Hello and welcome back to On the Nose, the Jewish Currents podcast. I'm editor-in-chief Arielle Angel, and I'll be your host for today. Today, we're going to be talking about Charlie Kirk, the right-wing founder of Turning Points USA, who was killed last week at, I think, the kickoff to his new college tour in Utah. The shooter has been arrested. He's a 22-year-old, very online gamer. There are several things that I think the Jewish Currents audience might want to think about together. So, today, to talk, we have contributing editor David Klion. Hi, Dave.
David Klion:Hi.
AA:Assistant editor Maya Rosen. Welcome, Maya.
Maya Rosen:Hi. Great to be here.
AA:Contributor Ben Lorber, who works as senior research analyst at the social justice think tank Political Research Associates, researching antisemitism and white nationalism, which he often writes about for Jewish Currents. He's also the co-author of Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism. Thanks for being here, Ben.
Ben Lorber:Thanks for having me.
AA:So, I wondered, actually, Ben, if you could just give us the lay of the land into who Charlie Kirk was, and then we can talk a little bit about the way that he's being remembered in the media.
BL:Sure, yeah. Charlie Kirk was just 31 years old when he was murdered. He grew up in the Chicago suburbs in a well-to-do neighborhood. He founded Turning Point USA in 2012 when he was just 18. He was one of these: I grew up in a very liberal area. There was so much liberalism at my high school, so here I am calling out liberal bias. Over the next few years, during the second Obama presidency and the Tea Party era, he slowly built Turning Point USA into one of these conservative mouthpieces. He appeared regularly on Fox News. But then, it was really during the first Trump presidency when Turning Point USA really took off as a MAGA culture war battle tank on college campuses. I mean, Charlie Kirk would do these campus tours like many others of that time—people like Milo Yiannopoulos—where he would challenge liberal students to a debate, and he would film it, and clips of him, quote, unquote, “owning the libs” would go viral.
BL:So, he really became a culture war mouthpiece, and he built TPUSA into a network of chapters on thousands of college campuses. So, he became a mouthpiece for the millennial and Gen Z MAGA right. Over the years, he positioned himself both as a culture war crusader and as a very effective MAGA operative. I mean, he quickly harnessed the power of this Gen Z MAGA base, and he would do voter turnout operations for conservative candidates. His TPUSA conferences became these core meeting points for MAGA activists. He really became like a key operative in the GOP infrastructure, to the point where in Trump's 2024 election, many really credit TPUSA with being key to his get-out-the-vote, especially in key battleground states. Along the way, he formed TPUSA Faith to mobilize Christian nationalists, pastors; he had TPUSA women's groups. So, really, he built it into a core empire on the MAGA right, really making him one of the leading MAGA kingmakers.
AA:Yeah, I think that some of the way that you're telling the story—and the way that he was on college campuses also mobilizing electorally—is some of what's being seized on by liberal pundits like Ezra Klein when they're saying, “Charlie Kirk was doing it right,” basically. But we also know about Charlie Kirk that he was supportive of Trump's desire to overturn the 2020 election when Biden won and involved in January 6th, and also that a lot of his views, especially as it relates to immigrants and women and people of color—it wasn't a democracy for all, basically. There were tiers. So, I'm curious if we can just start maybe talking about the liberal response to this. We've had Ezra Klein, as I said, saying “Charlie Kirk was doing politics right,” and we have Rachel Cohen Booth in Vox talking about sitting shiva for Charlie Kirk. And there is a way—I mean, I'm pulling out these two notably Jewish commentators—there is a way that this has become a signal of our democratic health. I'm just curious how you guys are reading that or responding to that.
DK:Well, I've been struck from the beginning of this by what I feel is a powerful disconnect between the inherent significance of the event and the significance that's being forced on us by the right, and by the largely cowed media, and by certain liberals who are following that pattern. Because the event itself is certainly a major news story. I mean, Charlie Kirk, for all the reasons Ben said, is a prominent person, and he did get shot and killed. But people on the right are talking about it, literally comparing it to 9/11. I mean, we're really talking about one guy getting shot, and while we didn't immediately know (and still don't know) the ideology or motivation of the killer, Occam's Razor so far to me would suggest he's a brain-poisoned young, angry man who knows how to use a gun and has some mishmash of superficially right and left-wing views derived from like, memes. I mean, we'll find out more, so I don't know if I can be held to all of that, but this is the thing that happens very often in America. It just doesn't usually happen to Charlie Kirk or an equivalent figure.
