THERE’S a few reasons why unionist politicians – particularly the younger breed – were so incredibly upset by the assassination of Charlie Kirk. The first is religious. Kirk foregrounded Gahd in everything he said and did. Whether he was genuinely devout, or whether his overweening religiosity was a confected part of an online persona which made him a very rich youngish man is not altogether clear to me, and now that he’s dead we’ll never know. But what we do know is that Kirk’s unctuous and frequent invocations of his Saviour were incredibly attractive to pro-union elected reps here, to whom the line between religion and politics is either distinctly indistinct or non-existent.
It's interesting to speculate on whether Kirk’s assassination would have provoked the same levels of grief and despair had it happened six months or even a year later, because while his radical and ruthless Christian nationalism was not up for debate, he was most certainly up for reconsidering what form his evangelical Christianity took and to what countries, movements and individuals his US nationalism should attach itself. Ironically, his move away from traditionally Protestant dogma would in all likelihood not have proved as problematic for certain members of the DUP, the UUP and the TUV as his increasing detachment from the Trumpian orthodoxy on Israel.
Those who claim that Kirk was on the verge of taking instruction in the Catholic faith may have been a bit hasty because he continued to articulate opposition to key aspects of Catholic dogma up to his death, but if some observers were a bit previous, it might not have been by much. Just months before his death, Kirk told a caller to his show that Protestants “under-venerate Mary”. To be clear, his reasoning was rooted in a misogyny that’s grimly familiar among US Christian evangelicals: He thought the Virgin Mary was a welcome antidote to feminism, or to “toxic feminism”, as it’s invariably known among Yankee Bible-thumpers. But in Charlie Kirk’s life other straws were bending so low in the wind of change that there’s little doubt the podcaster was in a period of faithful reflection. Just over a week before he was shot, Kirk attended an anti-abortion breakfast in Fresno, California, at which he bumped into the local Catholic Bishop, John Brennan. When Bishop Brennan asked him about public speculation that he was considering taking Catholic instruction, Kirk replied, “I’m this close.” (Bishop Brennan gave permission for his brother, Robert Brennan, to reveal the private conversation in an article in the Los Angeles Catholic magazine Angelus.)
Kirk’s wife, Erika, is Catholic and their children are being raised Catholic; Kirk frequently attended Mass with them as a family.
Such flirting with the Antichrist would have been a deal-breaker for Ian Paisley Snr, who spent a fair chunk of his life among the hot-gospellers of the American heartland who shared his belief that Mary was not the conservative heroine of Charlie Kirk’s online meanderings, but the red-eyed Whore of Babylon. Today, Kirk’s heresy – whether imminent or idle posing – would not be as daunting a prospect for right-wing unionist evangelicals who are all too familiar with the growing centrality of US Catholicism to the MAGA project of which Kirk was a leading apostle.
If unionism would likely have remained relatively sanguine about the idea of Charlie Kirk taking the wafer, the hotly disputed facts of his relationship with Israel were much more likely to spread discomfort and alarm. Just as we’ll never now know if Kirk was indeed Romeward-bound, we’ll remain similarly bereft of certainty in relation to his position on the perpetrators of the Gaza genocide. What we do know is that in September when Kirk was assassinated, the split in the American right over Israel threatened to end some very close and long-term relationships; ten weeks after his murder, those former allies have indeed parted company, but with a bitterness and anger of such incredible profundity that the conservative political landscape of 2026 will be as blasted as Gaza – but without the mass casualties.
There’s little doubt that the anti-Israel forces on the US political right are going to win the day – they are just too powerful, too big and too many. The big beasts of online conservatism are not only withdrawing support and cover for Israel’s crimes in Gaza, they are denouncing those crimes with a coruscating passion that has seen Israel’s polling credit go from the black to the red with a rapidity and comprehensiveness that has left Tel Aviv and DC floundering. And having their billionaire flunkeys buy up legacy media and new media outlets isn’t getting the job done. In fact, things are getting worse for the Only Democracy in the Middle East (that bans gay marriage and doesn’t allow Jews to marry gentiles).
Digital behemoths Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes have discovered the more they berate Israel and the louder they condemn the Gaza slaughter, the bigger their online numbers get. Joe Rogan has not yet officially signed on to the all-powerful anti-Zionist alliance, and neither has former Fox and NBC anchor Megyn Kelly, but they have distanced themselves from Tel Aviv to such an extent as to be hors de combat. Meanwhile, Candace Owens’ vicious spat with Erika Kirk – now a central figure in her late husband’s lucrative online MAGA empire – has propelled conspiracy theories about the Kirk shooting into the mainstream, and at the weekend forced Mrs Kirk to sue for peace.
Meanwhile, formerly dominant ultra-Zionists Ben Shapiro, Mark Levin and Dave Rubin are finding the Gaza slaughter an increasingly hard sell to an increasingly disinterested audience.
Kirk had not turned his back on Israel at the time of his death, but, to paraphrase the Pulitzer Prize-winning Jewish poet Bob Dylan, he didn’t need a weatherman to see which way the wind was blowing.
“I’ve been telling them [US Zionists],” he said in July. “There’s an earthquake coming in this country on this issue, and they don’t believe me.”
At the time of his death, the pre-eminent social polling company Pew had 59% of Americans holding an unfavourable view of Israel. And even against that background of a jawdropping collapse in support for Israel, Kirk believed that there was still “an earthquake” to come. The earthquake has begun, and while the halls of American conservatism have not yet collapsed, dust and plaster are falling on the heads of the MAGA/I Stand With Israel Republican establishment.
Before supporters of Palestinian freedom start to develop warm feelings towards the likes of Owens, Carlson and Fuentes, I’d like you to note my strong suspicion that their strident opposition to the Gaza genocide is not born primarily out of a humane concern for Palestinian innocents; rather it is more likely a noxious by-product of the latest joining of two hardy perennials of classic American conservatism: isolationism and anti-semitism.
Whatever the reasons for it, Israel is losing the US right, and it is losing it quickly and spectacularly. For now, Trump and the MAGA movement are holding the line on Israel, but they’re looking at next November’s midterms with increasing anxiety in the knowledge that the Democrats lost in 2024 in large part because they didn’t take heed of their internal polling on Israel and Gaza. The Richter needle on Charlie Kirk’s predicted earthquake is trembling and moving upwards; if former certainties collapse in Washington DC, leaders will fall in Tel Aviv. Which means that Charlie Kirk fans here will – like Donald Trump – have a decision to make in the coming 11 months.
The unionist attachment to Israel may appear unbreakable – it certainly did to me a year ago – but it is no more unbreakable than the Israel consensus cleaved to up until relatively recently by those online big beasts who now speak of Israel in words that would get them banned from the BBC.
And if you don’t think anything’s possible, arch Bible-thumper Candace Owens just turned Catholic, Tucker Carlson says he was attacked in bed by a demon and Nick Fuentes thinks Rome should be more like the Taliban.
