Charlie Kirk
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Charlie Kirk was an American conservative activist whom John Kiriakou describes as the centre of the MAGA movement and one of the few figures of his generation with a genuine claim on mass political authority. Kiriakou disagreed with him on "I don't know 80% of the issues," but treats that disagreement as beside the point: "he was a born leader, and that was what his real service to the right and to the Republican party was."

The one meeting

Kiriakou met Kirk once, while working on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Kirk was seventeen or eighteen and arrived with a group of Tea Party people, which Kiriakou found funny, he watched them for a moment and thought "you know what? It's that kid who's the leader. It's not any of the adults." The group went office to office lobbying for tax cuts, and when it came time to leave there was a press conference, which the teenager gave himself. Kiriakou said to a colleague, "Boy, that kid's going places, whoever he is", and had to ask who he was.

Political weight

On Kiriakou's account Donald Trump said he would not have been elected to a second term were it not for Kirk, because it was Kirk who brought young people voting for the first time not merely to the Trump campaign but to MAGA as a movement. That is the basis for the comparison Kiriakou offers: "Think of somebody like Martin Luther King or Robert F. Kennedy Senior. I would compare his political power, his authority to those people."

He regards Kirk as unreplaceable within Turning Point USA and the wider movement: the remaining figures, he names Ben Shapiro and Benny Johnson, "are not Charlie Kirk. So this is going to hurt. This is going to do damage."

The turn on Israel

Kirk had been, in Kiriakou's description, "one of the most pro-Israel, one of the most pro-Zionism figures on the American right until recently", and then began taking a stand against Israeli war crimes in Gaza. Kiriakou sets that alongside the collapse of American public support for Israel to explain why some observers looked to Mossad after the killing: a figure with Kirk's following switching sides "would be a serious problem for the Israelis." His own conclusion is a refusal: "Did the Israelis have a reason for this to happen? You bet they did. Did they do it? I don't see it."

See also

- Charlie Kirk shooting
- Turning Point Usa
- Senate Foreign Relations Committee
- Donald Trump