DK:And in watching the right-wing response—for instance, I watched a conversation between my bête noire Bari Weiss and Ben Shapiro, who are two of the most influential right-wing (and, incidentally, right-wing Jewish) commentators right now, and they both seem genuinely shook, and so do many other people I see online. And so, one lens I understand this through is that the right feels vulnerable. There's been a generalized condemnation of political violence, including from liberals like Ezra Klein, but political violence has actually been—I mean, you could say it's been a feature of the entire history of the United States, but I would say an acute level of political violence stemming from the current Republican administration, which Charlie Kirk championed, has been a feature of American life for the last 10 months since Trump won re-election. I don't have to belabor the many examples to this audience, but obviously: Stephen Miller's raids on immigrants and the lawless, arbitrary way that's unfolded; USAID being defunded, and millions of people who are going to die of AIDS and other preventable diseases as a result; the Gaza genocide. I think that'll do for a list of examples. And just the constant threats toward all kinds of Americans, including—I watched a video, after he died, of Charlie Kirk deadnaming a murdered trans woman and calling her an abomination before God. I mean, this was a hateful figure in many ways, and people are now being threatened with—and in some cases actually being fired—just for accurately quoting what he said.
DK:So, I'm really struck by the insistence of so many right-wing media mouthpieces—not to mention sitting elected officials like J. D. Vance or Stephen Miller, for that matter—many of whom seem to have been friends with Kirk or at any case were closely aligned with him, and they're basically stoking a panic. The best explanation I have for it—besides that they'll take any pretext to crack down on the left, obviously—but I think there's some emotional sincerity to it because I think they feel threatened and vulnerable. I think that they've been threatening and actualizing political violence for the past year or longer, and it's bewildering to them to see that political violence can come for them, too. And now they want to treat that like it's a unique emergency.
AA:I mean, I understand it from the vantage of the right. I mean, the right obviously is looking for justifications for the policies that are already in place, and it's very, very useful to have a martyr figure. I think we'll talk more, in the whole scope of this podcast, when we talk about the reactions from Israel, about the way that the idea of innocence plays into this. Like, there is a way that the American right is claiming a certain kind of innocence through the murder of Kirk. But why is the liberal pundit class part of this? I want to take up the question that you just asked, Dave, at the beginning of what you were saying, basically: Why has this become so much more than it is? Again, not that it's not a big deal. A political assassination in this country is a big deal generally, although it's not like this is a politician, but of a public figure is a big deal. But to the extent that it's become a referendum on our democracy—Is it? Is it actually that referendum?
BL:Well, one theory which I've seen floating around for why some liberal commentators are bending over backward to make a soft martyrology of Charlie Kirk on their own, as someone who was committed to the noble American democratic tradition of debate or whatever, is because they're afraid. I mean, they're genuinely afraid of the repression. I mean, just this afternoon, J. D. Vance went on Charlie Kirk's show to host Kirk's show. And it's absurd on one level that there's such a dense interpenetration between folks—Charlie Kirk, their podcast—and government officials, to the fact that J. D. Vance can host his show and then have Stephen Miller and RFK Jr. on as guests is absurd. But they were saying: We have to go after the media. It's not only the person who pulled the trigger; it's all the commentators who have helped to create the conditions for this violence. They seem to be very clearly constructing this narrative that vast swaths of the left and liberal media ecosystem were accomplices in the assassination by raising alarms about white Christian nationalism and the MAGA movement and its threats to democracy.
BL:So, I think it remains to be seen how much bite is going to come along with this bark, but there's certainly a lot of bark right now. And it does seem, as you said, they're gearing up for it. I also just think there's something to be said for—Charlie Kirk knew everybody. I mean, he was such a kingmaker. He was right there, easily in the top five of MAGA influencers. Everyone in the administration was close to him. All the people who have their hands on the machinery of authoritarian repression right now are personally feeling this loss and are grieving in a real way—and probably in a manufactured public way also. But it's very personal for them, and so, I think regardless of what details are going to come out about the killer, it doesn't matter. They're going to turn Kirk into a martyr and use that, I think, as the pretext to at least attempt to further the Project Esther-style repression that they have been planning.
