Turning Point USA’s Conspiratorial Turn

Officers of Turning Point USA, the national nonprofit organization that engages in conservative activism on college campuses, have taken positions on the Hamas attack on Israel that are, to put it lightly, strange. 

Its founder, Charlie Kirk, intimated on a podcast last week that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu allowed Hamas to massacre Israeli civilians to shore up political capital after the domestic protests against his judicial-reform push. 

Saying “some questions need to be asked,” Kirk asked whether Israel’s government had deliberately kept soldiers from responding to the attack in the early hours of October 7. 

“I don’t believe it . . . six hours, they’re live-streaming the killing of Jews. Did somebody in the government say stand down? That is a legitimate, non-conspiracy question,” Kirk said. His rationale for why the Israeli government would allow its people to endure such atrocities is that “Netanyahu now has an emergency government and a mandate to lead.”

To entertain the “non-conspiracy” conspiracy theory for a moment: If the attacks were part of some cynical play on Netanyahu’s part, it wouldn’t have been a very smart one. Polling suggests an overwhelming majority of Israelis see the fact that the Hamas infiltration happened as a failure of Israeli leadership, which doesn’t portend well for Netanyahu’s future in government. More recently, Ronen Bar, head of Shin Bet, the Israeli security agency, took responsibility for a lack of vigilance on the Gazan border. 

As the head of TPUSA, Kirk is its loudest voice. But he is far from the only person associated with the group to have used conspiratorial, anti-Israel, and antisemitic arguments in discussing the terrorist-provoked war between the Jewish state and Hamas. 

A woman who goes by “Morgan Ariel” on social media and describes herself as a Turning Point representative fired off a bevy of ill-advised tweets, claiming “Zionism and communism go hand in hand,” alleging a woman killed in the music-festival attack is actually alive, and saying “we live in the Zionist States of America.”

The first point, the claim that communism is inherently Jewish, featured prominently in Adolf Hitler’s propaganda and was a main justification for the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. It is also untrue; though Karl Marx himself was born into a family that was ethnically Jewish, his parents converted to Christianity before his birth. Moreover, Marx himself was a virulent antisemite, writing in his “On the Jewish Question” that “money is the jealous god of Israel.” 

The idea that Shani Louk — a young German-Israeli woman who was murdered while attending the music festival that Hamas terrorists reached via paraglider — is still alive is challenged to say the least by the footage of her lifeless, brutalized body being paraded through the streets of Gaza.

The “Zionist States of America” is an Ilhan Omar-esque argument that the Jewish lobby controls the United States. In reality, the Israeli cause ranks nowhere near the top of the list of lobbying efforts: As Tablet reported in 2018, “total pro-Israel spending was around $5 million, of which AIPAC accounted for $3.5 million. In contrast, Native American casinos spent around $22 million that year. By Tablet’s count, AIPAC was the 147th-highest ranked entity in terms of lobbying spending in 2018.”

Morgan Ariel also called Ben Shapiro an “Israel 1st Jesus hating big pharma shill,” which really needs no explication. Readers presumably understand how rabidly antisemitic that comment is.

Then you have Lauren Chen, a host on the Blaze and a Turning Point contributor, who approvingly shared the thoughts of Nick Fuentes, an avowed white supremacist, saying he has a “more balanced and rational take on Israel/Palestine than the whole political class.” His take is that, hopefully, the Hamas attack will diminish Israel’s influence and cast it out from the international community.

Chen has also expressed a belief that reports of beheaded Israeli babies — which have since been confirmed — were concocted by “propagandists out there who are actively feeding you lies.”

And there’s R. C. Maxwell, a Turning Point “ambassador,” which is a program the organization runs for social-media influencers. He shared a graphic saying “both Muslims and Jews hate Christians. They’ve been killing us as long as they have been killing each other. This conflict is none of my business.” It is unclear where he got the idea that Jews have been killing Christians — not to mention the moral relativism on display in the graphic — but it is simply untrue.

We at NR have written a lot of words about the Left’s atrocious response to the Hamas attack. Now, we’re seeing it from a portion of the Right, if only a portion we already knew not to take seriously. But it is important to take note of what bad actors on either side of the political divide are up to.