Charlie Kirk was worried. Privately, in conversations and in a letter he sent to Prime Minister Netanyahu roughly five months before he was killed, Kirk outlined what he saw coming: a younger generation of America First conservatives being systematically turned against Israel, and Israel doing almost nothing to stop it.
Tragically, Kirk was murdered and did not live to see how bad it would get. Last week, Israel365 Action convened a webinar to take stock of where things stand. The panel included Pastor Rob McCoy, co-founder of TPUSA Faith and Kirk’s own pastor; Josh Hammer, senior editor-at-large at Newsweek and author of Israel and Civilization; and Dr. David Wurmser, who served in multiple US administrations as a senior Middle East advisor. Rabbi Pesach Wolicki, Executive Director of Israel365 Action, moderated.
What followed was one of the more honest reckonings with the question hovering over pro-Israel circles for two years now.
The Numbers
Josh Hammer didn’t come to the conversation to tell people what they wanted to hear. He cited a recent New York Times/CNN poll: 75% of Republicans over 45 approve of the Iran war. Among Republicans under 45, that number collapses to 39%. 70% of young Republicans want a new direction from Trump on Israel, and only 20% say to follow his lead.
“We have our work cut out for us,” Hammer said. “I’m not trying to put an overly rosy picture on this.”
But the polling is not uniformly bad. At Turning Point USA’s December conference in Phoenix, 87% of the tens of thousands of attendees said Israel is either America’s greatest ally or one of its most important allies, and ranked Islamist extremism as America’s top threat. That is a far cry from the anti-Israel drift that Tucker Carlson and his crowd represent, and it matters that this was a Turning Point crowd, not a legacy conservative audience.
The event was held the day after Thomas Massey lost his Republican primary in Kentucky. The isolationist podcast class spent months building Massey up as their champion. He was their proof that MAGA could be pulled away from Trump’s pro-Israel foreign policy toward a harder-edged America-only isolationism. They put their credibility behind him and made the race a test of their influence. They lost that test.
What “America First” Actually Demands
Hammer is not a neoconservative. He rejects Bush-era democracy promotion as hubristic and unconservative, and he said so directly. America should not go abroad looking for monsters to destroy. But that is a completely different question from whether Israel is a useful ally.
Hammer defines an ally this way: “If a country, when acting to protect its own national interest, ends up advancing American interests as a secondary or tertiary effect, that’s an ally.”
Israel fits that definition better than any country in the world. In 2024, Israel took out Fuad Shakur and Ibrahim Akil, the masterminds of the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing and the simultaneous US Embassy bombing. Both men carried $5-7 million US State Department bounties on their heads for more than four decades. Nobody collected. Until Israel did – not as a favor to Washington, but as part of its own war. That is what an ally looks like.
This is the argument Hammer brings to skeptical young conservatives. Strip out the idealism. Forget the moral case, the biblical case, the civilizational case. Look at cold national interest. Israel is clearly America’s most valuable ally.
The Massey Defeat
McCoy put it simply: “We’re done with that. You don’t get to hate Jews in America. It just doesn’t work that way.”
Wurmser broke down what the Kentucky result actually means. The isolationist faction, from Tucker Carlson to Joe Kent and others, argued for months that they were the real core of MAGA, and that if Trump moved against them they would go their own way and take the movement with them. Kentucky settled that question. Trump is the definition of MAGA. There is no alternative base of support that exists independent of him, and the isolationists do not have one.
But within the data, Wurmser flagged a real problem. Voters between 25 and 45 broke for Massey. The youngest cohort, 15 to 25, trended back toward Trump. “The worst group was the 25 to 36 group,” Wurmser said. That generational gap does not disappear because Massey lost his seat.
The Deeper Diagnosis
Wurmser refused to treat the erosion of Israel support among younger Americans as primarily an Israel problem. When his wife taught at the Naval Academy in the 1990s, cadets came to her instead of their American professors specifically because she was Israeli-born. They wanted to know why America should be engaged in the world at all, because their American professors were teaching them why it shouldn’t.
“These were cadets in the Naval Academy in the nineties,” Wurmser said. “You can only imagine what’s being taught at Harvard, Yale, Princeton.”
Young Americans are not given an inspiring vision of what America is or why it matters. The collapse in support for Israel is a symptom of that larger failure. A generation with no understanding of what western civilization built, or what threatens it, is easy to turn against Israel. Israel cannot fix that problem. Only America can.
Wurmser also made the longer historical argument: Jewish civilization has consistently thrived wherever freedom has thrived, from Cyrus’s Persia to Renaissance Venice to the United States. This is not coincidence. Jewish flourishing and the health of free societies track each other across millennia. Which means anyone who genuinely cares about Israel’s survival has a stake in American civilizational strength, and anyone in the America First movement who thinks weakening that civilizational inheritance is somehow conservative is confused about what he is trying to conserve.
Kirk’s e
Wolicki reflected on the project Kirk left behind. The letter to Netanyahu was detailed: Israel was losing the information war, lies spread faster than the truth, and specific structural changes were needed to fight back in real time. When the Prime Minister’s office didn’t move on the recommendations, Kirk began working directly with Israel365 to implement them himself.
The result is the Israel Truth Network, a rapid-response site that publishes documented fact sheets rebutting whatever lie about Israel is dominating the news cycle, getting accurate information into the hands of journalists and influencers fast.
Kirk understood something that a lot of pro-Israel advocacy misses. Moral appeals to people who have already been radicalized don’t work. What works is showing younger conservatives that supporting Israel is not a contradiction of their worldview, but rather an expression of it.
The challenges are real, and nobody on this panel pretended otherwise. But Massey lost, the youngest voters are trending back toward Trump, and the argument for Israel on purely American national interest grounds is stronger than it has ever been. The battle for the America First movement is not yet lost.
Israel365 Action hosts regular briefings on Israel and American politics. Sign up for the Israel Truth Network newsletter at theIsraelTruthNetwork.org.
