Point USA\u2019s AmericaFest in Phoenix in late 2025, open conflict erupted. Ben Shapiro blasted Tucker Carlson for platforming Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes as \u201cmoral imbecility\u201d; an antisemitic vendor booth required staff intervention to remove displays attacking Shapiro.\n<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Candace Owens floated conspiracy theories linking Kirk\u2019s murder to Jewish donors. Vance offered only vague calls for a \u201cbig tent that loves America.\u201d Fuentes has openly urged followers to infiltrate Turning Point USA chapters from within. Rallies that once featured Israeli flags now echo with chants of \u201cgenocide\u201d and questions lifted directly from Kirk\u2019s final interviews.\n<\/p>\n
Vance\u2019s 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 \u201cJesus Christ does not support genocide.\u201d Vance replied: \u201cI agree. Jesus Christ certainly does not support genocide\u2026 whoever yelled that out from the dark,\u201d before pivoting to praise the administration\u2019s Gaza ceasefire and blame the previous president.\n<\/p>\n
The message landed: Christian morality now requires equating Israel\u2019s defensive campaign with moral failure.\n<\/p>\n
The numbers confirm the audience. Support for Israel among white evangelicals aged 18 to 34 has fallen to 32%\u2014over 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.\n<\/p>\n
Turning Point USA, built to mobilize these exact young \u201cMake America Great Again\u201d voters, has recalibrated accordingly: endless foreign wars serve no American interest, and Israel drags the United States into them\u2014the same narrative long pushed by the extreme left and the modern \u2018Axis of Evil\u2019 (China, Russia, North Korea, Turkey, Qatar, Iran and Tehran\u2019s Proxies).\n<\/p>\n
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 \u201cIsrael hawk\u201d, flew to Tel Aviv on October 21, 2025, to \u201csupport\u201d Israel\u2014then on October 23, 2025 (right before boarding the Presidential plane) hypocritically labeled Jerusalem\u2019s symbolic West Bank annexation resolution as a \u201cstupid stunt,\u201d exposing his double standard against America\u2019s strongest ally. In March 2026, he sharply criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for \u201coverselling\u201d the Iran war as an easy path to regime change, calling the assessment \u201ctoo optimistic.\u201d In other words, it is very obvious where and with whom Mr. Vance stands.\n<\/p>\n
The administration\u2019s reluctance to pursue full Iranian regime collapse\u2014paired with indirect talks\u2014reflects a broader reordering. Iran\u2019s 3.2 million barrels of daily oil output make containment more attractive than upheaval, stabilizing global prices in the $70\u201380 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.\n<\/p>\n
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.\n<\/p>\n
In a hypothetical future Vance presidency, Israel would likely remain a partner\u2014but a transactional one at best.\n<\/p>\n
Charlie Kirk built Turning Point USA as a firewall for conservative principles. Today, it hosts forces that equate Jewish self-defense with Christian sin.\n<\/p>\n
Vance\u2019s 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.\n<\/p>\n
The data, the rallies, the quotes\u2014none 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.\n<\/p>\n
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\u2014on foreign policy, on institutions, on the West itself. They are no longer adversaries, but mirrors.\n<\/p>\n
And that exposes an uncomfortable truth. While traditional conservatives remain anchored in coherent principles, the fringes have found common cause\u2014not despite their differences, but because of them. United less by ideology than by instinct, they target the same institutions\u2014and in doing so, advance a de facto common agenda against the Jews and the State of Israel.\n\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\tJose Lev is an American-Israeli scholar focused on Middle Eastern security doctrine.
\n
\nA multilingual veteran of both the Israel Defense Forces\u2019 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\u2019s 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.
\n
\nAlongside 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.\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Charlie Kirk was killed at a Turning Point USA event in Utah on September 10, 2025, many…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":77300,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[18501,10725,16929,2492,41,12457,262,14116,470,16930,38,496,18502,27607,12618,2254,7889,1411,18503,423,34,1424,598,37,1421,48,11783,16101,7376,14117,49,18504,16704,2253,55,545,2525,3717,1176,22740,4056,28144],"class_list":{"0":"post-77299","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-israel","8":"tag-2025-hostage-deal","9":"tag-anti-zionism","10":"tag-antisemitic-violence","11":"tag-antisemitism","12":"tag-benjamin-netanyahu","13":"tag-charlie-kirk","14":"tag-china","15":"tag-christian-zionism","16":"tag-christianity","17":"tag-definition-of-antisemitism","18":"tag-donald-trump","19":"tag-gaza","20":"tag-gaza-border","21":"tag-gaza-disengagement","22":"tag-gaza-reconstruction","23":"tag-gaza-strip","24":"tag-genocide","25":"tag-hamas","26":"tag-hostages-in-gaza","27":"tag-idf","28":"tag-iran","29":"tag-iran-nuclear-deal","30":"tag-islam","31":"tag-israel","32":"tag-israel-at-war","33":"tag-israel-iran-conflict","34":"tag-israel-us-relations","35":"tag-israel-jewish-and-democratic","36":"tag-israeli-foreign-policy","37":"tag-jewish-christian-relations","38":"tag-middle-east","39":"tag-october-7-anniversary","40":"tag-palestinian-statehood","41":"tag-palestinians","42":"tag-russia","43":"tag-terrorism","44":"tag-trump-peace-plan","45":"tag-tucker-carlson","46":"tag-turkey","47":"tag-us-midterm-elections","48":"tag-us-politics","49":"tag-us-presidential-elections-2024"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":"Validation failed: Text character limit of 500 exceeded"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77299"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77299\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77300"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}