He begins by noting that until recently he knew almost nothing about Kirk, which gives him common ground with me. In fact, even his vague knowledge far outstripped my own:
I’d vaguely known that Kirk was a young conservative activist who had dropped out of community college as a teenager about a dozen years earlier to found Turning Point USA, an activist organization intended to draw youthful Americans into his ideological camp, and heavily funded by mega-donors, it had grown large and successful over time. Those bare facts exhausted my total knowledge.
Given that I’d paid so little attention to him,I was initially shocked by the enormous outpouring of media coverage his killing generated, seemingly greater than might have been accorded many important American elected officials or even major world leaders under similar circumstances. All our top newspapers gave his story large, front-page headlines, and the discussion of Kirk’s assassination and its implications entirely blanketed much of the Internet.
Now this next paragraph mirrors my own initial reaction, which was ‘Who Feared Charlie Kirk?’ It also gets to the heart of the matter—why would anyone want to kill Kirk?
I’d always regarded Kirk as a rather bland mainstream Trump conservative, hardly the sort of figure most likely to inspire lethal hatred. I wondered whether my impression had been mistaken so I sought to assess his views and positions, and get a better sense of why he had been targeted in that deadly attack.
Given his brutal slaying at such a young age, I was hardly surprised that a large fraction of the commentary amounted to hagiography, …
To get past the hagiography, Unz turned to Michael Tracey, who had
Many of Kirk’s supporters had described him as a political truth-teller, with President Donald Trump declaring that he had been “a martyr for truth.” But Tracey was scathing in his criticism, portraying him as essentially a political propagandist, someone who regularly shifted his positions to conform to those of Trump, his leading patron:
He was a government functionary. A mouthpiece. He trafficked in ludicrous propaganda on behalf of the Administration he loyally served. And was doing this basically 24/7, in the extremely recent past.
And, of course, Tracey provided examples to back up his claims. This is all stuff that I was totally unaware of:
Perhaps most notoriously, after taking a personal phone call from Donald Trump, Charlie Kirk hopped on his podcast the next day and proclaimed, “Honestly, I’m done talking about Epstein for the time being. I’m gonna trust my friends in the administration. I’m gonna trust my friends in the government.” He then bizarrely tried to deny that he said this, or insist it had somehow been taken out of context — which it hadn’t. The context was that Trump got annoyed that a bunch of people had criticized him over Epstein at Kirk’s “Turning Point USA” conference, and then Trump called up Kirk, and then shortly thereafter, Kirk announced he was going to do the government’s bidding. That’s just what Kirk was, and the role he played in US political affairs — notwithstanding how people might now want to exalt him as a paragon of truth-telling virtue because of his untimely death.
Tracey also cites Kirk’s flip flop regarding war on Iran:
On April 3, he said “A new Middle East war would be a catastrophic mistake.” Then by June 17, as drumbeats for the joint US-Israeli war against Iran were intensifying to full volume, Charlie changed his tune to mollify Trump, whom his whole identity was built around sycophantically serving. “It is possible to be an extreme isolationist,” Charlie Kirk warned his massive audience. “President Donald Trump is a man made for this moment, and we should trust him.” This was just pathetic. Turn off your critical thinking skills and place unquestioning “trust” in the US government to wage a war on false pretenses! What awesome, noble “truth-telling”!
Kirk then called for Trump to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, for the peace-bringing act of launching a new war in the Middle East.
Unz continues quoting Tracey at considerable length in support of the proposition that Kirk was simply a political operative who was willing to change his views to suit his masters. This, of course, is a conceptual argument. It’s well supported, but human beings aren’t abstract concepts and aren’t always consistent. We’ll get to that, too.
However, after all the Tracey material, Unz turns to a guy who publishes at the Unz Review, Andrew Anglin (never heard of him before). What’s interesting in what Anglin says in criticism of Kirk is that, whereas the politically oriented Tracey focused on hot political topics that Kirk had commented on, Anglin focuses on hot button social issues. And Kirk’s views on social issues are precisely of the sort that would seem to strongly militate against sexual deviants ever wanting to kill him. Not to put too fine a point on it, Kirk’s social views were exactly of the woolly headed Libertarian sort that I’d more or less expect from someone of his background.
