One year after Charlie Kirk’s murder, Rabbi Pesach Wolicki remembers the man who inspired Israel365’s rapid-response network, and the last conversation they had.
Interview by Rabbi Elie Mischel
One year ago this Thursday, on September 10, 2025, Charlie Kirk was shot and killed while taking questions from students on a college campus in Utah. He was 31 years old, the founder of Turning Point USA, and the most influential young conservative in America. He was also, in an era when support for Israel among young conservatives was collapsing, one of Israel’s most consistent and most effective defenders.
Rabbi Pesach Wolicki, the lead anchor of Israel365 News, knew that side of Charlie Kirk well. The two men first met over a Shabbat dinner in Phoenix in December 2023, and over the following two years Rabbi Wolicki served as a resource and sounding board for Charlie on Israel. Their last conversation took place the night before the murder: a working session preparing Charlie for the questions about Israel he knew were coming on the first stop of his campus tour.
Israel365’s connection to Charlie runs deeper than that. The Israel Truth Network, the rapid-response project Israel365 launched to fight the daily flood of lies about Israel, was Charlie’s idea. He conceived it, he named it, and he pushed for it. Tragically, he did not live to see it go live.
On the first anniversary of his murder, I spoke with Rabbi Wolicki about the Charlie Kirk he knew. What did Charlie understand about the Jewish people and the land of Israel that so many of his political allies do not? How did he read the antisemitism rising inside his own movement? And what did he say in that last conversation that Rabbi Wolicki has not stopped thinking about since?
Elie Mischel: How did you and Charlie first come into contact?
Pesach Wolicki: You and I met him together, actually. It was a small Shabbat dinner, the Jewish Sabbath meal, at AmericaFest in Phoenix in December of 2023. There were only a few Jews in the room, the two of us and a handful of others we knew. Somebody in our group mentioned to the Turning Point office that we were having this dinner, and Charlie showed up. He sat down with us, and we talked.
The main topic we talked about was Shabbat. Charlie said at the time that he was planning to write a book about Shabbat and how it had transformed his life, and that was the subject of our conversation. That really struck me. Here was someone so political, such a public figure, and the book he wanted to write was about the power of Shabbat. It made a very big impression on me.
We didn’t exactly stay in touch after that. He knew who I was, and I of course knew him. But to a certain extent we moved in the same circles. I got involved in that movement, and I briefly had a show on the same network he was on, so I was definitely in his orbit.
You met with Charlie shortly before he was murdered. What was that meeting about, and what did he say that you’re still thinking about a year later?
I met with Charlie the night before he was murdered. That meeting was about Israel. All of my conversations with him were about Israel. Charlie and I were not personal friends in that sense. We knew each other, and we were definitely friendly, but it was very much a professional relationship. I served as a resource for him on Israel, a sounding board. I was someone in Israel who he knew he could trust and who understood his political positions. That was the basis of our relationship, that he could consult with me on the issues of the day, the headlines, whatever was going on regarding Israel.
Charlie was asked a lot of questions about Israel on these college campuses. His people told me that somewhere between 40% and 50% of all the questions he got asked on campus were about Israel, which was not something he liked. He wanted to be talking about America. But that was the way it was.
So he scheduled this Zoom call the night before his first stop on what was supposed to be a campus tour. He knew he was going to get asked a lot of questions about Israel, and he wanted the meeting scheduled very close to that first date, because in the middle of the war the headlines about Israel move very quickly, and he wanted to make sure he had the most up-to-date answers. His people provided me with about 20 different questions, the ones he was asked most frequently, and we talked through them. I was given them in advance, and I prepared information and ideas about how to address those issues. It was very much a working meeting.
At the end of the meeting, he made something very clear. Charlie had famously said that Islam is not compatible with Western civilization, and he very much saw Islam as the greatest threat to American society. At the end of our conversation, he said that the four pillars of Western civilization were the United States, Israel, Jews, and Christians.
That really reflected an understanding of what this is all about. Islam and the Marxist left both seek to take down Western civilization, and their enemies are Jews and Christians, the United States and Israel. That alliance is based on shared heritage, shared values, a shared biblical worldview. It impressed me. Charlie had a way of putting things concisely, in a single memorable phrase, and the four pillars was one of his sharpest observations. He had captured in one line what most people can’t explain in an hour.
Did Charlie see the antisemitism problem coming inside his own movement?
