Verge writer Tina Nguyen reports it’s been “barely a week before everyone began fighting each other for a piece of” Charlie Kirk. The resulting feeding frenzy is sparking a civil war among MAGA influencers that’s caught up even the leadership of Israel.
The indictment of Kirk’s alleged assassin, Tyler Robinson, cited his Discord chats wherein he appeared to confess to the shooting.
“Its contents were strong enough for the power brokers of MAGA world — all the way up to President Donald Trump himself and his cabinet — to begin a rapid, systemic purge of left-wing critics across the country,” writes Nguyen. “But it took less than 24 hours for the MAGA influencer coalition that had united behind Kirk’s death to start falling apart. By Wednesday night, at least three high-profile personalities — Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes, and Tucker Carlson — began questioning the Trump administration’s motives, vocally disagreeing with their actions, and, in some cases, suggesting that the evidence against Robinson had been doctored.”
The trio of anti-Israel, antisemitic, and largely anti-Trump influencers begins with Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, according to Nguyen, who began questioning the veracity of the chat, claiming “Tyler Robinson’s chat tied up all the “inconsistencies and discrepancies and questions … in a neat little bow.”
Owens, who Nguyen said has been “cast into the wilderness” by right-wing media over her statements about Israel, also questioned the evidence.
“These messages are clearly doctored,” she told her followers, arguing that the absence of timestamps and missing portions of the chat look suspicious. “You have the right to be a little bit uncomfortable about that, because I am a lot a bit uncomfortable with that.”
Tucker Carlson, meanwhile, is tearing into the Trump administration for using Kirk’s death as a pretext for suppressing free speech, and attacking FCC chairman Brendan Carr for successfully getting comedian Jimmy Kimmel canned from ABC.
“If they can tell you what to say, they’re telling you what to think, there is nothing they can’t do to you because they don’t consider you human,” Carlson said.
And then there’s Fuentes, who Nguyen said “theorized for two hours straight that Robinson was part of a larger Jewish conspiracy to eliminate Kirk, involving several people with connections to the Trump administration, that was covered up by the FBI Director Kash Patel and financed by MAGA-adjacent hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman."
“The goal, he claimed, was to eliminate MAGA’s top young influencer and replace him with ‘Jewish Zionist’ Ben Shapiro, or ‘gay Jewish Zionist slash drag queen’ Milo Yiannopoulos,” said Nguyen, adding that it does not help how antisemitic the political climate “has shifted to these influencers’ advantage.”
The state of Israel has become deeply unpopular among American voters due to the war in Gaza, reported Nguyen, “particularly among young people but especially young Republicans.” A Pew Research poll released earlier this year found 50 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning voters under the age of 49 expressing “negative views towards Israel,” which is up from 35 percent in 2022.
The hot seat is boiling enough to drive Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu to post a recent video statement denying that Israel had anything to do with Kirk’s death.
“The contrarian voices within the right have emerged much faster than anyone could have anticipated,” said Nguyen. “Whatever is in the store for the future will be messy.”
Read the Verge report at this link.