The only true surprise about this latest MAGA influencer civil war is how quickly it happened, given the circumstances: Charlie Kirk, an ubiquitous presence, influential political force, and seemingly everyone’s best friend, had been dead for barely a week before everyone began fighting each other for a piece of him.
The indictment of Tyler Robinson, released Tuesday, cited, among other things, the Discord chats that he sent to his roommate wherein he appeared to confess to the shooting. Its contents were strong enough for the power brokers of MAGA world — all the way up to President Donald Trump himself and his cabinet — to begin a rapid, systemic purge of left-wing critics across the country.
But it took less than 24 hours for the MAGA influencer coalition that had united behind Kirk’s death to start falling apart. By Wednesday night, at least three high-profile personalities — Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes, and Tucker Carlson — began questioning the Trump administration’s motives, vocally disagreeing with their actions, and, in some cases, suggesting that the evidence against Robinson had been doctored.
This is a group of influencers who’d been pushed out of the MAGA mainstream for being even further right than Kirk — anti-Israel, antisemitic, and / or critical of Trump — but would have, theoretically, called Robinson a guilty leftist. They all have large right-wing, anti-lib audiences, and if they question the MAGA narrative about Robinson, or refuse to go along with MAGA’s retribution spree, so, too, will their listeners and viewers.
Fuentes, an infamous white supremacist influencer, spent the weekend pushing back against allegations that one of his groyper followers had killed Kirk, due to the yearslong harassment campaign they’d ran against Kirk for being pro-Israel. Robinson’s Discord chat should have been enough to exonerate Fuentes and the groyper Army — in fact, prominent right-wing influencers had been defending Fuentes from left-wing allegations — but on Wednesday, he began questioning the veracity of the chat anyway.
“These messages are clearly doctored,” [Owens] told her followers
“It seems like [Robinson] is narrating the events and connecting one event to the next, and resolving all of the inconsistencies and discrepancies and questions, basically tying it up in a neat little bow,” he said on a Rumble livestream, where he was dissecting the Discord chats in real time. “Because up until this point, those are the questions people are asking: Why did he change clothes? How did the weapon get in the woods? Conveniently, now we have this little narration, this expository narration from the killer, as if to wash away any doubts.”
Over on her corner of the internet, right-wing influencer Candace Owens also cast doubt. She had been cast into the wilderness by Turning Point USA and The Daily Wire, two massive entities in right-wing media and her former employers, for her statements about Israel. She, too, had suggested that Robinson was a leftist prior to the indictment’s release, but now she questioned the very evidence that seemingly proved it. “These messages are clearly doctored,” she told her followers, laying out the lack of timestamps and the fact that large portions of the chat had been edited out. “You have the right to be a little bit uncomfortable about that, because I am a lot a bit uncomfortable with that.”
Carlson is the closest to the MAGA mainstream out of the three but still an open critic of Trump. This summer, he was one of the leading right-wing voices razing the Trump administration for not releasing the Epstein files, insinuating at a TPUSA summit that Jeffrey Epstein had been a Mossad asset. (Disclaimer: the author formerly worked for Carlson at The Daily Caller in 2011.) Unlike Fuentes and Owens, he had a warm relationship with Kirk, who’d appeared on his podcast last month, and he didn’t start questioning the veracity of the Discord messages.
But on Wednesday night, he savaged the Trump administration for using Kirk’s death as a pretext for suppressing free speech. Earlier this week, Attorney General Pam Bondi had strongly implied that she would classify any criticism or celebration of Kirk’s death as “hate speech.” And Carlson began streaming just hours after FCC chairman Brendan Carr successfully got comedian Jimmy Kimmel ousted from ABC for making a brief, benign joke about Kirk’s killer.
