Israel is being blamed for Charlie Kirk’s death. Here’s what that conspiracy theory says about the far right’s divide
Dueling conservative factions are trying to claim Kirk as either a champion of Israel or a growing threat to the country
Conservative political activist Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point Action, speaks during a meeting on the campus of the University of Arizona last October. Kirk was killed Wednesday. Photo by Olivier Touron/AFP via Getty Images
By Arno Rosenfeld September 11, 2025
Less than two hours after Charlie Kirk was killed by a gunman in Utah, Maram Susli began suggesting to her 500,000 followers on X that Israel was to blame.
“Charlie Kirk was attacked by Israel supporters last month and labeled an anti-Semite for defending free speech,” wrote Susli, a self-styled analyst known for spreading conspiracy theories, in her initial post, which received more than 1.4 million views and 4,400 shares on X.
“Targeting the neck is very IDF coded,” she wrote later in the same thread, featuring an X-ray of Gaza civilians who had been shot in the head.
Jackson Hinkle, a right-wing commentator, quickly seized on the same theory, and by early Thursday morning he was ready to declare, “I think Israel killed Charlie Kirk.”
As more of these influencers, who spread fringe theories to legions of online followers, joined in, the claims that Israel was responsible for Kirk’s murder were shared tens of thousands of times and viewed by millions.
And while Israel and its spy agency Mossad are often blamed for almost any negative world event — from flooding and crop failures to political violence — the root of the Kirk theory exposes a particular rift over Israel in the conservative movement.
The alt-right that helped fuel President Donald Trump’s first victory in 2016 often took a dim view of both Jews and American support for Israel. But Kirk, a founder of the right-wing campus group Turning Point USA, was part of a more mainstream movement. He managed to endorse the alt-right’s antipathy for “globalist” boogeymen like philanthropist George Soros — “Jewish donors have been the number one funding mechanism of radical open border” policy, he said two years ago — while simultaneously backing Israel.
Kirk famously booted Nick Fuentes, a prominent white supremacist and Holocaust denier who frequently rails against Israel, from a Turning Point conference last year, and many Jewish supporters of Israel quickly sought to memorialize Kirk as a political ally. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called him a “lion-hearted friend of Israel.”
Divisions over Israel among right-wing figures have emerged since Oct. 7, 2023, including after two Trump-friendly YouTubers faced massive backlash from their fans for hosting a softball interview with Netanyahu over the summer.
Josh Hammer, a conservative Jewish columnist, praised Kirk for siding with Israel in these debates: “He was really holding back some really nasty stuff in some very young, far-right online circles,” Hammer told Jewish Insider after Kirk’s death.
The battle for Kirk’s legacy
But in claiming without evidence that Israel had in fact killed Kirk, Susli, Hinkle and others who share Fuentes’ antipathy toward both Jews and Israel tried to undermine the notion that Kirk was a conservative supporter of Israel.
“People have layers and hidden thoughts,” Susli wrote before detailing a series of examples in which Kirk appeared to break with the Trump administration over Israel. She pointed to his criticism of the White House’s crackdown on antisemitism related to Israel and a clip of him asking whether the reason the administration wouldn’t release more documents about Jeffrey Epstein was because he was a Mossad agent.
She included an August post by Harrison H. Smith, an InfoWars host, who claimed he was told Kirk “thinks Israel will kill [him] if he turns against them.”
On Wednesday evening, an anonymous account called Vox Veritas, self-described as “unapologetically white,” shared a video of Kirk talking about what he believed were spurious accusations of antisemitism he had faced for being critical of Israel.
“Why was Charlie Kirk shot?” Vox Veritas asked alongside the clip, which has since been viewed 2 million times. “Watch this.”
Others shared — as evidence that Israel killed him — clips of Kirk speculating that Israel had intentionally allowed the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack to take place.
But not everyone was convinced.
Patrick Casey, former leader of the white supremacist group Identity Europa, who has since tried to adopt a more mainstream stance, mocked “the anti-Trump, Jew-obsessed ‘right’” for trying to claim Kirk was a secret opponent of Israel following his assassination.
“These people openly hated and attacked Charlie until yesterday,” Casey wrote on X. “Now they’re using his murder to farm engagement — contemptible.”
Additional reporting by Andy Carvin.
