A Trump insider and long-time friend of murdered far-right influencer Charlie Kirk has told the Grayzone that Kirk’s burgeoning change of heart on Israeli influence over US politics provoked a backlash from Netanyahu’s allies that left him angry and ‘frightened’ of the Israel lobby after a seeming Israeli spying operation was uncovered.
Charlie Kirk rejected Netanyahu donation
According to a source close to Kirk, Kirk rejected a huge offer of cash from Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu earlier this year for his far-right ‘Turning Point USA’ (TPUSA), believed Netanyahu was trying to bring him to heel after he began to raise public questions over Israel’s “overwhelming influence in Washington” and had begun to “loathe” Netanyahu and his influence over Donald Trump’s appointments and decisions, which had led to Kirk warning Trump against attacking Iran to please Israel.
Kirk’s new-found recognition of Israel’s malign influence led to him becoming the target of a “sustained private campaign of intimidation and free-floating fury by wealthy and powerful allies of Netanyahu”, and Kirk was frightened:
“He was afraid of them,” the source emphasized.
Kirk tried to underline his commitment to Israel, making a series of comments about the consistency and resoluteness of his devotion, but even the least criticism of Israel’s actions generated a mass backlash, as did his decision to host Dave Smith, a comedian and political commentator who has become increasingly critical of Israel during its genocide in Gaza, in a debate Kirk organised. As the Grayzone reported:
“He was being told what you’re not allowed to do, and it was driving him crazy,” Kirk’s friend recalled. The conservative youth leader was not only alienated by the hostile nature of the interactions, but “frightened” by the backlash.
The friend’s account dovetails with those of multiple right-wing commentators with access to Kirk. “I think, in the end, Charlie was going through a spiritual transformation,” Candace Owens, a conservative influencer who shifted decisively against Israel after October 7, reflected after her friend’s killing. “I know it, he was going through a lot. There was a lot of pressure, and it’s hard for me to watch the people who were pressuring him just say the things that they’re saying.”
She continued: “They wanted him to lose everything for changing or even slightly modifying an opinion. It’s very hurtful to me.”
Kirk appeared visibly outraged during an August 6 interview with conservative host Megyn Kelly, as he discussed the menacing messages he was receiving from pro-Israel bigwigs.
“It’s all of the sudden: ‘oh, Charlie: he’s no longer with us.’ Wait a second—what does ‘with us’ mean, exactly? I’m an American, okay? I represent this country,” he explained, before addressing the powerful Zionist interests harassing him.
“The more that you guys privately and publicly call our character into question—which is not isolated, it would be one thing if it were just one text, or two texts; it is dozens of texts—then we start to say, ‘whoa, hold the boat here,’” Kirk continued. “To be fair, some really good Jewish friends say, ‘that’s not all of us’… But these are leaders here. These are stakeholders.”
He went on to complain to Kelly, “I have less ability… to criticize the Israeli government than actual Israelis do. And that’s really, really weird.”
Disillusionment
Kirk’s disillusionment with Israel has been mirrored among other well-known far-right figures, notably Georgie Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green, who has begun frequently expressing her disgust with Israel’s murder of children in Gaza, the Trump administration’s Israel-driven decision to ban wounded Palestinian children coming to the US for medical treatment and the amount of funding that the US funnels to Israel to the detriment of US citizens. This shift even on the US Trumpian far right is known to be a source of major disquiet among Israel lobby groups – and likely led to Israeli personnel trying to bug White House facilities before they were caught by the US Secret Service, an experience that also happened to a former UK prime minister:
Former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson recounted a similar incident in his memoir, writing that his security team found a listening device in his bathroom soon after Netanyahu used his personal toilet.
Kirk was murdered last week by a single shot fired, apparently, by a sniper from a rooftop 2-300m away. Police at first arrested a man who claimed to be the shooter and repeatedly called out “Shoot me!” Two men to the side of Kirk were also filmed making strange, signal-like movements.
Questions have been raised about a series of discrepancies in the FBI’s narrative and supposed evidence, particularly around the rifle supposedly used, which the suspect was not carrying in footage that the police claimed showed him escaping after the shooting and was not of a type easily dismantled, yet which was then ‘discovered’ in nearby woods, fully assembled.
Fears of assassination?
And the Grayzone found that comments were circulating about Kirk’s fear of assassination by Israel weeks before he was killed:
Many advancing the unsubstantiated theory have pointed to a Twitter/X post by Harrison Smith, a personality at the pro-Trump Infowars network, stating on August 13 – almost a month before Kirk’s assassination – that he was told by “someone close to Charlie Kirk that Kirk thinks Israel will kill him if he turns against Israel.”
The frenzied speculation has set off shockwaves in Tel Aviv, where Netanyahu was compelled to explicitly deny that his government killed Kirk during a September 11 interview with NewsMax.
Netanyahu and his allies bury the Kirk crisis as “big tent” collapses
That appearance was just one of several interviews and statements the Prime Minister dedicated to Kirk in the wake of his killing in an effort to frame the late conservative leader’s legacy in a uniformly pro-Israel light. The major public relations push has occurred while Netanyahu wages a military campaign on seven fronts, punctuated by a regional assassination spree that most recently reached into the heart of Qatar, a US ally.
Netanyahu first tweeted prayers for Kirk at 3:02 PM in the afternoon on September 10, minutes after news of the shooting broke. He has since authored three additional posts about Kirk, even breaking away from the Israeli war cabinet to spend the afternoon of September 11 memorializing the conservative leader on Fox News.
Charlie Kirk: blame Muslims
Despite the arrested suspect turning out to be a white right-wing extremist and there never being any indication that the shooter was anything else, Netanyahu and Trump were quick to try to pin the blame for Charlie Kirk’s killing on Muslims and the left. Netanyahu said:
The radical Islamists and their union with the ultra-progressives—they often speak about ‘human rights,’ they speak about ‘free speech’—but they use violence to try to take down their enemies.
Netanyahu also commented that he had invited Charlie Kirk to come to Israel:
I spoke to him only two weeks ago and invited him to Israel. Sadly, that visit will not take place.
He didn’t say whether Kirk had accepted or rejected the invitation.
Featured image via the Canary
By Skwawkbox
This post was originally published on Canary.