Jonathan S. Tobin
The podcaster and the late Charlie Kirk were wrong to refuse to cut ties with Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. This failure is poisoning American conservatism.
Political commentator and media personality Megyn Kelly speaking at the 2025 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in National Harbor, Md., Feb. 21, 2025. Credit: Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons
The late conservative activist Charlie Kirk joined Megyn Kelly’s podcast on Aug. 6 for a session in which both of them griped about the heat they were taking from Jews and friends of Israel because they wouldn’t distance themselves from former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, someone they both regarded as a friend. Today, that conversation is part of what Kelly and many on the far left and far right claim is a debate on free speech.
The truth is that what’s at stake in this argument has nothing to do with any American’s First Amendment right to say what they like. It is one about whether antisemitism should be treated as legitimate discourse.
Kirk, who would be assassinated on the campus of a Utah university a month later, was an ardent supporter of Israel and someone influenced by the study of Judaism. Those who have accused him of antisemitism or turning on the Jewish state are wrong. The same can be said of others who would make that accusation about Kelly, who has been a backer of Israel and supportive of the Jewish community. But by succumbing to the impulse to lash out at critics, they provided more fodder for an increasingly disturbing kerfuffle that has metastasized since then.
Charlie Kirk and Israel
Since his death, Kirk—the founder of Turning Point USA, and one of the most successful and consequential political activists of this century—has only grown in stature. Any criticism of his stands or statements in life is being treated by some of those who mourn his loss as disrespect or sacrilege. Just as interestingly, the battle for his legacy, and whether or not he was turning on Israel, has become part of a more general debate about the way the post-Oct. 7, 2023 surge of Jew-hatred that conquered the political left is now gaining a foothold on the right.
At the center of it is the question that irked Kelly and Kirk on that podcast. The unwillingness of important voices on the right to cut ties with Carlson and the even more unhinged political commentator Candace Owens generated criticism they took personally. Kirk thought shunning the two would contradict the basic principles of his brand of activism. Kelly’s position seems more a matter of her contrarian spirit. Like most strong individuals with ideas of their own, she just doesn’t like to be told what to do.
She summed up her impatience with the criticism and advice she’s been receiving in a post on X: “Look at this. No, I have no obligation to “separate” myself from anyone. I run my own media company and my own show. That show is where I express my own opinions, and I will decide what/what not to opine on. If you need me to condemn Candace or Tucker for their opinions in order to listen to me, then I may not be for you. He’s a close friend, and she is under enough pressure w/o gratuitous shots from me. My fight is with the left, not these two.”
Of course, she’s right that she can do what she likes and say what she wants.
But those like her, whose job it is to speak publicly on the issues of the day, must accept that they will be held accountable by the public for those choices. And if friendship with one person and sympathy for another are more important than the responsibility to stand up against antisemitism, then the public, in addition to other pundits and commentators, have the same right to speak up and say that what you are doing is not just mistaken but an immoral choice that compromises your standing as someone deserving of respect and trust.
Charlie Kirk addressed the 2025 Young Women’s Leadership Summit in Grapevine, Texas, on June 13, 2025. Credit: Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.
Advice for Netanyahu
Kelly is now also wading into the arguments about whether Kirk was disillusioned with Israel. The mad and brazenly hateful comments about Jews, Judaism and Israel by Owens have raised the question of whether she is simply a cynical hate-monger or someone who has lost her grip on reality. She took issue with the comments of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in which he praised and mourned Kirk after his murder.
Netanyahu spoke of a letter he had received from Kirk expressing his support for Israel; Owens falsely asserted that he was lying about its contents. Kelly appeared to be doing the same recently in another unfortunate post on X in which she seemed to say that the griping session she had with him about Israel supporters pressuring them on her podcast contradicted the letter.
Now that the full contents of that letter have been published, everyone can see that Owens is a liar and that Kelly is trying to salvage an argument that hasn’t a leg to stand on.
