Megyn Kelly, it seems safe to say, understands her audience. Since she was pushed out of TV news in 2019, the biting conservative commentator has built herself an enormous audience online. She has over four million subscribers on YouTube and one of the most popular right-wing podcasts in the country. So it’s instructive to see how she’s positioned herself in the conservative movement’s increasingly acrimonious civil war over Charlie Kirk and Israel.
Before Kirk was killed, one of his donors, Robert J. Shillman, reportedly told him he was withdrawing a $2 million pledge to Kirk’s organization, Turning Point, because of its relationship with the increasingly anti-Israel podcaster Tucker Carlson. That fact has set off a roiling debate on the right about the degree to which Kirk was becoming disillusioned with Israel, in turn leading to insinuations that Israel had Kirk murdered.
Some of the more high-profile people behind these conspiracy theories try to maintain a degree of plausible deniability, insisting, in the manner of trolls everywhere, that they’re just asking questions.
Candace Owens, a former colleague of Kirk’s who last year suggested that Judaism is a “pedophile-centric religion” that “believes in child sacrifice,” claims that Kirk was about to break with Israel and reunite with her. “He said it explicitly that he refused to be bullied anymore by the Jewish donors,” she said on her podcast, asking, “And then did he just 48 hours later conveniently catch a bullet to the throat before our onstage reunion?”
Carlson has been even more careful; he hasn’t made any direct claims, only suggestive analogies. Since the killing, he’s talked repeatedly of Kirk’s impatience with pro-Israel donors. Then, speaking from the podium at Kirk’s memorial, he said that Jesus, like Kirk, was killed for telling the truth. He could picture the scene 2,000 years ago, he said: “A lamp-lit room with a bunch of guys sitting around eating hummus, thinking about ‘What do we do about this guy telling the truth about us?’” One of them, in Carlson’s telling, suggested, “Why don’t we just kill him?”
Plenty of people — both hard-core antisemites and anxious Jews — thought Carlson was implying that Jews killed Kirk just as they had Jesus. But, of course, he never said that; perhaps the hummus eaters were Romans.
Others have been less cautious; endless posts on social media blame Israel for assassinating Kirk. The meme became so widespread that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel made a video denying it, which only seemed to fan the flames.