Turning Point USA founder and professional Trump toady Charlie Kirk floated a deranged new conspiracy theory on the PBD Podcast last Thursday, having failed to anticipate the former president’s rapprochement with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“I’ve been to Israel many times, the whole country is a fortress,” asserted Kirk. “When I first heard this story, I still have the same gut instinct that I did initially: I find this very hard to believe. I’ve been to that Gaza border, you cannot go 10 feet without running into a 19-year-old with an AR-15 or an automatic machine gun that’s an IDF soldier, right?”
He continued:
The whole country is surveilled and so let me just kinda go through this. We don’t talk about Israeli politics very often and most Americans don’t know this. The last nine months Israel was on the brink of civil war, it’s not an exaggeration. This judicial stuff, there were hundreds of thousands of Israelis taking to the streets because
Bibi Netanyahu is basically redefining the Israeli constitution, that’s not an exaggeration, right? He said the judicial branch has too much power, there were protests planned this week against Netanyahu where they anticipated tens of thousands of people to take to the streets. That’s all gone, Patrick. Netanyahu now has an emergency government and a mandate to lead.I’m not, I’m not willing to say, to go so far to say that Netanyahu knew or there was intelligence here, but I think some questions need to be asked. Was there a stand down order? Was there a stand down order? Six hours, I don’t believe it. Israel’s the size of New Jersey. When I took a helicopter ride from Jerusalem to the Gaza border, it’s 45 minutes, six hours, they’re livestreaming the killing of Jews. Did somebody in the government say stand down? That is a legitimate, non-conspiracy question.
Kirk’s comments came one day after Trump criticized Netanyahu for not being “prepared” for the attack as well as for having supposedly “let us down” when the U.S. killed Iranian terrorist Qasem Soleimani in an airstrike in 2020.
Unfortunately for Kirk, Trump indicated his desire to mend fences with Netanyahu the day after his appearance on the PBD Podcast when he posted #IStandWithIsrael #IStandWithBibi on Truth Social.
Notably, Kirk had also mocked the idea that the attack
Kirk was lambasted for his conspiracy peddling on X.
“Why is TPUSA tolerating anti-semiti… Oh,” tweeted conservative writer Emily Zanotti.
“Charlie got his marching orders and decided to spin this nonsensical conspiracy theory. Netanyahu is hurt politically by this. This was not some grand plan to let Hamas slaughter Jews to secure power internally. Israelis see the attack as a failure of leadership,” observed RedState blogger Bonchie.
The Dispatch’s Jonah Goldberg, meanwhile, drew a comparison between Kirk and a fictional villain.
Fox News and The Spectator‘s Ben Domenech went even further, speculating that Kirk’s presence in the conservative movement was representative of a broader, and more sinister phenomenon on the right.
“If Charlie Kirk remains the head of TPUSA,” declared Domenech, “the right has an anti-Semite problem that will follow them into the coming elections.”