“You hope that a year from now, the turmoil we’re seeing in the aftermath of his murder won’t be leveraged to bring hate speech laws to this country. And trust me, if it is, if that does happen, there is never a more justified moment for civil disobedience,” Carlson said. “And there never will be, because if they can tell you what to say, they’re telling you what to think, there is nothing they can’t do to you because they don’t consider you human.”
To put a finer point on it, he attacked Bondi specifically. “That thinking that she just articulated [is] exactly what got us to a place where some huge and horrifying percentage of young people think it’s okay to shoot people you disagree with to kill Nazis for saying things they don’t like.”
There was little incentive — a neatly partisan one, anyway — for Fuentes, Owens, Carlson, and others to start casting doubt on what the rest of MAGA world saw as a slam dunk for their side. When the indictment was released on Tuesday, laying out the state of Utah’s evidence against Robinson, there was enough evidence for conservatives to conclude that he was liberal: the etchings on the bullet casings, the gender identity of his roommate, the Discord messages saying, “I’ve had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.”
The many reversals of Nick Fuentes
Just weeks prior, Fuentes had been demanding that Kirk debate him about Zionism and called him a “bitch” (among other slurs over the course of several hours). But he quickly changed his tune upon the news of Kirk’s death. “To all of my followers, if you take up arms, I disavow you, I disown you in the strongest possible terms. That is not what we are about,” he told his followers the day after the shooting, memorializing Kirk as a respected foe and Christian martyr.
Over the weekend, he spent his time online battling accusations that Robinson was a groyper, which had not been a totally unfounded theory: the group had targeted Turning Point and Kirk for years over for their support of Israel, showing up at Kirk’s college appearances, posing as students who wanted to debate him, but then used it as an opportunity to troll him by asking him deeply antisemitic questions, as well as repeatedly asking if he’d ever debate Fuentes. (To be clear, groypers are not pro-Palestine but are deeply antisemitic.) But now, Fuentes was thanking other MAGA influencers who stepped in on his behalf. Clearly, Fuentes was in self-preservation mode, worried about the blowback if the shooter turned out to be one of his fans.
And then on Wednesday, once Robinson’s motives were more established, he immediately trashed their goodwill. On his show, Fuentes theorized for two hours straight that Robinson was part of a larger Jewish conspiracy to eliminate Kirk, involving several people with connections to the Trump administration, that was covered up by the FBI Director Kash Patel and financed by MAGA-adjacent hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman. The goal, he claimed, was to eliminate MAGA’s top young influencer and replace him with “Jewish Zionist” Ben Shapiro, or “gay Jewish Zionist slash drag queen” Milo Yiannopoulos.
On his show, Fuentes theorized for two hours straight that Robinson was part of a larger Jewish conspiracy to eliminate Kirk
Carlson suggested during his Wednesday livestream that Kirk had been harassed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government for voicing criticism of the war in Gaza, a claim for which he provided no apparent evidence. “Benjamin Netanyahu really tormented Charlie,” he said Wednesday on his show, during a discussion with fellow former Fox host Megyn Kelly. “We talked about it many times. He tormented Charlie, and his advocates tormented Charlie. For him to run around saying that Charlie died for Israel. It’s just too much. It’s just disgusting.” He threw in another bombshell accusation: that Kirk had urged him to bring up Epstein’s connections with Israeli intelligence during his then-upcoming TPUSA appearance. “He said, do it,” claimed Carlson. “So I did it.”
Shockingly, Fuentes stated that he did not believe Israel was behind Kirk’s death, nor did Carlson openly insinuate it. But Owens did. In another episode of her show, she claimed, without evidence, that Ackman had staged an “intervention” for Kirk, offered him “a ton of money” to modulate his views, and made “threats” should he not comply. She also insinuated that Netanyahu had invited Kirk to Israel to pressure him further. (In a lengthy post on X, Ackman aggressively denied Owens’ accusations and asked his followers to “not let those emotions [about Kirk’s death] cause us to construct conspiracy theories that can cause innocent people serious and potentially deadly harm.”)
