A clear divide has opened up inside President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement following the US military’s recent strikes on Iran. Many conservatives online have been sharing the words of one well-known figure to voice their worries: the late activist Charlie Kirk.
Rob Smith, an Iraq War veteran and conservative commentator, dug up an old X poll Kirk posted last June asking his followers if the US should get involved in “Israel’s war with Iran” (90% said no). Former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene reshared a clip of Kirk — watched 2.7 million times — where he called regime change in Iran “pathologically insane.” The conservative comedy duo the Hodgetwins shared a clip with their 3.5 million followers of Vice President JD Vance saying Kirk had convinced Trump to stay out of deeper conflict with Iran last year.
Right-wing commentator Calvin Robinson posted the same video and wrote: “God bless Charlie Kirk. We are worse off without him.”
But not everyone in Trump’s camp is happy about this. Trump supporter Laura Loomer, who said she spoke to the president after the strikes, pushed back on social media. She said people who oppose Trump’s support for Israel “never miss a beat exploiting his death to say our entire foreign policy has to be dictated by the opinions of Charlie Kirk, who is dead.”
“Of course it’s sad, but Charlie Kirk was wrong about a lot,” she added. “Just like he was right about a lot.”
This public argument shows how confused many of Trump’s biggest online supporters are — trying to square his repeated promises to keep the US out of foreign wars with his recent military actions in Venezuela and Iran.
It also shows how much influence Kirk still has, even six months after he was shot and killed at an event on a Utah college campus. Statues in his honor have been proposed at universities in Minnesota and Florida. His face has shown up in Republican campaign ads, and a banner with his image now hangs on the US Department of Education building.
As the founder of Turning Point USA, a group focused on getting young conservatives involved in politics — Kirk had long been a vocal critic of military action overseas. Many of his supporters are skeptical of foreign wars, and Kirk himself grew up watching the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan unfold after the September 11 attacks.
Before he died in September, he had repeatedly warned against going to war with Iran. He called the desire to fight Iran “a weird fanatical obsession” in the Republican Party and called out Senator Lindsey Graham and former national security adviser John Bolton for pushing for war. He warned that removing Iran’s Supreme Leader could cause a “bloody civil war,” create a massive refugee crisis, and drag the US into another long and expensive Middle East conflict.
“We have seen this play before,” he said in June. “With regime change, you have no idea how this is going to work out.”
Now, with Iran’s Supreme Leader dead, American soldiers killed, and Graham and Bolton applauding Trump’s actions, clips of Kirk’s warnings are spreading widely online — shared by both Trump’s critics and members of his own base.
That said, Kirk’s full views on Iran were more nuanced than the clips suggest. When Trump struck Iran last year, Kirk wrote that Tehran gave the president “no choice” and praised the operation. He told his podcast listeners, “I support President Trump. … In a situation like this, I support my friend. And he’s had my back, and I have his.” He later had Vice President Vance on his show to explain the decision to strike.
Since the new strikes, some of Kirk’s closest allies have watched uncomfortably as different factions within the conservative movement try to claim his legacy. Blake Neff, a longtime producer of the Charlie Kirk Show — which has continued after Kirk’s death — acknowledged on Saturday’s broadcast the videos circulating all over social media.
“I know people, all of us, are feeling the lack of Charlie in a moment like this, because he was a natural leader of the movement,” Neff said.
The two-hour episode showed the growing tension. The hosts tried to address concerns from younger listeners about the Iran strike, while also stressing that Kirk was always loyal to Trump. Neff said that even if Kirk had doubts before a military action, afterward he would “look for the bright side of things” and “pray for our success once that began.”
“It’s really irritating for me to see so many people on social media have the opposite reaction,” said Turning Point USA chief of staff Mikey McCoy, “to use his voice to actually cause chaos, to actually cause fear of this situation, to actually cause hatred of President Trump in this whole ordeal, when actually that’s not what he would want.”
Still, some of Kirk’s friends are aware of the real political risk here. Jack Posobiec, a longtime friend of Kirk’s, noted that Kirk had often warned the White House about how young voters might react if the US got pulled back into Middle Eastern conflicts.
“Last year, Charlie Kirk told us all that younger generation of Americans are far more interested in domestic policy than pursuing international conflicts,” Posobiec wrote on X, “and we can’t forget that in a midterm year.”
