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Charlie Kirk is the Founder and President of Turning Point USA, the largest and fastest growing conservative youth activist organization in the country with over 250,000 student members, over 150 full-time staff, and a presence on over 2,000 high school and college campuses nationwide. Charlie is also the Chairman of Students for Trump, which aims to activate one million new college voters on campuses in battleground states in the lead up to the 2020 presidential election. His social media reaches over 100 million people per month and according to Axios, he is one of the "top 10 most engaged" Twitter handles in the world. He is also the host of “The Charlie Kirk Show,” which regularly ranks among the top news shows on Apple podcast charts.
Charlie Kirk and Josh Hammer Reflect on High-Profile Israel Debate at Turning Point USA Summit
Charlie Kirk and Josh Hammer discuss the packed-room Israel debate at the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit that featured Hammer facing off against Dave Smith. The debate explored America First foreign policy, U.S.-Israel relations, and the Trump doctrine while drawing standing-room-only crowds on a typically quiet Sunday closing session. Hammer argues that nationalist realist foreign policy represents a third way between neoconservatism and isolationism, while both debaters found common ground on phasing out aid to Israel and condemning antisemitism. Kirk and Hammer break down the viral moments, points of agreement, and what the debate revealed about how younger generations view American involvement in the Middle East.
Charlie Kirk opens by reflecting on an extraordinary moment at the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit—a Sunday closing session that defied all expectations. Typically, Sunday sessions see attendance drop to about one-third capacity as attendees fly home after a long weekend. However, the Israel debate between Josh Hammer and Dave Smith packed the room to capacity, marking one of the most attended closing sessions in summit history outside of appearances by President Trump.
Kirk invites Hammer back on The Charlie Kirk Show to unpack the debate, offer additional context, and expand on points that time constraints prevented during the live event. The conversation reveals not just the substance of the debate itself, but what it signals about the state of foreign policy discussions within the America First movement.
The Trump Doctrine: A Third Way Forward
Hammer emphasizes that one of his primary objectives during the debate was to clarify what the Trump doctrine of foreign policy actually represents. He explains that MAGA and America First do not mean what libertarian isolationists believe they should mean. Instead, the Trump doctrine embodies nationalist realist foreign policy—a third way between two equally problematic extremes.
"The Trump doctrine of foreign policy is a nationalist realist foreign policy. It is a third wave form policy between the equally absurd extremes of neoconservatism on the one end and isolationism on the other end," Hammer states. This framing became a central theme throughout the debate, repeated deliberately to ensure the audience understood the distinction.
Hammer points to Operation Midnight Hammer and Trump's 12-day war against Iran as the perfect embodiment of this doctrine in action. The surgical strikes demonstrated how American military force can be used effectively without nation-building, regime change, or extended occupation. For younger millennials and Gen Z who grew up witnessing the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, this represents a potential inflection point in how they view American military engagement overseas.
Points of Agreement
Despite the heated nature of the debate, Kirk highlights five key areas where Hammer and Smith found common ground:
Both agreed on implementing a plan to wind down U.S. aid to Israel, though they disagreed on the timeline
Both affirmed that every human is made in the image of God and civilian casualties should not be trivialized
Both condemned the October 7th attacks as awful and terrible, deserving more emphasis in public discourse
Both rejected antisemitism and Jew-hatred as having any place in legitimate political discussion
Both demonstrated that open debate is preferable to censorship and name-calling
Kirk makes a point of emphasizing the importance of the fourth agreement, addressing what he describes as "disgusting stuff online." He tells the audience directly: "Don't get yourself involved in that. I'm telling you, it will rot your brain. It's bad for your soul. It's bad. It's evil. I think it's demonic."
Hammer responds by praising Kirk's consistent defense of the Jewish people throughout his career, noting the absurdity of situations where Kirk, a young evangelical Christian, finds himself having to defend the Talmud to online conspiracy theorists on college campuses.
The Case for Phasing Out Aid to Israel
One of the most substantive areas of agreement between the debaters concerns U.S. aid to Israel. Hammer explains that he has been criticizing this arrangement for a decade, arguing it ultimately harms both countries.
From the American perspective, the annual $3.8 billion aid package functions as crony capitalism within the military-industrial complex that President Dwight Eisenhower warned about in his farewell address. The arrangement essentially subsidizes major defense contractors like Boeing and Northrop Grumman—companies that, in Hammer's view, don't need additional taxpayer money flowing into their coffers.
From Israel's perspective, reliance on foreign aid creates vulnerability to political pressure. The more dependent Israel becomes on American aid, the more leverage other countries have to threaten aid cuts as a form of coercion. Hammer points to the Biden administration's repeated attempts to use aid as leverage after October 7th as a prime example of this dynamic in action.
Hammer connects this to the concept of Zionism itself, which he defines as "the notion rooted in the book of Genesis that the Jewish people have a God-given ancestral biblical right to their homeland." If that premise is accepted, he argues, it follows that the Jewish people should be self-determining and not dependent on foreign support.
However, Hammer makes clear that timing matters. He would not advocate cutting aid during an active seven-front war like Israel has faced since October 7th, but believes that in the mid-to-long term, phasing out the aid would serve both countries' interests.
