JP Sears Mocked Erika Kirk Then Blamed Zionists for It

JP Sears posted a January 2026 sketch mocking Erika Kirk, then answered the backlash by offering zero apologies and blaming Zionists. Five days after the bit hit, the Awaken With JP host said the people who hated it were Israel First conservatives. He thanked Candace Owens for sharing it.

Charlie Kirk, 31, had been shot in the neck on Sept. 10, 2025, at Utah Valley University. His widow took over Turning Point USA. Sears treated her grief, and a leaked staff call, as comedy. When other conservatives did not laugh, he did not retrace the joke. He renamed the audience.

A YouTube Sketch Aimed at Erika Kirk

The upload, titled Employees on Leaked Erika Kirk Call, went up on Jan. 31, 2026. Sears plays Turning Point staffers waiting for a Zoom with “Erica,” then cuts to a bright, informal host who is not crying.

He posted the same bit on X as “Erika Kirk’s leaked call, from an employee’s perspective.” The camera stays with the workers. They expect tears. They get thumbs-up, merch talk, and a tone they keep comparing with Charlie’s.

Erika Kirk's leaked call, from an employee's perspective… pic.twitter.com/xWw5zIei6b

— JP Sears (@AwakenWithJP) January 31, 2026

The premise is that a private staff call leaked, and that the new CEO sounded like a brand manager instead of a widow. Sears does not show the real audio. He writes the reaction around it, then sells the reaction as the reveal.

Owens, who worked in communications at Turning Point from 2017 to 2019, had already spent months tying Kirk’s killing to Israel, to people inside the group, and to Erika Kirk. Sears thanked her for retweeting the sketch. The comedy clip sat down in a lane she had already paved.

Zero Apologies and a Zionist Common Denominator

On Feb. 5, 2026, Sears answered the pile-on with a follow-up that promised no walk-back. He wrote that he had been crucified on X for the leaked-call sketch and that he would formally offer zero apologies.

He went through comments. He said the widow’s fame-seeking looked weird, and that saying so was calling balls and strikes. Then he told viewers what he saw in “the majority” of the people who hated the bit.

Here’s what I see as a common denominator within the majority of them. They’re conservatives in what we might call Israel First conservatives, relative to America First conservatives, or Zionists, is another way to say this.

JP Sears, Awaken With JP, Feb. 5, 2026 video

He used Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon as the example, calling Dillon incredibly pro-Israel. Late in the same clip he turned to Kirk’s last months, including texts that circulated after the shooting, and treated Kirk’s death coming after a reported turn away from Israel as a coincidence he did not really treat as a coincidence.

That is the move that changed the argument. A fight about whether a widow was fair game became a fight about who owns conservative loyalty. Critics of the sketch were no longer people who thought the target was cruel. They were a bloc with a foreign capital.

The earlier backlash over the same skit had already split that audience. Sears did not try to win the split with a funnier punchline. He tried to win it with a roster of enemies.

His Mock Apology for Criticizing Israel

He kept going. On March 19, 2026, he posted a video that opened, “Hello America, Israel is your master now.” Nine days after that, on March 28, he published a 10-minute-31-second clip titled I Was WRONG! My Apology for Israel Criticism.

Here is my apology for criticizing Israel. I've voiced criticisms in videos recently and I now realize I was wrong. I am sorry. pic.twitter.com/cXtE5c4zGz

— JP Sears (@AwakenWithJP) March 28, 2026

The sorry was a gag. He confessed to “erroneously criticizing the Israeli government,” called it a grave mistake, then listed lessons. Lesson one was that you should line up with the side doing the censoring, because YouTube had pulled a video he called “Hey man, what’s Zionism?”

So the year had a sequence. First a widow sketch. Then a straight-faced refusal to apologize, with Zionists as the common denominator. Then a parody apology aimed at the same subject. The second sorry was not for Erika Kirk. It was a joke about being punished for talking about Israel.

He has apologized before, when he wanted to. In 2017 he pulled a Costa Rica roast and said he was sorry after the Costa Rican ambassador to India, Mariela Cruz, objected. The Erika Kirk video got the other treatment: no apology, then a fake one pointed somewhere else.

What the Leaked Call Sketch Put on Screen

The employee bit is short, and the lines are the whole case Sears makes. They are also the whole case against him, because they are aimed at a woman whose husband had just been murdered on a campus stage.

LINES FROM THE BIT

• The Zoom: Staffers say they cannot believe she is doing the call “just six days after Charlie,” and they figure she will cry the whole time.
• The tone: The host is casual, collecting thumbs-up, and someone notes it is more informal than Charlie would have been.
• The crowd line: Asked how they did, a staffer answers, “We had over 275,000 people.”
• The merch line: Another voice asks, after noting that her husband got shot in the neck 11 days ago, “how do we do on merch?”

