Is it really too much to ask that a murdered young man be given the dignity of a proper burial before bad-faith opportunists attempt to posthumously rewrite his legacy to better serve their own nefarious ends? Is it really too much to ask that a murdered young man’s family and friends — to say nothing of the countless individuals whose lives the young man touched and inspired — be allowed to mourn in peace, without having to fend off charlatans seeking to hijack his memory to advance their pet crusades?
Apparently, the answer is: Yes, it is.
The body of my friend Charlie Kirk, who was tragically assassinated last week during a campus event in Utah by an alleged leftist transgender-adjacent “furry” fetishist, had barely returned home to Arizona before some grifters ostensibly on the right started trying to capitalize on his memory. Instead of focusing on the metastasizing evil of a distinctly leftist political violence or the fact that transgenderism had yet again found itself implicated in a horrific shooting, as any sane conservative would have done, these agents of chaos decided it would be most appropriate to “just ask questions” about — you guessed it — the Jews.
Disgraced podcaster Candace Owens, never one to miss any opportunity to slander Jewish people, took precious time away from her Brigitte Macron legal defense to suggest that Jewish people or the Jewish state of Israel were somehow involved in Kirk’s assassination. To hear Owens tell it: Kirk, a lifelong vocal supporter of the Jewish people and the Jewish state, was souring on Israel and was getting close to publicly adopting a hostile stance. Oh, and what’s more — per Owens, Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge funder and proud Zionist, staged an “intervention” with Kirk during a retreat last month in the Hamptons where Ackman pressured Kirk to “get in line” on the Israel issue. Notably, numerous high-profile cable news has-beens have legitimized Owens’ outrageous laundering of a left-wing political assassination into an antisemitic caper.
Where to begin?
I spoke with Charlie Kirk less than 24 hours before his untimely death. The night before, a right-wing rabbi friend and I held a Zoom call with Kirk and a few others. During this call, Kirk, an unapologetic Christian Zionist who was greatly distressed by rising antisemitism in some pockets of the right, asked us a series of Israel-related questions that he anticipated receiving on his upcoming campus tour. We answered those questions and provided messaging advice for how to best communicate and win over students. At one point, Kirk joked to me that he would simply direct students toward my book when Israel came up on tour. It beggars belief that someone on the verge of renouncing Israel would organize this call.
As for the Hamptons retreat last month: I was there. Kirk had personally texted me to invite me, and I had inscribed book copies for two special retreat attendees — Kirk and Ackman. Put simply, there was no “intervention” — not from Ackman, not from Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon, not from anyone else. The retreat featured numerous open-ended conversations, usually moderated by Kirk, and only one of which was actually about Israel itself. The conversations were spirited and robust, but hardly rancorous. Kirk was critical of the way some pro-Israel advocates advanced their arguments, but he was not critical of the underlying substance. On the contrary, he only doubled down on his opposition to Islam and suggested that Israel is a natural ally in the fight against jihadism. Ackman and Kirk interacted very amicably.
This is who Charlie Kirk was: He focused on building bridges and maintaining big-tent coalitions within the broader right, which he had no interest in dividing or tearing down. And he had a long track record of befriending Jews — like me — and defending the Jewish state of Israel. His May letter to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the existence of which the premier confirmed on Fox News last week and which I was given access to earlier this year, makes his affection very clear. Kirk’s own pastor and spiritual mentor, Rob McCoy, has made it clear as well.
At a time when the focus should be on ending the potentially existential threat of left-wing domestic political violence, Owens and other instigators have embarked upon the ultimate gaslighting crusade: Lie to our faces and pretend that Kirk was something other than the champion of Jewish-Christian relations that he demonstrably was, while simultaneously insinuating “the Jews” may have had something to do with his horrific assassination. All of this, moreover, while so many of us simply wish to mourn and honor our fallen friend.
From a personal perspective, such behavior is reprehensible. And from a political perspective, it is outright evil.
Nor is such a buffoonish “just asking questions” ruse evil merely because of how it seeks to fracture the Jewish-Christian alliance that is the only hope of saving the West — something Kirk fought for every day. It is also evil because such appalling idiocy and grotesque conspiracy-mongering threatens to repel the overwhelming majority of Americans who remain coherent and sane, and who may well conclude that they want nothing to do with a political movement that entertains such cranks. It is not merely the Jewish-Christian alliance that these reprobates are threatening, then. They are also threatening the integrity and viability of the MAGA coalition, which no one did more to hold together than Kirk.
Truly, could there be any greater desecration of Charlie Kirk’s memory than that?
Josh Hammer’s latest book is “Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West.” This article was produced in collaboration with Creators Syndicate. @josh_hammer
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