Israel has become a flashpoint
It was once unthinkable for a right-wing influencer to openly criticize Trump and his administration (to say nothing of the GOP’s relationship with Israel), but it’s a growing trend. Fuentes, for one, has already gone on the attack against Vice President JD Vance, telling his followers to “stay home” if Vance becomes the Republican presidential nominee in 2028. Fuentes has been banned from other right-wing conventions — not just Turning Point events, but also the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which has been held ever since the Reagan years. Owens is also persona non grata in these circles due to her comments about Israel, but she was able to build her own independent media brand and audience. Carlson still retains his popularity within MAGA world, but crucially, has the financial independence to survive a Trump cancellation strike: after he left Fox, he launched his own streaming service, Tucker Carlson Media, and bought out his investors earlier this year to assume complete control of his company. (Carlson’s nicotine gum brand, launched in response to Zyn pulling its advertising from his show, is apparently quite lucrative.)
But in the past year, the political climate has shifted to these influencers’ advantage.
For one, the state of Israel has become deeply unpopular among American voters due to the war in Gaza, particularly among young people but especially young Republicans. A Pew Research poll released earlier this year found that 50 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning voters under the age of 49 expressed “negative views towards Israel” — up from 35 percent in 2022. It’s a shocking about-face for the Republican Party, which had treated support for Israel as sacrosanct for decades. But it is an audience that Owens, Carlson, and Fuentes speak to directly. The MAGA summer meltdown over the Epstein files only added to their popularity. A plurality of right-leaning and right-wing voters disapprove of how Trump has handled the files, as did a vocal faction of MAGA influencers. But it was Owens, Carlson, and Fuentes who asserted that there were potential connections between Epstein and the Israeli government.
Their combined accusations and followings posed enough of a threat to Netanyahu that he put out a video statement on Thursday, vociferously denying that Israel had anything to do with Kirk’s death. “Now, some are peddling these disgusting rumors — perhaps out of obsession, perhaps with Qatari funding,” he said.
But the Qatari accusation was soon picked up by none other than Laura Loomer, the MAGA influencer currently trying to force companies to fire employees who have made social media posts criticizing Kirk or celebrating his death. She has frequently portrayed herself as Trump’s most ardent defender outside of the administration, rooting out supposed disloyalists, razing them on social media, and getting him to fire them. She took time out of her Wednesday to celebrate: “Jimmy Kimmel’s career just got assassinated. Who’s laughing now?”
And she took a swing at Carlson on Wednesday night for not backing Trump’s assault on free speech — a bellwether portending the first of many fights within the right over who could claim Kirk’s legacy. “Tucker Qatarlson is a shameless grifter,” she wrote on X. “He is the most self-serving person on the right. He is the demon he said he was attacked by in his sleep.”
Inevitably, her attacks on Carlson escalated on Thursday, and she soon looped Owens into her spree. Radio host Michael Savage jumped in, saying Carlson’s rhetoric would “going to get Jews killed outside of synagogues.” Smaller influencers like Misfit Patriot began asking why Carlson and Kelly hadn’t discussed “the far left pro trans ideology of Kirk’s killer who as far as we know has zero opinions about Israel.” Guests on Patrick Bet-David’s podcast accused Owens of mining Kirk’s death for views and clicks.
It’s not unusual for MAGA influencers to fight each other online over who is the least America-loving, who’s the most traitorous, or who has the morally correct position on any trending topic on any given day. In fact, it’s good for brand consistency and viewer engagement.
But even if this is an everyday kind of dynamic, Kirk’s death is not an everyday kind of event, and the abrupt return to squabbling for clout has implicated both the fallout and the narrative around his killing. Whether it is with respect to Kimmel’s indefinite suspension or — more conspiratorially — the basic facts around Kirk’s killing, the contrarian voices within the right have emerged much faster than anyone could have anticipated. Whatever is in the store for the future will be messy.
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