FILE PHOTO: Founder and president of Turning Point USA Charlie Kirk speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at National Harbor in Oxon Hill, Maryland, U.S., February 28, 2019. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque/File Photo/File Photo
The New Republic’s Jim Geraghty thinks MAGA has gone completely off the deep end with its latest conspiracy theory: that Charlie Kirk is not really dead, placing him alongside figures like Elvis Presley and Tupac Shakur in the pantheon of “still alive” myths.
Writing Monday, Geraghty said the conspiracy is coming from people known for insisting they are “just asking questions,” and added, “I wish I were making that up, but I am not.”
The Manhattan Institute released a report dividing the Republican Party into two groups, a small, "but still sizable faction" with policy beliefs that aren't all that conservative. In fact, they're actually progressive on multiple issues. The report revealed that a "significant" amount of those now believe that the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Towers were an "inside job," the moon landing was fake, and stories of the Holocaust are "exaggerated" or never happened.
Far-right commentator Tim Pool welcomed "controversy-courting gadfly" Milo Yiannopoulos on the show where he questioned if Kirk's assassination was real.
“The astronomically inadequate explanations given, in my view, for the actions before, at, and after Charlie’s death and the behavior afterwards from both the federal government and Turning Point executives — you think nothing of his deeply, deeply sinister wife?" he continued.
Former Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.), who was recently pardoned by President Donald Trump, was also on the show, and pressed Yiannopoulos on how Kirk's wife was "sinister."
"Have you seen the difference in the size of her hands with Charlie’s in their wedding pictures, and then compared it to him in his casket?" Yiannopoulos asked.
"Are you saying she’s a man?" Santos questioned.
"No, no. I'm saying that wasn't Charlie in there," Yiannopoulos claimed.
He went on to ask whether Kirk's body was somehow "lost" or "vanishingly slight."
Geraghty compared it to the conspiracy theories that question whether former President John F. Kennedy actually survived the Dallas shooting in 1963.
The columnist also cited a glowing Wall Street Journal profile on Pool from July in which they painted the podcaster, his guests "and those like him, represent the new wave of right-of-center voices. They’re the wise minds and leaders on the rise, shaping the discourse and guiding the national conversation."
Geraghty explained, "Poll results like that suggest that Trump has succeeded in attracting two sizable and significant groups to his political coalition: disaffected Democrats who rarely agree with the Republican Party on policy but like Trump’s personal style, and lunatics who doubt that the Holocaust or moon landing happened or that al-Qaeda is responsible for the 9/11 attacks."