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.
Some Zionist conservatives are extremely worried about this increasingly paranoid hostility to Israel in the MAGA movement, and they want to marginalize Carlson and his ilk. “Cut Tucker Loose” said a headline in the Jewish publication Tablet, writing that he has “not only embarrassed the administration but also fractured the president’s base, elements of which are now at each other’s throats over the words of a glorified podcaster.”
The conservative actress Patricia Heaton, a Fox News regular, posted a video about big-name podcasters giving a platform to antisemites. “We’re all seeing it,” she said. “Many of us are alarmed.” The left, she argued, coddles its extremists. “Don’t let that happen to the conservative movement,” she pleaded.
But it already has. Given her stature on the right, Kelly has come under pressure to denounce Carlson and Owens. She has declined. “If you need me to condemn Candace or Tucker for their opinions in order to listen to me, then I may not be for you,” she wrote on X. “He’s a close friend and she is under enough pressure without gratuitous shots from me.” A few days later, on the “Fifth Column” podcast, she said she didn’t think Carlson was an antisemite, then added; “But I don’t really care. I think Tucker’s a very important, valuable voice in the national conversation.”
Last month, Kelly went to Virginia Tech, filling in for Kirk on what was supposed to be his college tour. A student brought up claims the white nationalist Nick Fuentes has made about Israel — he didn’t identify which ones — and said he was having a hard time discerning truth from falsehood. Kelly was extremely circumspect in her response. She told the student to trust independent voices over the corporate media, but to avoid those who “get too out there, unless that’s just your jam for fun.” She didn’t mention Fuentes at all.
I have no way of knowing what’s in Kelly’s heart, but from a business point of view, her hesitation about punching right seems shrewd. Carlson, after all, is not tangential to the MAGA movement; he is one of its most important figures. As of this writing, his podcast is the highest-ranked right-wing show on the Spotify charts, with Owens not far behind. Fuentes has become so influential that, as The New York Times reported last month, both current and former Trump officials are afraid to publicly criticize him. The three of them are far more representative of the American right than their critics.
Many pro-Israel conservatives refuse to see this. Under Trump, American conservatism has given itself over to an orgy of berserk hallucinations, nihilistic transgression and epistemological disorder. It barely made news in September when Trump shared an A.I. video promoting “medbeds,” fantasy devices that, in QAnon lore, can cure all ailments but are selfishly hoarded by evil elites. If a young person like the one at Virginia Tech can’t figure out what’s true and what’s not, it’s at least in part because the right has systematically undermined the very idea of dispassionate expertise. Now, conservative Zionists are surprised that the resulting chaos has spun out of their control.
Consider Dinesh D’Souza, who is probably best known for “2000 Mules,” a conspiracy film about the 2020 election, for which he was sued and had to publicly apologize. Last week he appeared on the podcast of Laura Loomer, a Trump confidante who once shared a video on X calling the Sept. 11 attacks an inside job. Together, they bemoaned how successful Owens and Carlson had been in sowing suspicion of Israel.
Owens’s “investigations,” D’Souza lamented, “never produce a single fact, a single reliable theory that you can work with. They never reach any conclusion. And the moment they run out of gas, a new incendiary accusation comes in its place.” Must be frustrating.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.
The post The Right’s Civil War Over Charlie Kirk and Israel appeared first on New York Times.