DK:I just want to add to what Ben said that right before we started recording this afternoon, I watched a clip from J. D. Vance on Charlie Kirk's show, in which he went after a specific article in the Nation magazine—which, full disclosure, I'm a columnist for—that basically went through all the terrible things Charlie Kirk said and stood for when he was alive. And J. D., in attacking it, also claimed that the Nation is funded by Open Society and George Soros, which is simply not true. It's a complete lie. He also accused the article of lying about something Kirk said that, if you look at the wider context, is really not a lie at all. So, you have literally the most powerful people in this regime just spreading blatant falsehoods to a national audience and targeting people we know—people in our circles, people who do the same work we do. In that context, I understand why people like Ezra Klein are scared.
AA:Yeah. I want to bring in an article that was in Jacobin. It's an article called “Charlie Kirk's Murder is a Tragedy and Disaster” by Ben Burgess and Megan Day. It went up almost right away, and there is something a little bit defensive in its tone, almost like it's basically saying: I know some of you are going to celebrate this, but this is really nothing to celebrate. It talks about the competitive lack of empathy, which is likely to “turn off ordinary Americans, who abhor political violence, but [is] also politically misguided and strategically naive. There is nothing to celebrate here. Indeed, there's much to fear.” And it gives an argument throughout the piece that we have this fragile win—Zohran’s primary win—that is imperiled by these kinds of acts. It doesn't go as far as the Klein piece, but it talks about how one of the authors did debate Charlie Kirk, and actually, Charlie Kirk was kind of a standup guy to debate with. Even if he believed a lot of shitty things, he didn't resort to ad hominem attacks, and he stuck to the substance of the argument, and that, in a certain sense, this is the cornerstone of our democracy.
AA:I don't know. I'm not actually in opposition to any of this, but I can't help but feel that there is some way that this conversation has become fused, in some sense, with people's perception of the left's response to October 7th. I have this sense, and I can't prove it, that this kind of article would not have been written in a pre-October 7th moment and that there's a way in which part of the reason that people on the left are feeling like we have to do this disavowal—even though, from all accounts, it's really not clear that this assassination has anything to do with the left—there is this sense that we have something to apologize for, in this moment, because of the response to October 7th and the way that there was a celebration or glorification of that violence after October 7th. Which, just to say, I think it's worthless to deny that there was such celebration and glorification. I think there was. But what that means and what it means now to roll this event into that one, even if it's implicit as opposed to explicit, is something that I'm thinking through. The writer and activist Sarah Schulman said: “Our responsibility for the hidden and denied slaughter of 600,000 Palestinians is all being channeled into a collective national obsession with one man.” I think that that's also becoming true on parts of the liberal and left—that it feels like these politics have—that one has been sublimated into the other in this moment. Maya, I don't know if you agree with that in any way. I'm curious.
MR:
It hadn't occurred to me. I share your gut assumption that it's unlikely that these pieces would have been written before October 7th. It's interesting to me, though, because the characters that we're talking about are not the exact same characters. It's not like Ezra Klein celebrated October 7th, and now he feels the need to disavow it. And so, it's interesting who feels like they're speaking for whom.
AA:Right. These are people that would have issued that finger-wagging in the first place.
MR:Right. And who did finger-wagging after October 7th but who still feels some kind of preemptive need now to speak out against that violence.
DK:Yeah. I've seen very little celebration of Kirk's assassination. I've seen a lot of people point out things he said and did, and I've seen a lot of people object strenuously to this culture of martyring him, and I've been doing that too. But I've seen very little, “glory to the killer,” in part because we didn't even know who the killer was, and it seems, so far, like an ideologically incoherent act.
MR:Do you think that if we'd had a Luigi-figure here, we'd be seeing the same response? What's the difference between this and Luigi? Is it just around what we know about the killer's ideology?
DK:I think so. And some might say also, Luigi's a very attractive man. But I think Luigi is actually the most interesting recent precedent for understanding what's happening because Luigi Mangione killed this health insurance CEO in cold blood and was caught after a manhunt of a few days, and he became this much-memed hero figure for a lot of people, especially on the left.
