Did the Jews kill Charlie Kirk?

Yes, things can always get worse. Within less than a week of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, a new conspiracy was in town. Despite mounting evidence of the homegrown nature of Tylor Robinson’s radicalism, social media was ablaze with an explanation so perfect, so fitting, so dazzling that only a stooge could possibly deny it. This was no story about terrorism, they say, let alone the online incubation of extremism. This was a story about – who else? – the Jews.

The idea that Israel is responsible for the assassination of Charlie Kirk continues to clock up millions of views every single day on X, so it’s worthwhile explaining what happened to readers sane enough to avoid social media entirely. By far the most common accusation was that Benjamin Netanyahu himself gave the order to kill Charlie Kirk because he was starting to “turn against Israel”. The evidence provided for this view is predictably slim, and rests mostly on a few short clips in which Charlie Kirk talks to Ben Shapiro and raises some sporadic, though hardly uncommon, questions about the conduct of the Gaza war. It didn’t make things any better when Netanyahu himself went on camera to deny the accusations soon after, doubly strange given the old adage that you should never believe anything until it is officially denied.

The second (and only slightly less ludicrous) theory is that Charlie Kirk was killed so that Ben Shapiro could take the reins of his organization, Turning Point USA. This would allow full consolidation of the organization in the hands of someone who wanted to protect Israel from criticism within the MAGA movement.

Then, another conspiracy theory appeared claiming that Jewish donors were upset with Charlie for his broad stance against US involvement in the Israel-Iran war last June.

Lastly, and least surprisingly, a conspiracy interpreted all of this in light of the Jeffrey Epstein/Mossad cover-up saga which continues to engulf the imagination of a considerable number of Americans today.

Whichever angle you take, it appears that a degree of anti-Semitic conspiratorialism has gone mainstream amongst large swathes of the American electorate. Why?

Some have said that anti-Semitism, like all forms of racism, simply always exists. Analogously, it is like a “virus” that is liable to suddenly catch and take over people at any random point in history. But this way of viewing things doesn’t quite explain why anti-Semitism happens to catch particular people at particular times, other than by invoking a kind of weakened “social immune system” kind of explanation. Plausible? Somewhat. But completely satisfying? I don’t think so. Even if we carry this idea to its logical conclusion, we’d still need to explain why anti-Semitism has gone mainstream right now – as opposed to, say, ten or twenty years ago.

Another popular alternative explanation would be to blame social media, and Lord knows I have done it. In this telling, some weird mixture of bot activity and engagement farming – particularly from the blatant use of highly emotive and conspiratorial ideas – drive revenue for social media influencers, particularly on the far ends of the political spectrum. By peddling these wild and extreme theories to millions through the monetization algorithm of X/Twitter, they can (and do) make a lot of money. And even if they do get sued for defamation, these fines can be absorbed and written off as the cost of doing business – much as the marketing departments always have the biggest budget in tech companies. Early reports suggest that this disinformation about Kirk is indeed being pumped into social media by bots, but whether it’s for making money or foreign influence still remains unclear.

Maybe, others have told me, the people that push these “Israel killed Charlie Kirk” conspiracies are just crazy. And it’s a nice idea, and probably not altogether completely incorrect, but crazy is as crazy does – and crazy people are doing extremely well in global politics these days. Without realizing it, we’ve entered a cultural universe so totally fused with the internet and a memeified social media today that bombastic and wild trickster anti-heroes continue to reach the summits of global power. You can never quite write off the sense that crazy performative politics is just a cynical, tongue-in-cheek technique for gaining attention. But attention, when skillfully manipulated, easily turns into political power.

But there’s the last perspective, too, and it’s one which I personally believe to be the most compelling of all. People greatly misunderstand conspiracy theories. Most of us believe that they are, in the words of the critic Frederic Jameson, simply the “poor person’s cognitive mapping in the postmodern age”. In other words, conspiracy theories help us make sense of a world which is increasingly fragmented and destabilized by social media, fake news, conflicting narratives and straightforward lies. Rather than try and organize and shift through this incredible complexity of information, most people prefer to just take a black-and-white view of things. They ignore everything else, and are easily prey to simplistic conspiracy theories.

It’s a seductive theory, but it’s not quite the full story. Conspiracy theories, much like the outgrowth of strange cults and mystical religions, do more than just offer us a digestible explanation of the world. They’re not just intellectual. They do something for us socially, too. When new movements break off and found new Churches, secret societies, or even tech startups – they’ll often do so with the rationalisation that the older guys were doing it wrongly or immorally. Think of the many Protestant sects that exploded in the 16th century, all of whom disagreed with one another but basically agreed that the Catholics were absolutely and unequivocally wrong. They didn’t split in the name of some new variety of prayer, or view on transubstantiation, or resurrection, or whatever. They broke off and then they came up with the reasons for doing so. New ideologies are always downstream of the desire to break away from the original group. Ideologies are rationalisations, not explanations.

And the same basic process is now happening within the American Right. Donald Trump upended a system of neoconservative Republicanism that had been relatively stable for decades. He rode to power renouncing many of the old shibboleths, particularly around foreign intervention, that had once animated serious players on the Washington scene. Now, however, deep and possibly unresolvable cracks are starting to appear in the MAGA movement, particularly (although not by any means entirely) around America’s relationship to Israel. Now is the time of conspiracies not because the loonies have temporarily taken over, as many people earnestly wish to be true, but rather because we’re in the middle of a white-hot battle for ideological control over the Republican party and the essence of American conservatism itself.

Public anti-Semitism is often simply a tool – and a particularly shrewd one, as is often the case in the history of conspiracies about Jews – to hive off support away from previously mainstream leaders and institutions to build rivals that can compete with them. Even some of the most pro-MAGA social media commentators said the conspiracy was dumb. But it’s only dumb if you misunderstand what it is. Tucker Carlson’s final speech at Charlie Kirk’s funeral comparing his death to Christ’s crucifixion by the Jews seems outrageous, which it obviously is. It seems stupid, too, but it’s not. It’s the opening gambit in an ideological battle which will only continue to accelerate the widening gulf between factions within the MAGA movement. It reflects an assertiveness and a growing dominance which, whilst still marginal, is rapidly gaining in strength.

Soon, Donald Trump will finish his second presidency and his successor, almost certainly JD Vance, will fight the next election. The fight is on to see whether the MAGA movement will fully institutionalize as mainstream, or fade as a little more than a charismatic ejaculation tied to the personal fortune and celebrity affection for the current president. Anti-Semitism has been loaded in the deck, and the cards are being shuffled. What comes next will almost certainly direct the future of American Jewry, and perhaps even the United States itself.