Sharply attacking Kirk from the right, Anglin eagerly dredged up quotes that demonstrated the victim’s notably liberal views on various hot-button issues. This hardly surprised me since it merely reflected the leftward shift of our conservative movement, whose right-wing MAGA partisans these days espouse many positions on social issues that would have marked them as extreme progressives as recently as the 1990s.
For example, Anglin noted that one of Kirk’s Tweets praised Trump’s strong support for global gay rights and condemned the media for failing to give the president sufficient credit on that score:
Then Unz comments, noting the mind rot so typical of libertarians who claim to be “conservative” rather than radical antinomians:
This last example seems to perfectly exemplify the nature of our modern conservative movement. The promotion of totally insane ideas by the mainstream media and the academic community has provided self-proclaimed conservatives with considerable necessary cover, allowing them to win popular support by proudly advocating ideas that are only somewhat less insane in comparison.
As an example of Kirk’s personal support for transgenderism, Anglin noted that his organization heavily promoted an activist of that ilk called “Lady MAGA,” going much farther in that regard than most other pro-Trump conservatives. This certainly seemed to contradict early media reports suggesting that Kirk had been killed for his hostility to transgenderism.
More on that libertarianism, which is also embraced—when it suits them—by Jewish Nationalists in their war on an American identity:
According to Anglin, Kirk had also been a leading proponent of the notion that “America is an idea,” with our ideology and our constitutional principles defining what it means to be an American. Anglin located a 2019 clip in which Kirk took exactly this position, while simultaneously proclaiming that Israel should rightly remain “a blood and soil nation,” falling into a different category because of the holy connection to its land:
Immigration?
As with many conservatives, Kirk apparently had some strong libertarian roots, and during Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign he had emphasized that wide open America could easily accommodate almost unlimited numbers of hard-working, productive legal immigrants. Anglin actually claimed that Kirk had invented the meme of “stapling green cards to diplomas” and indeed in this clip the latter proposed that any foreigner who graduated from an American university should be issued a green card allowing permanent legal residency. Kirk even suggested that our country could reasonably absorb an astonishing fifty million new legal immigrants over the next ten years.
OTOH, says Unz:
Anglin was obviously mining Kirk’s record to find those public statements most likely to infuriate the many right-wingers now mourning Kirk’s martyrdom, and I’m sure that clips could also be found in which Kirk sometimes took the opposite side of these same issues. For example, by 2023 he had apparentlyproposed halting all immigration.
But that’s the crucial point. Like so many other conservative activists, Kirk’s views on most ideological issues were hardly set in stone, and instead might easily change over time as Trump and other national leaders of his movement chose to move in different directions. This hardly indicated that Kirk was the sort of fanatic ideologue most likely to attract a deadly assassin.
All of this suggested that Tracey’s more cynical criticism of Kirk was probably much closer to the mark.
Which is Unz’s point: Why would Kirk be a target? Sure he was identified as a Trump supporter, but one who openly espoused ideas that most of Trump’s base would have rejected.
OK. At this point Unz goes on to argue that the Kirk assassination looked, to him, to be more professional than most. YMMV. Read it and draw your own conclusions. But this leads Unz to the Israel issue, via Tucker Carlson’s “remarkably candid” speech at TPUSA and Kirk’s own remarks that were critical of “Jewish Americans”.
That leads Unz to reflect, before highly recommending the Blumenthal/Parampil article that I also highly recommended (btw, the duo will appear later this afternoon on Judge Nap’s show)—reread the article to refresh your recollection:
Earlier this year I’d published an article summarizing Israel’s long history of high-profile political assassinations, a record unmatched in all of world history, and this particular incident certainly fit very well into that pattern.
Three months earlier I’d summarized the strong, even overwhelming evidence that Israel had played a central role in the deaths of both President Kennedy and his younger brother Robert, and the parallels with Kirk’s killing seemed quite apparent.