AA:But not only. I think it's significant that there was populist support for this across the political spectrum.
DK:Yeah. He also wasn't an identifiably left-wing figure. He seemed to be another product of a strange, extremely online set of tendencies, but he'd had some bad experiences with the health care system and had become radicalized against it, as many Americans are. In the case of Luigi, even some of the people who criticized the celebration of Luigi and of murder would sometimes grudgingly admit that, yes, the American health care system is a terrible system, even if this isn't the way you would want to solve it. But there was a coherence to Luigi and to the point he was trying to make, even if that wasn't necessarily an acceptable way to do it. This time, I think even people who hate Charlie Kirk and reject everything he stood for don't really understand why this happened.
AA:Well, Kirk is just not the kind of person that the left cares about that much, in my experience. He's just such an insider voice on the right that unless you're the person like Ben, who has to wade through all of this right-wing stuff, most of us aren't paying that much attention to him. That's my sense. The thing that made the least amount of sense to me is that he isn't the kind of figure that is constantly being beamed into the left-wing algorithm, to the extent that people would be getting themselves worked up about Charlie Kirk in particular.
DK:Yeah. I mean, I was certainly aware of him before, but he wasn't someone who fascinated me the way, for instance, Stephen Miller fascinates me. He wasn't a figure who I think got an unusual amount of hate from the online left. He wasn't that interesting, really.
BL:I think maybe one more reason there wasn't this populist pull to cheer what happened like in an unencumbered way, the way there was for Luigi, is because—maybe it's just me, but I think a lot of people immediately have the gut sense that: Oh, this is bad. Like, this is going to be very bad. The right is going to take this and run with it in a bad way.
DK:One thing about the Luigi incident was that it happened not very long after Trump won re-election. And although I can't prove this, I think one reason some people were excited about it was there was this sense: Well, every political process has failed, and things are only going to get worse from here, including likely on the health care front. And so, there was something, I think, thrilling for people in seeing a guy take matters into his own hands, as it were, even though obviously, it didn't do a thing to get us closer to universal health care. But there was a sense like: Oh, the most powerful people in the world, who we feel helpless before, actually are vulnerable.
DK:I think that's how they feel right now, seeing what's happened to Charlie Kirk. But it's all very strange to me because in reality, I don't think almost anyone in the left is prepared to take up arms right now. Everyone in the progressive part of the country understands we'd be outgunned and is still rooted in a nonviolent tradition, going back to the civil rights movement or more recent campaigns like gay marriage. Whereas the right—I mean, we've seen an attempted coup by the right that did employ violence, and we've seen that the logic of that coup is at the core of the current administration, which one of the first things it did was pardon everyone involved. We know that Charlie Kirk was, as you said, part of that too. Almost all political violence in the last, I want to say, 50 years in America has been on the right, with very minor exceptions.
DK:There was a time when left-wing political violence was a real thing. The 20th century kicks off with the Russian Revolution and—
AA:The Red Army.
DK:Yeah. And in the ’70s, you have the Weather Underground, you have the Baader-Meinhof gang, you have the PLO, which was an identifiably left-wing organization, or the IRA. So, there is a period in some people's living memory where the left actually took up arms. But I think what I said to you on the phone the other day, Arielle, is there's a joint fantasy held by much of the right and by certain edges of the left of that actually ever being a thing again. To the right, it's a justification for crackdowns and for suspending constitutional rights, for arresting people, deporting people, whatever. And then there are people on the left—and I think they're mostly anonymous online accounts—who like flirting with the rhetoric of that; posting some guillotine emojis or whatever to simulate this radical tradition. I think you definitely saw some of that in the wake of October 7th as well, but I really think this is largely cosplay, as far as online leftists go. It's largely a way to feel like we have more power than we actually do in a world in which laws don't seem to matter much, political processes don't seem to matter very much, the right seems to have a stranglehold on almost everything. I think the real violence is going to be aimed at us, not coming from us.
AA:Right. There's no structural conditions that are pushing the left into these kinds of organizations. I don't even know of any that exist. We don't even have a name for anything that people might join that might seem more militant.
