By David Harsanyi

Copyright nypost

On Wednesday night, a Turning Point USA event at Virginia Tech honoring the late Charlie Kirk took an ugly turn.

A male student stood up to ask popular podcaster Megyn Kelly if she was concerned about the growing, unseemly influence of “rich billionaire Jews” on American politics.

“Did you say, ‘rich billionaire Jews’?” Kelly incredulously responded.

“Yes,” the questioner said, as if this was a completely normal topic to bring up.

It’s just one more example of the abnormal fixation younger Americans have on Israel and Jews.

The young man seemed to be allied with the progressive left, which has long flirted with this kind of rhetoric.

But similar comments are increasingly spreading on the right, as well — even in the glare of the public spotlight.

Just the other day, disgraced former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who has developed a creepy monomaniacal obsession with Jews, used Kirk’s otherwise inspiring memorial in Arizona to suggest that “a bunch of guys sitting around eating hummus” in Jerusalem had something to do with silencing the late TPUSA leader.

The statement seemed tailor-made to create division between Jews and Christians.

Yet no one who participated in Kirk’s funeral tribute condemned our modern-day Charles Coughlin — and the popular Carlson will be headlining future events for TPUSA.

Though facts rarely dissuade conspiracy theorists, it’s objectively false to contend that Jewish people have an outsized influence on the Trump administration.

Here’s the list of President Donald Trump’s top 12 donors in 2024, according to Forbes : Timothy Mellon, Linda McMahon, Diane Hendricks, Miriam Adelson, Kelcy Warren, Timothy Dunn, Richard Uihlein, Jeff Sprecher and Kelly Loeffler, Phil Ruffin, Jimmy John Liautaud, Antonio Gracias, and Douglas Leone.

Only one of those billionaire donors is Jewish. There were, as far as I can tell, four other Jewish donors in the top 25.

Yet you may notice that paranoid Israel-haters on the right are fixated on billionaires like Larry Ellison and Bill Ackman, a longtime Democrat who defected to Republicans in part because of the left’s embrace of Hamas apologists — and not Elon Musk or Vivek Ramaswamy or Peter Thiel or many others.

Carlson, for instance, blamed Fox News personality and radio host Mark Levin for convincing Trump to bomb Iranian nuclear sites.

Indeed, the podcaster assured his credulous audience that Levin was leading the United States into World War III at the behest of foreigners.

We expect this kind of aspersion from the progressive left, not alleged conservatives.

One can say many things about Donald Trump, but the notion that his positions can be bought by campaign funds stretches credulity.

Besides, no one needs to buy Trump’s support for Israel, considering he’s been an on-the-record vocal champion of the Jewish state for nearly 40 years.

When Trump this week met on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly with French president Emmanuel Macron — who had just rewarded Hamas with unilateral recognition of an imaginary Palestinian state — he made his position known.

“Well, I have to say that I’m on the side of Israel,” Trump said. “I’ve been on the side of Israel really my whole life.”

It is difficult to argue that any president has been a better friend.

Trump was offering pro-Israel statements years before he was in political office; years before he had any donors; and years before Benjamin Netanyahu, the boogeyman of Jew-baiters, was Israel’s prime minister.

It is also objectively false that American Jews are an ideological monolith.

I’ve spent 20 years publicly disagreeing with numerous Jewish American organizations and individuals, and I can assure you we don’t have secret meetings to plot control of the world.

I’ve never met a Jewish billionaire.

Jews, though, are the only ethnic group that is collectively smeared as Fifth Columnists for advocating for causes they believe in.

One of the popular issues among many American Jews is championing the long-standing US allyship with Israel — a wholly moral, constructive and defensible position that many individuals and groups openly advocate.

The insinuation that it’s nefarious to do so is only peddled by bigots unwilling or unable to debate the issue in good faith.

It’s clear that the stigma associated with spreading ugly tropes about Jews is disappearing. It’s been that way in the conspiratorial swamp of social media and podcasting for a while.

Now it is being normalized in the real world.

David Harsanyi is a senior writer at the Washington Examiner. X: @davidharsanyi