The letter makes clear that the claims that Kirk had turned on Israel were false. He was as dedicated to its support as ever; however, he was also concerned about the nation losing the information war with so much of the public on social media and the mainstream media being deceived by Hamas propaganda and lies about Israeli military conduct during the battle against the Hamas terror organization in Gaza.
That’s a problem for a small but not insignificant collection of voices on the far right.
They have joined forces with their counterparts on the left to attack Israel in a manner that is not only unfair and disconnected from the facts about the events in the Middle East, but also increasingly indistinguishable from antisemitism. Their demonization of Israel and attempts to delegitimize its right to defend itself against Islamist foes—who are just as interested in waging a religious war on both the West and the United States—is deeply hateful. But it is also no different from the arguments heard from the red-green coalition of Islamists and leftists that have sought to silence, intimidate and target Jews for violence on the streets of American cities and college campuses in the last two years.
The most visible figure in this movement is Carlson.
He is important because he is not a fringe figure in American discourse. During his time with Fox, he became one of the more influential people in broadcast journalism. During the Black Lives Matter summer of 2020, he served as the de facto tribune of American conservatism, providing a clear counterpoint to the moral panic about racism driven by myths and lies about law enforcement killings of African-Americans that followed the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers.
Since the cable giant fired him in April 2023, Carlson has traveled further and further down the rabbit hole of Israel-bashing and openly attacking Jews, to the point of platforming a Holocaust denier on his podcast. But Kirk and Kelly, as well as President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance, never cut him off—and that is creating a crisis for the conservative movement and, by extension, American political discourse.
Kirk’s belief in dialogue and engaging in conversations with those with whom he disagreed was at the core of his activism and something he was doing at the moment of his death on Sept. 10.
Hate speech at the Kirk memorial
As laudable as that practice is in principle, like anything, it can be taken too far. When it is extended to hate-mongers, it neither advances the bridge-building Kirk believed in nor creates political discussions that elevate or enlighten those engaged in it. Everyone needs to be willing to listen to opposing views, but that’s not the same thing as treating lies and hate speech as legitimate opinions. That expands the Overton Window of acceptable discourse to the point where hatred and bigotry are no longer relegated to the fever swamps of the far right and left, and are instead allowed to fester in the mainstream and even be considered legitimate.
Kirk believed that there could never be too much free speech—and, in many contexts, that’s right. Still, he was wrong to include Carlson in the most recent Turning Point USA convention. That’s not just because Carlson is a toxic figure but because it sent a message to the many young people in attendance that his hate is just another point of view and as defensible as any other stance to be heard at a conservative conference.
That mistake was compounded when Carlson was invited to speak at the massive memorial service for Kirk—just 31 when he was shot and killed—that was attended by most senior members of the administration. In his talk, he clearly invoked the deicide myth about Jews being responsible for the death of Jesus, a standard antisemitic trope that has been linked to violence and pogroms for many centuries.
Sadly, instead of being widely condemned for this, Carlson’s appalling contribution to the evening was largely ignored. It was done so by both those on the right and by voices you might think would pounce on antisemitism coming from someone that could be linked to Trump, even though he opposes the president’s pro-Israel and anti-Iran policies. As Park MacDougald recently wrote in Tablet, news outlets like The New York Times, which once routinely denounced Carlson for his conservative stands, now grant him and even right-wing extremists like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) “strange new respect” because of their Israel-bashing and antisemitism.
Like many other conservatives, Kelly says that she is focused on fighting the left—and that includes the woke antisemites who are the engine driving most of the hate directed against Jews, especially since the Oct. 7 massacre. She deserves credit for that; however, turning a blind eye to the influence of Carlson and even the deranged Owens remains indefensible.
Lately, Kelly seems more like Carlson and Owens, as interested in chasing clicks from extremists on the margins as gaining mainstream viewers. Perhaps that’s a function of this era of no-holds-barred hyper-partisanship. That’s a switch for a woman who rose to stardom on Fox as a sharp journalist and voice of reason before leaving it in 2017 for a big contract at NBC, where she flopped. Since then, her career has again taken flight as one of the country’s leading conservative podcasters.