DK:What was that free zone in Seattle or something, during 2020, that the right got really worked up about? It was like a small number of anarchists claiming sovereignty over like, a city block. I mean, that's the thing that they want to treat as a major threat. I guess Antifa is their catch-all for contemporary, potentially violent left radicalism.
AA:Right. But the vast majority of these people are completely unarmed and also, by nature, not organized in very formal ways.
BL:I also think it's a projection on the right. When they fantasize about the left being ultraviolent, it's really like a projection for their own libidinal desire to both commit acts of personal violence—like when it's the glorification of someone like Kyle Rittenhouse—but also, of course, to implement institutional violence. I think the irony is that a lot of the infrastructure for anti-fascist research, and reporting, and street mobilization is much weaker right now than it was during the first Trump presidency. And so, it's almost like, if now is the time when they really do a larger crackdown against whatever they want to call antifa, it's chasing specters at this point.
AA:I think that's totally right. I think something that is quite strange is how much these people are just like, so clearly online and not involved in any real political networks of any kind. That does seem to suggest that it matters what kind of stuff people see online. Like, what is the level of discourse? Now, there's really no way for anyone, right or left or otherwise, to police that, but it does bring home the question of responsibility on some level, and what it means to be a steward of this discourse in such a way that would be meaningful.
BL:I don't know if this moment brings us to any responsibility. For me, the kind of nostalgia for the Red Army Faction or whatever—I think it's evidence of powerlessness in the real world and of our lack of having a lot of hope (and certainly a practical agenda for) a real horizon of emancipation and a real way to get there in our time.
AA:Yeah, I mean, I agree with you. I don't want to do what other people are doing, which is make this moment into a moment of self-reflection when it just doesn't point in that direction. I will say that it is just scary—the extent to which things that incubate online have become real in such a violent way, and the fact that there's just no way to control that, really, without crackdowns on speech, which I don't think makes sense. Maya, I want to bring you into this conversation in a more significant way because I know that you've been struck, as you've been watching the Israeli response to this, and it has been completely insane. Maybe I'll talk about two things. One is the American Orthodox response. I had someone tell me that Ramaz, the Jewish day school, did a moment of silence and memorial for Charlie Kirk—an official one in their day school programming. And you have the clothing brand J Drip making kippot with Charlie Kirk’s date of birth and death on it and selling them for $50 to support pro-Israel causes. You have just so many American Jewish Orthodox figures coming to support him. And then, there's this whole other Israeli response—naming traffic circles after him in Netanya. I mean, tell me more about that and what is going on there.
MR:Sure. So, I've spent a lot of time on right-wing Israeli media tracking the response to Kirk's death. I will say that until last week, I had never seen Charlie Kirk's name mentioned in Israeli media, maybe since 2018 or 2019 when he came to Israel after the embassy move. It's just been like a total fanfare in the last week. The most egregious is a photo that I saw that's been circulating on social media of an Israeli soldier holding a munitions case that's bound for Gaza that says “In memory of Charlie Kirk” on the missile itself. In Tel Aviv, there's a big billboard that's up with a picture of Kirk and Trump. There was a memorial statue built on the Tel Aviv beach. I saw a video of someone running through Tel Aviv with a flag, with Kirk's face on an American flag. In Jerusalem last night, there was a memorial march for him, and the Knesset lit up its lights in red, white, and blue in his memory. I would say in general, there's been a lot of circulation of photos of Kirk standing outside the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron. And also, a lot of these videos that you see on social media of these debate clips, in Israel, it's specifically the clips of him defending the war and subtitles added in Hebrew, which was not something that was circulating here on social media before last week.
AA:Well, also, it's not just like popular support. It's like Netanyahu: Suddenly, we're buddy buddy, I just talked to him last week.
MR:Yeah, you have MKs and ministers all putting out these statements that he was a true friend of Israel and things like that, and a lot of talk about how he had apparently told Amichai Chikli, the Minister of Diaspora Affairs, that he was planning to come to Israel in January for this conference that the Ministry was putting on. Any politician of note in Israel has put out some statement along those lines as well.
AA:And a lot of those statements, too, focus on the left—basically on the intolerance of the left.