Charlie saw the antisemitism in the MAGA movement, but I would say this was an area where he had some blind spots. Let me explain what I mean.
Charlie’s number one concern was the well-being of young Americans and the future of America. That’s the big picture. In the more pragmatic sense, his number one concern was the MAGA coalition. That coalition was made up of a very disparate group of people. You have all sorts of factions in it with significant ideological differences between them, united on certain common principles. What Charlie worried about every day was holding that coalition together. He understood how fragile it was.
That was his overarching concern. Add to it the fact that Charlie built his career by having conversations, by going onto campuses and talking with people. That’s how it all started, and he never stopped doing it, even as he built a huge public presence and a huge organization around himself. He believed in the open marketplace of ideas and in open debate. Put those two things together, his concern for the MAGA coalition and his unequivocal belief that all opinions should be heard, and I think together they produced a blind spot, a tolerance for some antisemitism in the movement.
On the one hand, he wanted to keep the coalition together, and he was therefore loath to push people aside. He was very averse to saying that a certain group is not welcome in the movement, because he always tended toward keeping the coalition together. At the same time, because he had this unequivocal belief in the open marketplace of ideas, and therefore that every opinion should be heard, I think he sometimes extended that to opinions that some of us would say shouldn’t be heard.
So I think there was a bit of a blind spot. At the same time, he was very vocal about the dangers of antisemitism and Jew hatred, and he understood how dangerous it was. But that doesn’t mean he always saw it clearly.
A lot of young conservatives are turning against Israel. Charlie went the other way. Why?
Charlie resisted the trend toward being anti-Israel for reasons that are all closely related.
First and foremost, Charlie was a Bible-believing evangelical Christian, and he understood the biblical significance of the nation of Israel’s return to the land of Israel. He saw it for what it is. He did not believe in replacement theology. He saw the Jewish people’s return as a fulfillment of biblical prophecy, and he believed that the Bible itself obligates Christians to stand with the nation of Israel.
Second, as I said earlier, he had an acute understanding of the fact that the enemies of Israel are the enemies of America and the enemies of Western civilization, and that Israel is on the front lines of that battle, the tip of the spear. He was acutely aware of that.
The third component is Charlie’s humility, in a very specific way. Very often, when people develop this big persona and they have a big platform and everyone is listening to them, they start to believe they have all the answers. Charlie did not. Charlie was always learning and seeking advice from people older than him. He had a number of people in his life who were mentors to him in different ways, spiritual mentors and mentors on different issues. He was constantly reading and searching for more information from those older than him.
That humility and that constant search for truth led him away from the lies about Israel. He had a clearer understanding of the realities because he was constantly in learning mode, and because of his willingness, his desire, to take guidance from those who were older than him. All of those things together are why Charlie never went down the anti-Israel road.
Israel365 runs a rapid-response site called the Israel Truth Network. Charlie’s fingerprints are on it. What’s the backstory?
The Israel Truth Network was really Charlie’s idea, start to finish.
Charlie was very frustrated, like many people are, with Israel’s failure at telling its own story in the media. As someone with a very big media presence who was defending Israel regularly, he was particularly frustrated. He also had his finger on the pulse of the younger generation and of the conservative political movement in America, where there was a lot of anti-Israel sentiment building, and he saw it.
So he wrote a letter to Prime Minister Netanyahu, an eight-page letter, in which he laid out many of the things Israel is doing wrong and made suggestions about how Israel could improve its ability to tell its story. One of the centerpiece suggestions of that letter was what he called the Israel Truth Network. He came up with the name.
What he envisioned was a rapid-response network that would answer whatever lies were being spread about Israel on any given day, along with a website that would hold background information and archives, all of it user-friendly, and getting that information into the hands of influential people so that the lies could be combated more quickly and more effectively.
His hope was that the Israeli government would set it up. He sent the letter to Prime Minister Netanyahu, and it didn’t really go anywhere. Then we started having conversations about building it out ourselves, with his guidance. That was a project we had already started before he was killed. It didn’t launch until after the murder. But Charlie was not just an inspiration for it. He was someone who really pushed for this idea to come to fruition. I’m proud that we’ve been able to put it together and launch it.
The Israel Truth Network, the project Charlie Kirk envisioned and named, is live. Visit www.theisraeltruthnetwork.org for rapid responses to the lies told about Israel, along with background material and archives you can use and share.