Therefore, a few hours after hearing of Kirk’s death, I very gingerly raised these possibilities with someone well situated in conservative circles who personally knew Kirk, and was shocked by his response. He unequivocally told me that everyone in Kirk’s circle, even including important Trump Administration officials, suspected that Israel had probably killed the young conservative leader. While such beliefs might not necessarily be correct, I was astonished that they were apparently so widespread without even a hint of those notions reported anywhere in the mainstream or conservative media.
But two days later, this media silence was dramatically broken as the story I’d been privately told by a conservative insider was fully confirmed by a revelatory article published in the Grayzone.
I’d strongly urge that everyone read the entire 2,100 word piece by editors Max Blumenthal and Anya Parampil. But the information reported by those two investigative journalists seems so explosively important that I feel compelled to quote it at very considerable length:
Again, all of this mirrors my initial response: Who Feared Charlie Kirk? Unz then quotes the Blumenthal/Parampil article at extreme length. When he returns in person he notes that, despite Kirk’s record of changing his views to suit Trump, Kirk seemed to have undergone some sort of change:
Nonetheless, it seems clear that Kirk had increasingly moved into sharp conflict with Israel and therefore apparently feared for his life at the hands of a country whose record of political assassinations is unrivaled across all of human history. Moreover, immediately after Kirk’s violent death, his place was taken by Ben Shapiro, a Jewish Zionist known to be one of America’s fiercest public supporters for Israel, someone who had sharply attacked Kirk on that very issue just four days before the latter’s death.
These obviously seem like very dangerous and suspicious circumstances, but perhaps Kirk was instead killed by a young activist angered over his insufficiently strong support for transgenderism. Odd coincidences do sometimes happen.
Jackson Hinkle @jacksonhinklle
 BREAKING: NETANYAHU claims “ISRAEL did NOT ASSASSINATE Charlie Kirk”
What an odd thing for a world leader who is busy bombing 7 countries to say…
And I’ll end by quoting myself:
Also, recall that there have been repeated reports of Trump warning Netanyahu that Jewish Nationalist genocide is causing Israel to be bleeding support among Republicans—including especially younger people, Kirk’s base of support. There are many such articles, but I’ll link a few that date back to mid summer:
Younger Republicans join MAGA isolationists and Christian conservatives in calling out Jewish state as Gaza war drags on; president hasn’t adopted their more hostile rhetoric, but has taken notice
Trump's statements extend beyond mere diplomatic chatter, touching the core of the ongoing narrative battle. While militarily robust, Israel, he posits, is losing the battle for public opinion—a crucial element in modern international relations.
Not that Trump’s opinions matter much among those who matter:
If Trump thinks his comments on Israel's loss of 'control over Congress' will be a wake-up call for Netanyahu, he's mistaken.
That being the case, Jewish Nationalists struck quickly, issuing orders to their elected representatives who control both houses of Congress to take action to control speech and information flow in America:
Megatron @Megatron_ron
NEW:
 The House passed a bill punishing "politically motivated" boycotts of Israel in the fog of the Charlie Kirk murder - The intercept
4:35 AM · Sep 13, 2025
ayden @squatsons
While Charlie Kirk bled out, Senate Republicans blocked the release of the Epstein files.
What an excellent moment to divide America and pit us against each other.
7:44 AM · Sep 12, 2025
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Without commenting on the Israel angle on this assassination (which I find wholly plausible), I will just say that the portrayal of Kirk as a woolly-headed liberal seems dated and unfair. The posts/quotes in this respect are years old. Having listened to one of his recent podcasts after finding out about him post-mortem, he comes across as someone who has been and is searching for the Truth, and drawing closer.
Fascinating video: Judge with Max
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GceyZzZzYlc
Without commenting on the Israel angle on this assassination (which I find wholly plausible), I will just say that the portrayal of Kirk as a woolly-headed liberal seems dated and unfair. The posts/quotes in this respect are years old. Having listened to one of his recent podcasts after finding out about him post-mortem, he comes across as someone who has been and is searching for the Truth, and drawing closer.