MR:Yeah, I mean, this was something I was thinking about earlier in our conversation. I think a strange feature of a lot of the statements by politicians is that many of them say something along the lines of: This could happen in Israel, too. It'll happen soon if we don't change something. We in Israel know about what can happen when political discourse goes to this point. Which is a strange thing for them to say because the political assassination of note in Israeli history is Yitzhak Rabin, who's not a figure that they're trying to align with. Like, they're trying to cast themselves as the potential victims. In fact, some of them actually say that if this happens, the Attorney General, who they see as their enemy and as being on the left, quote, unquote, will be the one to blame. And so, it's a pretty strange recasting, both of Israeli history and also of the actual current power dynamics—who the mainstream is, who has guns, et cetera—in Israel. If one had to make an educated guess, any reasonable analysis is that the next political murder in Israel will certainly be of a leftist. And it's really being cast as: Oh, we see what's happening in America. We're also in danger here.
AA:Yeah. I mean, I wanted to pause and think about some of these statements from Israeli figures talking about the Judeo-Christian bond. I mean, obviously, I know that it's in the interest of the Israeli right to play into that, and this is something that Yoram Hazony from National Conservatism—which we did a great piece about, I'll put it in the show notes—also has been pushing, but I mean, what's that about? What does it mean when these figures are adopting the Judeo-Christian framework?
BL:I think they're trying to shore up this idea of a common bond uniting America and Israel, as the West, over and against the Muslim world, or the Axis of Resistance, or college protesters—all these threats to the Judeo-Christian West. It's very much that language is all over the US, and it's all over Project Esther, I mean, it's basically the rationale for this neo-McCarthyist crackdown—like a civilizational battle between those who defend American nationalism and Israeli nationalism versus those who oppose it. But it's interesting because Charlie Kirk is actually this liminal figure on the right’s discourse on Israel. I mean, he's a Christian Zionist. He has quoted verses in Genesis to the effect, like every Christian Zionist, that we have to bless Israel for us to be blessed.
AA:And also the Jews are very excited that he kept the Jewish Sabbath and wrote a book about it.
DK:Although, fun fact about that one, he said he kept the Jewish Sabbath, and he said he turned his phone off for it, but there are actually recent tweets of him doing normal, combative right-wing talking points on the Jewish Sabbath.
AA:Well, you heard it here first: Charlie Kirk doesn't keep the Jewish Sabbath. He's not Shomer Shabbos, folks.
BL:That I can identify with. You know, but he also has emerged as being more critical of Israel. I think in the lead-up to the war on Iran, he was one of these voices who cautioned against the US getting involved. So, he's tried to play this middle ground of like: I know a lot of the American right-wing, especially my younger base, is turning against Israel. I'm here to defend Israel, but I also am going to let Tucker Carlson come to my conference and say that Israel was working with Jeffrey Epstein. So, he's taken a lot of flak from both sides, and so, it's interesting that Israel is trying to claim him as this timeless defender.
AA:Right. I mean, I heard he recently had Ben Shapiro on and was challenging him a bit on some of the orthodoxy there.
MR:I think that for Israel and Israeli media, the actual facts there don't matter. Like this is playing out purely on a discursive level, and Israel has realized that they can claim him, and they have the little clips they can show of him saying: Oh, the Israeli military sends leaflets before they bomb, it's a moral army, that kind of thing. Like, they don't need to get into the details of what he said to Ben Shapiro.
DK:I was going to say, I think there's not really necessarily that much of a gulf between what it sounds like Israel's mainstream reaction to this is and what a lot of like liberal and centrist American media is because the defining political fact of 2025 is that Donald Trump controls everything, or at least the movement around Donald Trump controls everything, and the way you get anything done now is to suck up to him. For a lot of countries, that means promising him golf courses or whatever in exchange for him not putting too-punitive tariffs on them. For media organizations in the US, it's meant all kinds of concessions, and settling lawsuits, and throwing money at him, and paying for his inauguration in order to stay on his good side. It also means that everyone participates in this ludicrous posthumous martyrdom of Charlie Kirk, and it sounds to me like Israel writ large is in a similar situation. I mean, Trump, in his flaky way, will go back and forth day to day, week to week, whether he's Israel's best friend or he's starting to get sick of it. I guess the attitude in Israel is: We have to keep Trump on our side, and the way you do that is to pay tribute to his friend. Of course, the ultimate humorous irony here is that the last time reporters actually asked Trump how he was feeling about Charlie Kirk's murder, he seemed like he was already very bored with it.