Regarding AIPAC, Hammer challenges the perception that the organization wields enormous power. He points to their failure to stop Barack Obama's Iran nuclear deal in 2015—their top priority of the decade—as evidence that they are not the boogeyman many portray them to be. Nonetheless, he criticizes the organization for existing primarily to secure annual aid appropriations that he believes ultimately undermine both American and Israeli interests.
Genesis 1:27 and the Foundation of Western Morality
Hammer takes time to elaborate on the theological and philosophical importance of Genesis 1:27—the verse declaring that humans are created in God's image. He argues this concept represents the foundational ethical imperative of all Western civilization.
In his book "Israel and Civilization," Hammer traces how this biblical concept flows through the American founding documents and civil rights movements. Thomas Jefferson's declaration that "all men are created equal" has its roots in Genesis 1:27. The Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech in Washington, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 all derive their moral authority from this Hebrew Bible principle.
Hammer applies this principle consistently across conflicts, emphasizing concern for human dignity whether discussing Gaza, the Yemeni civil war, Syria, or Boko Haram in Nigeria. He notes with some irony that many who express intense concern about civilian casualties in Gaza remain conspicuously silent about humanitarian disasters elsewhere in the world.
Israel's Humanitarian Measures in Gaza
When asked what points he wished he could have expanded on during the debate, Hammer immediately points to the proactive humanitarian measures the Israeli military takes to prevent civilian casualties in Gaza. This is an area where time constraints prevented him from fully developing his argument.
Hammer explains that the IDF has implemented extraordinary protocols dating back at least to the 2014 Gaza conflict, possibly as early as 2012. These measures include:
Dropping leaflets from the sky onto buildings warning of impending military operations
Individually calling apartment buildings, stores, and houses to provide advance warning
Giving civilians 30 minutes to several hours to evacuate before operations begin
Targeting only locations confirmed to house Hamas facilities, often embedded in mosques or residential areas
Hammer cites data from John Spencer, the head of urban warfare studies at West Point, showing Israel achieved a civilian-to-combatant death ratio of 1 to 1.5 in Gaza—the lowest in the entire history of recorded urban warfare. This makes the IDF's Gaza operations the most humane urban military campaign ever conducted.
"In many ways, Israel is the IDF along with the US Army is the most moral warfighting machine in the modern history of the world," Hammer states. He describes accusations of indiscriminate slaughter as a modern manifestation of ancient blood libel against Jews.
Some U.S. military veterans have reportedly expressed surprise at how far Israel goes to prevent civilian casualties, with protocols that exceed even American standards. Hammer suggests that while the Obama administration imposed overly restrictive rules of engagement on U.S. forces, Israel's self-imposed restrictions go even further—perhaps, he suggests, sometimes too far in trying to appease critics who will never be satisfied.
Why Platform This Debate?
Kirk addresses criticism he received for hosting the debate in the first place. Some questioned why he would platform Dave Smith's perspective on Israel. Kirk defends the decision by arguing that open debate strengthens rather than weakens the movement.
Hammer points out that this was actually his second debate with Smith in just six months, having previously faced off at Princeton University as part of the Steamboat Institute's Campus Liberty Tour. He acknowledges that Smith has a significant platform and that many younger people take his views seriously, particularly on foreign policy matters.
"Dave Smith, for better or for worse, your mileage may vary. I obviously am not a fan to put it mildly of what the guy says. I think a lot of it is egregiously wrong to the point at times of just being utterly offensively wrong," Hammer admits. "But he has a platform and people especially a lot of younger people really really really tend to glom on to what he says."
Hammer draws a distinction between debating legitimate substantive issues—the nature of U.S.-Israel relations, appropriate levels of engagement, foreign aid policy—and debating premises he considers beyond the pale, such as whether Israel is committing genocide or operates as an apartheid state. The debate stayed within bounds of legitimate policy discussion rather than crossing into fundamental moral questions about Israel's right to exist or defend itself.
What Young People Can Learn
In closing, Kirk asks Hammer what takeaway young people should draw from the debate and what he learned about better framing these issues for younger audiences.
Hammer acknowledges that millennials and Gen Z came of age during or immediately after the failed regime change operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their skepticism toward U.S. military involvement overseas is both understandable and justified given that context.
However, he sees Operation Midnight Hammer—Trump's 12-day war involving 37-hour B-2 bomber runs into Iran—as a potential turning point. Combined with Trump's first-term eliminations of Qasem Soleimani and ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, these operations demonstrate what surgical, nationalist-realist military action looks like in practice.
"I think that Donald Trump has highlighted for young people for maybe the first time in their lives what a truly surgical strike, nationalist realists, bomb the crap out of our enemies who want to kill us and then get the heck out. What that kind of foreign policy can actually look like," Hammer explains.
He emphasizes that the Iran strikes would not have been possible without Israel's prior neutralization of Iranian air defenses and missile launchers—an example of strategic cooperation that serves American interests without requiring nation-building or extended occupation.
Hammer concludes by praising Trump for fulfilling multiple campaign promises with a single operation: setting back Iran's nuclear ambitions by many years while avoiding war and American casualties. This, he argues, is the Trump doctrine in action—and exactly what America First foreign policy should look like.
