Following the fatal shooting of Turning Point USA co-founder and conservative commentator Charlie Kirk, social media users began to share the claim that he had said Jewish money had ruined U.S. culture.
For example, a post on Instagram shared a meme by Occupy Democrats, making this claim among other purported statements by Kirk (archived):
The claim also appeared on X, garnering 5.2 million views. Further, Snopes readers searched the website and wrote emails to inquire about the veracity of the rumor.
The claim was true. While it was a paraphrase of things Kirk said publicly rather than a direct quote, he did indeed suggest that Jewish money was undermining U.S. values.
Snopes reviewed clips of Kirk's podcast, "The Charlie Kirk Show," dating from fall 2023, weeks after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, in which he made these comments.
The first clip, published Oct. 26, 2023, showed Kirk saying "Jewish donors, they have a lot of explaining to do":
Jewish donors have been the No. 1 funding mechanism of radical open-border, neoliberal, quasi-Marxist policies, cultural institutions and nonprofits. This is a beast created by secular Jews and now they're coming for Jews, and they're like, "What on Earth happened?"
And it's not just the colleges. It's the nonprofits, it's the movies, it's Hollywood, it's all of it.
Later, on Nov. 7, 2023, Kirk repeated the same idea on his show:
Jews have been some of the largest funders of cultural Marxist ideas and supporters of those ideas over the last 30 or 40 years.
[…]
Until you cleanse that ideology from the hierarchy in the academic elite of the West, there will not be a safe future. I'm not going to say Israel won't exist, but Israel will be in jeopardy as long as the Western children, children of the West, are being taught, with primarily Jewish dollars, subsidizing it, to view everything through oppressor oppressed dynamic. Until you shed that ideology, you will not be able to build the case for Israel, because they view Israel as an oppressor.
"Cultural Marxism" has long been an antisemitic trope used by white evangelicals and Christian nationalists. The implication is that this ideology is a Jewish conspiracy designed to undermine U.S. Christian values. Further, many evangelicals in the U.S. support Israel because of the theological belief that Jews must own the land of Israel in order to facilitate the second coming of Jesus Christ.
We've also looked into claims that Kirk once said the U.S. having some gun deaths "is worth it" to have the Second Amendment and that he called empathy a "made-up, new age" word.