DM:I think you're right that casting Charlie Kirk as a martyr serves everyone and serves a lot of people in different ways. I just think it serves Israel in a particular way, and in a particular way that it really needs right now. In a moment of starvation in Gaza, and bombing, and the horrific images that the world is seeing, and Israel being seen as a perpetrator, Israel's feeling so isolated, and has so few friends, and is so freaked out that basically, by associating itself with Charlie Kirk, it allows Israel associatively to take on the martyr status and the victim status. And there's nothing that Israel likes more than being the perpetual victim, which is part of what Charlie Kirk allows it to do in this moment.
AA:I think that's also true of the American right, and I think, again, it has to do with the question of innocence. Claire Schwartz, our culture editor, wrote a great piece interviewing Dionne Brand, where she says: It's not actually the complicity of whiteness and the structures of white supremacy; it's actually the claim on innocence that's being made through the closing off of our vision to all of the other kinds of political violence. I think that's really what we're seeing here. Forget about, as Dave said, all these people in detention, all these people who are dying of preventable diseases, all the Palestinians. I mean, people have commented, and I think this is true, that the most amazing thing about that video, for many of us, is that it's the first time in two years that we've seen such a gory, shocking act of violence that wasn't committed on a Palestinian person. And so, just the fact of having this white guy, two kids, being the victim—that's a moment of white innocence that everyone can feel good about for different reasons.
BL:Yeah. Not to mention that it covers over not only Kirk's complicity and authoritarianism on all fronts, but also, in this case, it covers over his increasing usage of explicit antisemitism. He said that Jews are behind cultural Marxism. Not even George Soros. He just said Jews are basically behind anti-whiteness in universities. Jews push all kinds of radicalism in American society. So, he's championing these explicit antisemitic points, and that's something that’s obviously very familiar to us at this point, but Israel's hagiography is covering over that, too.
DK:I think of the many quotes of his that have come up in the last few days, there's one that I think is unintentionally poignant. It actually says something that is wise in the context of making sense this week, compared to how much nonsense we've been going over. I'm paraphrasing him a bit, but he basically defended the Second Amendment, in the context of all the gun deaths and mass shootings that are just a routine feature of American life now, and he basically said that—whereas a lot of people on the right will try to change the subject whenever this happens, Kirk said something that was bracingly honest. He basically said: Look, the reason we have the Second Amendment is to protect us against government tyranny, and there are going to be some lost lives, some sacrifices. It's the price of living in a free society, and it's worth it, essentially. And while I abhor that view, and I'm sure anyone who has witnessed children being killed in schools, including very recently, would bristle at that, but I do think there's a certain wisdom in reflecting on the real meaning of his own death, which is: I don't think this is a martyrdom. I don't think this is a new September 11th. I think it's honestly a day in the life of America, where people sometimes get shot by unwell, angry young men, usually for no rational reason, with extremely available firearms. Charlie Kirk died as the cost of living in a society where that's possible, which is the exact society Charlie Kirk advocated for.
AA:Yeah. I mean, I will say that one of the other ways that this ricochets back to Israel is that one of the ways that Israel is becoming more like the United States is the proliferation of guns in civilian hands. We've been talking about covering that a bit more, and the ways in which that actually filters down to more and different kinds of violence that you are going to start to see in Israeli society that's more like American society: domestic disputes, suicides, kids killing themselves by accident or shooting one another by accident, these kinds of things. But I do think that, Maya, you're right that this also makes Israel ripe for the kind of political violence against Israeli Jews that is distinct from the violence against Palestinians that is routine in the West Bank and Gaza. It's even hard to know who the figures would be, but it certainly is not going to be members of Bibi's cabinet. Well, thanks, guys. This has been another episode of On the Nose. Thank you to Jesse Brenneman, our editor, and thank you to our guests. If you like this episode, share it, rate us, leave us a review, and subscribe to Jewish Currents, JewishCurrents.org. See you next time.