Those figures live inside the sketch. They are not an audited count of a Turning Point event, and Sears does not present the real leaked audio next to his rewrite. The laugh is the speed: six days to Zoom, 11 days to merch, a widow who will not stay in the posture other people assigned her.

Erika Kirk had been named CEO on Sept. 18, 2025, eight days after the shooting and three days before the public memorial. She was running the group her husband built, in public, while two children were suddenly without a father. Sears looked at that and saw a bit about branding.

Conservative Critics Objected to Mocking a Widow

Sears told his audience the blowback had a religious-national common denominator. The actual objections sitting under that claim were blunter, and they were not about Jerusalem.

People who still like his older work did not need a foreign-policy test to hate this one. They said a grown man should not spend a week impersonating the staff of a murdered friend-of-the-movement, then point the finger at the widow. They said the assassination was about Kirk’s public fights, including ones Sears used to cheer, and that turning the funeral period into a roast was disgusting on its face.

The Israel-First label does the same job Sears used to mock when wellness clients and then public-health officials used moral words to end an argument. It takes a dispute about taste and target and makes it a loyalty screen. If you flinch at the widow joke, you are in the other camp. If you stay, you get to call balls and strikes.

Dillon, the man Sears named, had already been living in the blast zone of the Kirk conspiracy circuit, including death threats tied to those theories. In a later note about how the campaign against Erika Kirk works, Dillon described a trap: an accusation so ugly it demands an answer, then every answer, silence included, is sold as proof. Sears’s Feb. 5 video did not invent that trap. It gave the trap a comedy timing and a word, Zionists, that made the critic the suspect.

Jonathan Jarry at McGill University’s Office for Science and Society had already mapped this habit in Sears during COVID, when the same comedian who had mocked gluten panics and essential oils started treating doubt itself as the show. The 2015 breakout How to Become Gluten Intolerant passed 10 million views by playing the guru straight. The Erika Kirk sketch uses the same deadpan. The target is no longer a diet fad. It is a woman whose husband was just killed, and then the people who said that target was wrong.

A Utah Judge Bound Tyler Robinson Over for Trial

While that argument ran, the criminal case did not follow Sears’s coincidence. On Sept. 1, 2026, a Utah judge found that prosecutors had presented enough evidence to try 23-year-old Tyler James Robinson for murder, allowed them to seek the death penalty, and took a not-guilty plea on all charges.

Utah’s medical examiner certified a gunshot wound to the neck as a homicide and recovered a bullet fragment. Examiners found no explosive residue of the sort an exploding-microphone story would need. Officers recovered a Mauser.30-06 bolt-action rifle and a spent casing from a nearby rooftop. The ATF matched the casing and could not conclusively match a deformed fragment, a result forensic specialists described as common when a bullet hits bone and breaks. Robinson’s DNA was reported on the trigger, the casing, and the towel wrapped around the rifle.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denied in a video that Israel had any part in the murder. U.S. law enforcement, including the FBI and Utah prosecutors, said the forensic file shows Robinson acted alone, with no foreign link. Erika Kirk and Turning Point have denied the inside-job stories. There is no public evidence that she planned, covered up, or contracted the shooting.

CLAIMS NEXT TO THE FILE

Sears’s Feb. 5 script does not have to prove a Mossad plot to do its work. It only has to leave the coincidence hanging, then sort the people who refuse it into Israel First. The court file does not sort anyone that way. It names a defendant, a rifle, a rooftop, and a cause of death.

August Recirculation of the Same Erika Kirk Sketch

As of July 18, 2026, AwakenWithJP listed 3.03 million subscribers and 597 million views. The COVID-era turn into conservative comedy, which Sears once said “turned out to be great for my career,” is still the business. The Erika Kirk material did not end the channel. It became a reusable clip in the year-long fight over who is allowed to speak for Charlie Kirk.

THE YEAR AROUND THE JOKE

1. Sept. 10, 2025: Charlie Kirk is shot in the neck at Utah Valley University and dies.
2. Sept. 18, 2025: Turning Point’s board names Erika Kirk CEO, three days before the public memorial.
3. Jan. 31, 2026: Sears posts the employee-perspective leaked-call sketch.
4. Feb. 5, 2026: He offers zero apologies and calls the critics Israel First, or Zionists.
5. March 28, 2026: He posts the sarcastic apology for criticizing Israel.
6. Sept. 1, 2026: A Utah judge binds Tyler James Robinson over for a death-eligible murder trial.

On Aug. 29, 2026, the same employee-perspective sketch was again being passed around as a checklist of red flags in how Erika Kirk handled the aftermath. The joke had not been retired. It had been filed as evidence.

Sears used to make his living imitating gurus who turned every objection into proof they were awake. The Erika Kirk videos complete that imitation without the quote marks. The people who would not laugh at a widow were placed in a bloc. The bloc got a name. Months later he said sorry to Israel as a bit, and still did not say sorry to her. In Utah, Robinson waits on a murder trial. The sketch and the docket are still running at the same time.