But instead of seeking to ensure that mainstream conservatism is free of the taint of antisemitic hate, Kelly is treating the issue as one in which neutrality is the right choice.
Buckley’s example
She couldn’t be more wrong. And it contradicts the example of the late William F. Buckley, a seminal figure of modern American conservatism. He was the founder and editor of National Review, which was the touchstone for conservative thought in the decades following its first issue in 1955.
The patrician and self-consciously intellectual Buckley couldn’t have been more different from Kirk. But as one of the nation’s leading authors and opinion leaders, he was as strong a believer in dialogue across the political divide as the Turning Point USA founder.
William F. Buckley Jr. attends the second inauguration of U.S. President Ronald Reagan, Jan. 21, 1985. Credit: SPC 5 Bert Goulait/U.S. Military via Wikimedia Commons.
Buckley created “Firing Line,” the first and most influential talking-heads show on American television, in which he interviewed and debated a wide cross-section of political thinkers, including many he strongly disagreed with.
He sought to build a broad conservative coalition, and it is impossible to imagine the Republican victories of the late 20th century without Buckley. He also thought that there needed to be limits to what was considered acceptable discourse. Buckley thought that it was important to hold putative allies on the right accountable as it was to do the same as opponents on the left. To that end, he chased the racists and fanatical extremists of the John Birch Society out of NR and mainstream conservatism in the early 1960s.
He did the same thing three decades later as antisemitism started to rise again on the right. When longtime colleagues Pat Buchanan and Joseph Sobran used their bully pulpits to bash Israel and stigmatize Jews for their support for the Jewish state, it was Buckley who took on the haters. He repudiated Sobran’s writing, which he labeled antisemitic, and pushed him off the magazine’s masthead. As the issue continued to percolate in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf war in December 1991, he devoted an entire issue of the magazine to an essay titled “In Search of Anti-Semitism”(also the title of the book he later published on the same subject), in which he took on Buchanan.
His conclusion was damning: “I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination amounted to anti-Semitism, whatever it was that drove him to say and do it,” Buckley wrote.
Both of those fights weren’t just good for the Jews. They made for a better American conservatism and a healthier national public discourse.
The same imperative is at play today with the likes of Carlson and Owens.
The need for moral clarity
Influenced by our contemporary culture in which all gatekeepers are considered intrinsically wrong, coupled with the way the internet and social media have made it easier for extremists and haters to be heard, podcasters like Kelly are incentivized not to do the right thing. Worse than that, she seems interested in seeking applause from extremists and antisemites for standing up to the Jews, instead of denouncing their hate.
People like Carlson and Owens have every right to spout their views, even if what they say is vile. Yet at a moment when antisemitism is surging and Jews are increasingly feeling themselves under siege in the United States, as well as in Europe and the Middle East, thought leaders shouldn’t hesitate not only to shun them, but to make it clear that their hatred has no place in the public square. Doing so is a defense of sanity and decency, not an attack on free speech.
Whether she likes it or not, we have every right to expect that sort of moral clarity and courage from Megyn Kelly. Such criticism doesn’t make her a martyr or a heroine for defending open discourse. It’s a sad testament to the way the hunger for attention has led her to believe that neutrality about antisemitism should be mistaken for conscience or principle.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of the Jewish News Syndicate, a senior contributor for The Federalist, a columnist for Newsweek and a contributor to many other publications. He covers the American political scene, foreign policy, the U.S.-Israel relationship, Middle East diplomacy, the Jewish world and the arts. He hosts the JNS “Think Twice” podcast, both the weekly video program and the “Jonathan Tobin Daily” program, which are available on all major audio platforms and YouTube. Previously, he was executive editor, then senior online editor and chief political blogger, for Commentary magazine. Before that, he was editor-in-chief of The Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia and editor of the Connecticut Jewish Ledger. He has won more than 60 awards for commentary, art criticism and other writing. He appears regularly on television, commenting on politics and foreign policy. Born in New York City, he studied history at Columbia University.
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